Individual Showreel
Group Showreel
Darren_Jiachen Ding_22018988
Category: Collaborative
Final project: Traveling with coins
Critical reflection
The basis of this animation project is the type we decided on based on the abilities of the four members and the direction we wanted to take. Two of us are studying 2D animation and two members are studying VFX. Based on this we decided that the type of project would be a composite animation using 3D environments and 2D characters. The theme we chose was “From an everyday object to a fantastical object”, we wanted to bridge reality and fantasy through the medium of the everyday object “Coin”, which will show the meaning and influence of human beings in society and history in relation to coins (money). Through this project, I have learned that there is a balance between planning and revising plans. I also learned that frequent communication is the most effective way to work together.
The first problem we encountered was the timing and completion of the project. After we had decided on the content of the project, I completed the Time Schedule and Beat Sheet for our group in the third week, as the initial content of the whole project was my initial idea, so I was the project planner, supervisor and compositor. Two weeks after the completion of the Time Schedule, two of my group members discussed with me that the time needed for the three scenes was very tight and would bring down the quality of the whole project. I agreed that this was one of the potential problems, so it was a unanimous decision by all four members that I put the last scene, “Hope”, on hold.
In the first three weeks we only had 2 face-to-face discussions together, but after the time schedule discussion, I felt that we needed to communicate regularly as a group. Only by communicating more frequently can we adjust our plans and confirm each other’s progress. So I proposed in the group chat group that we use Discord every Wednesday and Saturday to discuss and communicate with each other. Although not every discussion is about something important, it allows us to ask each other questions about the software or share ideas. We had a lot of ideas that came out of these discussions. For example, in the end, both 2D animation members ended up using Blender software for painting, which greatly accelerated the project.
My work included writing the story beat sheet, scheduling, Layout Artist (planning and creating the initial camera and staging of shots for animation), camera animation, sound effects, and compositing. There were a number of problems encountered during the project, such as time constraints, lack of discussion in the early stages, unfamiliarity with the software, use of the render farm, etc., but these were resolved one by one during frequent discussions in the later stages. Through this collaborative project, I have learned that efficient and high-frequency communication with a common goal is the most important factor for a team to complete a project successfully.
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Categories
Week 19: Create the soundscape
This week, I started looking for voice-overs and sound effects for the animation ahead of schedule. The first reason was that the Point Blank Music School students had spoken to us online and we had learned that the project would run until June, so there would be no soundtrack until the deadline of our collaboration on March 15th, so I, as a compositor, would need to take care of that as well.
The second reason is that half of our main animation work has only started this week for various reasons (such as a second revision of the light and shadow in the cave to achieve better results). I have to take some responsibility for this as I am the most responsible time planner for the whole project, although I don’t want to put any more pressure on the team. Because of this, I had to plan the soundtrack ahead of time and not wait until the animators had finished the animation to do the soundtrack and compositing.
I searched for relevant sounds on various sound websites, such as Audio Library (https://www.audiolibrary.com.co/), and the Free Music Archive (https://freemusicarchive.org/search). I also compiled a number of sound effects that I had collected in internet storage when I was at university. I searched for sounds related to the content of the animation, including wind, footsteps, coins, horns, swords, and monster roars (I searched for many monster roars and decided that the troll’s roar was the best match for Chenyang’s monster design in the animation). Although this is a very crude version of the sound effects, they do make the whole animation more complete.
This week was the most important week for our group work, we had to finish everything before the final compositing, as well as rendering tests. On Tuesday of this week I spoke to the head animator for Scene 1 – Yuanjie Lei – and I decided that the shots for Scene 1 were preliminary shots that could not be used in the final production, which required a lot of communication and discussion between me and the animator. But now we had no more time to discuss it, so I suggested that Lei and I meet offline to decide on the shots and animation content.
After Wednesday’s discussion, we split the one-shot scene 1 into two shots and edited them together in a montage. This ensured a coherent story and reduced the workload for the animators. I also added a lot of movement detail and adjustments to the camera to follow the coin and the character, and also used a binding relationship to ensure the camera followed.
We tried to use the school’s render farm to render the scenes, but it failed. After trying it out we were able to render the scenes locally on the school’s computer very quickly (about 20 minutes to render a scene), which was an acceptable amount of time. We also ended up synchronising the rendering video with the group responsible for the painting part of the animation which I think will give them a better grasp of the painting colours.
After I finished the shot animations within the 3D scene last week and made them into three separate videos which were made to allow the rest of the group to easily check and discuss the details of the shots together. After completing the initial shot animations, tianqi’s modeling and the two animators’ drawings worked smoothly after having the shot animations. I prepared the group presentation during this gap, we only had a week to prepare the presentation as Crystal had told us about it on short notice last week so we didn’t have more time to prepare. The project was still very tight, both in terms of refining the 3D modeling of the Tianqi scenes, including the daylighting and textures. The animation is still very much a part of the painting that needs to be done. So I decided to prepare and present this presentation by myself. I first spent a day preparing the PPT and the content of the presentation and then a day practicing the content of the presentation, mainly including the theme of our project introducing the basic information of the team members and our work plan, and finally presenting the progress of our current project and the software used.
At the end of the presentation day, the 2D animation group members said that their course had a collaboration with Point Blank Music School and that the sound effects music for our project could be given to the students of this school as a collaborative project. So the two members of the 2D animation group invited me and Tianqi to go with them to the Point Blank Music School for a showcase of this collaborative project. At the showcase, we were able to see other groups’ animation presentations and music presentations by students from the music course. This has given me a lot to look forward to for future projects.
Categories
Week 16: 3D Storyboard_1,2,3
My main job this week was to confirm the shots for all three scenes and render the shot split videos so that the animation crew could better draw the characters in context, so Chenyang Deng and I revised the desert battle scene and the running scene inside the cave twice. This ensured that the whole scene was smooth and the shots were coherent.
I then used skeletons in blender to parent the camera to make it easier for me to adjust and track the objects captured by the camera. After this I switched the blender rendering mode to workbench rendering. The renders were very preliminary but could be rendered very quickly in a matter of minutes, allowing the team to make many changes and attempts. I then sent the rendered video to the animation team as a story board with 3D backgrounds.
Categories
Week 15: 3D Storyboard_Scenes 2
Scene 2 was the climax of our whole assignment and we wanted to focus more on making the shots and animations for Scene 2. I used eight different cameras in scene two to do the switching between subs. In between I also learned how to switch between cameras depending on the timeline, the screen is also used to create bones and subsequently bind the bones to the camera to follow. This allowed the frame to effectively follow the object I wanted to focus on.
The shots inside the cave and Chenyang Deng went through a number of discussions to determine how the camera would move with the frame. I think it was very necessary to make the whole story coherent and the articulation of the images and the presentation of the hand-drawn animation content more effective.
This was the point in the week when we officially started working on the content of the project using the software. First we had to decide on the art style for our whole project, so according to the schedule I set last week, I had two members of the 2D hand-drawn animation team design character images for each of them, which included a king, a minister, an adventurer, a monster and a praying lady. During the week both members shared their draft character designs with us. We discussed and shared many pictures of the interior of the palace with each other and finally tianqi designed and produced the throne scene. And I did a simple camera animation based on the script based on his first draft white model.
Once the members of our collaborative project team had been identified, we also decided on the general direction and content of the project, so during the week I made a schedule for the content of our project. This schedule was developed in two day increments for a total of 45 days. From the very beginning, the style was set Research, Art style, Role design, Scene design, Preliminary model, Storyboard – 3D, Storyboard – 2 D, 3D modeling, 2D Animation, First Compositing, Animatic, Sound, Compositing, Rendering, Editing, Delivery. My aim in writing this timetable was not to make our group perfect and follow it to the letter, but to make it clear what we needed to do and to divide up the work in detail. I used different colours to represent the four different members of our group and organised the work so that we could alternate each person’s tasks to maximise the use of time. For example, after Tianqi has finished the basic model, I can start using the shots to define the subplot for the animation. While I’m working on the sub-screen, Tianqi can continue to finish the refinement of the model and materials. This is of course a very tight schedule and we don’t think we will necessarily be able to complete all of the above, so it will be adjusted according to the actual progress we make subsequently.
I was invited by my classmate Tianqi to form a group with two 2D animation students. We discussed our understanding and ideas on ‘From an everyday object to a fantastical object’ and finalised the content of our animation.
1) Title: Traveling with coins
2) Team members and roles:
Chenyang Deng
MA Animation
c.deng0320221@arts.ac.uk
Role: 2D animator
Yuanjie Lei
MA Animation
y.lei0320221@arts.ac.uk
Role: 2D animator
Tianqi Xu
MA Visual Effects
t.xu0320223@arts.ac.uk
Role: 3D scene modeler
Jiachen Ding
MA Visual Effects
j.ding0320223@arts.ac.uk
Role: Compositor
3)Description of idea:
We plan to use the everyday object of the coin as a medium to connect the real and the fantastical, to show the meaning and influence that humans give to the coin (money) in different fantastical worlds. The project will use 2D animation to draw the characters and parts of the screen. At the same time, using 3D models for the scenes and a virtual camera to complete the subplots.
4)Blog/Personal Padlet Online Power Point Link:
https://vimeo.com/759682547
https://tianqi.myblog.arts.ac.uk/
https://djiachen.myblog.arts.ac.uk/