Final Pigsy piece .

After the crit we made a few changes to our Final movie. Things such as the background in scene 3, the way the characters move and the opening page have been altered. We could see where people were coming from in there criticisms to these parts, so we tweaked them. The book was critisised to as being a bit too simple and plain for the context of a oriental book. Though there wasn't enough time to alter the book itself (regrettably). I like how the last scene looks a lot more in this version, as the birds add more character to the pages.

Here's the tweaked final-



Below is my Evaluation of the project.

Evaluation


The basis off this brief is to create a music video for Pigsy in Space, a song from the theatrical production “Monkey” a theatrical production of the legendary Chinese tale, where a Monkey goes on a journey to seek immortality. Ash Bowles and myself have had a growing interest in oriental artwork, (artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai). I myself have a good collection of books from Chinese artists already. So I knew that I had a good base, upon which to build on. It is notable that brief its self states that we shouldn’t try and replicate the art style that is already there.
The current art style for the Monkey theatrical production is by Jamie Hewlett. Jamie Hewlett has a kind of modern style influenced by modern manga. Bearing this is mind Ash and I decided that we’d have to go for a more traditional style of imagery if we were going to pay respect to the brief.
We came to a conclusion that we create an animated book that incorporated traditional oriental paint scenes, with animated features, such as water, rain sun and characters. We decided that the book would open up and every time a page was turned, a new image would appear.
Ash and I researched into quite a few different artists and examples of animated books before we started on the actual imagery itself. Though this seemed to come to be a bit of a mistake for I don’t believe we spent enough time learning or extending are knowledge on the techniques that would have to be used. I did myself play around with one scene that I painted myself before we worked on with the editing though I don’t really think that this was enough preparation for what we had to do. It seems we were a bit too arrogant in our approach and seemingly expected things to come into place as we progressed with the book.
I was pretty pleased with the way we tackled the artwork as Ash drew out the scenes and I painted them with inks (to keep it traditional) and then cut them up Photoshop. Though when it came to editing it was pretty hard going as only one of us could have the After Effects file at one time and we spent a bit of time apart during this brief. What we really should of done is cut the editing in half and been more organised in the way we tackled it so that we had certain amounts done at correct times at certain sections of the timescale we had to complete it. We could of probably done with making a an organiser which marked goals and aims by specific dates.
One thing that we wanted to do and never got chance to, was to incorporate some live action footage into our book, we were going to have one of the characters walk into a bar where and then switch to a silhouetted live action sequence where a guy sits drinking sake and a VDJ part comes in where things start to spin. We were going to use a generated backdrop for the bar with shelves of alcohol and somehow make them fit together. Though we never got chance to even make an attempt at this for time did not permit it.
I was quite pleased with the visual style of the artwork, as it did look very traditional and quite atmospheric, I enjoyed making weather enhancements too, these added real character to the pieces. The way they slowly emerged in the book was also niece as we did some ion sequence with the music itself. I’d like to think that the different scenes convey different emotions, though with a basis of tranquillity like the song.
One could argue that the some of the scenes don’t seem to add up or follow a specific path or story, but that wouldn’t of been what we intended. The music itself just seems to drift away and doesn’t really have any crescendo or climax; hence our piece was more of just a showcase of different scenes and scenarios of life in China.
The book itself wasn’t as effective as I would of liked; a big thing that was pointed out in the interim-crit was that we didn’t use a fancy authentic art book. We just used a ring bound college book. This is because we knew that we couldn’t key out the areas on the spine a book and keep it flat. Where as a ring bound book doesn’t have a spine. Maybe we or I should be a bit more adventurous in the future and ask for assistance in doing such things as keying out parts out. It would also of been niece if the pictures were already on the pages as they turned, and then animated when the page was flat. Ideas have come to my head on how to do this recently though of course it’s a bit too late. More pre-production planning should have been done to ensure this didn’t happen.
The interim crit went quite well, there was certain things that we knew needed to be amended. Such as the characters being cleaned up, the animations needed smoothing and slowing down and certain colours needed re-working in the backgrounds. It was pointed out to us that the text at the beginning was unnecessary so we changed this to a couple of images after the crit. It was also possible to redo some of the animations so that they were smoother, and to edit the some scenery’s so that they were subtler on the eye. I edited the birds into the final scene in sequence, so that there was more going on in this scene and a more tranquil feel would be apparent. A major thing that I would of liked to of done was maybe rework the animations in Flash, so that there legs moved and expressions changed. Though time didn’t allow this, maybe the next project would be a good opportunity to try incorporate Flash and after effects.
It did get mentioned at the crit that are book should have been something a bit more oriental, but by this time it was far to late to change it.
Thgis project has been a good experience as I do feel I’ve learned quite a bit. I feel my work rate has improved from the last project, but the thing I need to improve on is allocating time to different sections of production. I am quite pleased with certain elements’ of this project, though if I’d of been more organised with time, then I could of made something that I was really proud of.

Interim Crit

Today we had to present our Pigsy video. There were things we went in knowing that needed to be tweaked, such as the character movement (some were jerky, moved to quick). We also noticed that the character images needed cleaning up and making transparent (you could see this well on the big projector). There was a certain scene that looked too ultra violet on the big screen.

One thing that the are video was criticized for is the text at the start. Certain people deemed it unnecessary to have an introduction. Me and Ash could see pretty much where they were coming from .

Change.

We have decided that we are going to change the page at the beginning. The characters need to be reanimated and cleaned up. The background on the sun rise scene needs to softened possibly. The final scene needs to be more clear , the birds need be animated in sequentially .

Anyway ake a look at the video we showed today.



We shall upload the video when we have finished it.

Painted Scenes image development ,

Here are some of the scenes that Ash drew for me to paint. You can't see it too well in this piece but I've cut up some of these scans, so that backdrops will be possible to animate in After Effects.

Characters

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Here's the characters which Ash has drawn up, we think that these will fit well with the scenes themselves. Ash has made the characters quite vibrant an full of expression. This is so the scenes will have a bit more to them in turns of character. Though they are quite traditional looking, they still have a modern edge in there style. There features have been enhanced to make them more visually interesting and appealing to an modern audience.

Next they need to be colored up vibrantly to give thesee scenes a bit of a boost.