The Later Half of Fall 2011

The character design took a 180 degree turn in terms of style in the later half of the semester. We were supposed to design more animate-able characters. The 1st assignment was to design 2 creatures.

I wanted to do something Beatles inspired. Their music referenced several animals, ranging from birds to raccoon. I picked the walrus and octopus to work on. I reverted to a more traditional approach for the thumbnailing process, choosing to do it with pen on paper rather than digitally. For the final illustration, I tried to mimic the style of Serge Birault (a.k.a Papaninja); especially his technique of rendering slimy smooth surfaces.

The 2nd assignment was to create cartoon/caricature characters. I decided to concentrate mainly on creating caricatures of people that I know personally. Again, I did the thumbnails using pen on paper and eventually my drawing of my lecturers as rock stars was chosen. The guitar that the left character (my animation lecturer) is holding proved to be a new challenge for me as I don't usually draw hard surfaced objects. Overall I am very happy with how this piece turned out.

For the final assignment, we were given the choice of either doing a massive illustration which featured the 3 characters from the earlier half of the semester or the 4 stylized characters from the later half. I decided to go back to more familiar grounds with the earlier half. For this illustration, I wanted to really add a lot of drama, through the use of lighting and texture. I also wanted to fully flash out on the details that wasn't present on the earlier versions of the same characters. This one took a good 30+ hours.

Next up, matte painting class. The 2nd assignment was to construct a Chinese city in a fantasy setting. The emphasis was to create something that was out of this world. I went with flying junks and colorful clouds. I'm not really happy with this painting, as compared to my previous Indian city one.

The 3rd assignment was to create a futuristic city. The lecturer made it clear that he wanted futuristic, not sci-fi; the difference being that one was plausible in the near future. While not a huge fan of the sci-fi theme myself, I do follow Feng Zhu's youtube channel and that proved to be very helpful during this assignment. I wanted to do something different, something that was more painterly than my previous 2 efforts. I still used photo plates as reference, but I tried to paint-over them as much as possible.

For the final assignment, we had to create a short video of an environment, similar to this one I did back in my polytechnic days. Following the success of the previous assignment, I decided to stick closely to the painterly style. We were free to choose our own themes for the finals and luckily for me, I stumbled upon the 'Spirited Away' artbook in my school's library that day. I was immediately sold on the idea of creating an environment that would fit right into the movie.

As I already did one similar matte painting video in the past, I wanted to seek new challenges for this assignment. I tried to integrate 3D into the workflow, using 3DSMax for the river and lantern simulation. It turned out to be quite an easy process, with the help of a plugin modifier called Houdini Ocean.

Besides the above 2 classes, I also took a number of other classes during this semester. One of which was Flash. I won't go into the details of how much I hated Flash (I'm just glad its over) but here's the final animation that was created by myself:

Fall 2011 has been quite a relaxed semester (for Digipen's standards) and thus I was able to be engaged in several other projects. One of which was 'Flip's Adventures'. More on that later.

The Sacrifice, a Post-Moterm

'The Sacrifice' is the animation created for the final assignment for my projects class. It was a collaborative effort of the entire class - all 7 of us. I am honored to by appointed the director for this project. As this is my first time taking up such a role, I've decided to write a brief post-moterm, chronicling the successes and failures.

What worked

Settling on a style early on during the production
Over the course of the project class, we were told to stick close to the Hyung Tae-Kim art style in terms of character rendering. However, the options were wide open when it came to animation. There was simply no way we could follow up with his realistic style and translate that into animation within this short span of 3 weeks.

We did some research and decided to follow the Makoto Shinkai style. His style encompasses the use of highly stylized, and yet super detailed, background environments, anime styled characters and high contrast lens flares. It was a perfect fit of what we were going for - exciting action sequences with a professional finish. With that, the environment artists got to work and quickly created the background for the establishing shot. With the background and color scheme settled, everyone within the team had a clear vision of what to expect in the final output.

I believe that when creating art, it is very important to first have the vision. The clearer the vision, the better the final artwork will look. We definitely spent less time fudging around when we were already set on a path of action to take.

Involvement of the entire team
I, for one, do not believe in the Auteur theory. I think that in a team project, be it an animation, a game or a film, it should always be a collaborative effort. Sure, one person should take the lead and have the final say at the end of the day, but I dislike the notion that all ideas should only come from just that one person. Therefore, I prefer to consult the whole group (or whoever is present at that moment in time) even when dealing with simple issues. This might be an excuse as I myself am quite an indecisive person, but I want everyone to feel involved in the project.

While not always the case, I do feel that when you have a stake in something, you will naturally feel more motivated to give it your best shot. That is the working culture that I like, and I'm glad to say that I find that present in the Saikokids team. My teammates would come up to me time and time again to ask for more things to do, fearing that they were slacking off too much. The truth is, everyone is putting the maximum effort to make this project work, and that shows in the final animation that was put together.

What did not work

Bad scheduling
When planning the schedules and deadlines, I had one objective in mind - to finish everything 2 days before submission and to do it without crunching. Back when I was making games, we had a 20/80 theory. The last 20 percent of the work (usually the polishing stage) such take up 80% of the development time. Production is important, but Post-Production is the stage whereby a product can be converted from a grade A standard to a triple A standard.

I guess I was being overly optimistic, but I ended up overnight 4 or 5 times in school (and I am definitely not the record holder within the team) and we completed the final render of the animation 10 minutes before the final presentation.

I guess what failed the initial schedule was the lack of consideration of the different working patterns of each individual. Zishen, the storyboard lead and one of the key animators in the team is one person who can suddenly go on fire in the wee hours of the night. I, for one, cannot survive the night without nodding off. The female members cannot overnight in school, and some prefer to work at home, while some of the guys cannot work at home, either because their desktop is slow or because of the distractions that are present in their house. This conflict resulted in dependency issues whereby one task cannot be executed when the previous one, that is handled by another teammate, is not done.

In conclusion
All in all, it was a great experience working together with the other Saikokids. I was able to bring some of the management and project coordination skillsets from being a producer of my film project into this production.

It has been a long and hard 3 weeks of non-stop working, but I'll never forget the feeling during the final presentation. The whole team was present in Mccay (a classroom used for animation) and our lecturer played the video file. The thunderous roar of the Orochi blasted out from the speakers as Gamelena danced around it. And when the nuclear explosion took place and the video cuts to the credits, cheers and applause filled the room. I was once more vindicated of my decision to join this industry. The gratification that your work has just entertained a group of audience is priceless.