Project aim

The aim of this project is to create a short animation story of a young boys as he journeys from his mother land to another. As further research were carried out, I settled on presenting this story in the same way as the Storycorps tell theirs. A way of which someone narrates the story in the background whilst the characters acts out the scenes and also miming with the narrator to give the fell of the characters talking. I plan to complete thus short animation, approximately 3mins. I will be using Autodesk Maya and after effects fro animating and editing. After effects will be used for adding sounds and other type of visual effects if needed. The final animation would have all the effects and sounds that are needed and a focused level of animation to drive emotions and feelings of the characters to the audience.

As for the influence. I knew that I wanted my style to be different 3D with a sort of cartoony textures. As further research carries out, I looked at paper man by Disney and loved the black and white. 3D cartoony style was just perfect for my story. This can also be used in a sense of a flashback memory.

George is a young boy who was really playful, loved the Power Rangers but most of all, loves his dad.

Here is adult George, a more mature version of young George. Grew out of the childlike mentality of becoming a Power Ranger, however his dream is to become a successful artist.

Edwin Nwosisi was a good artist. He found his love in a place that he loves being in, university a place where he teaches.

Beverly Nwosisi was a student at university, where she found her love and then got married. Later on she had to travel abroad the continue her carrier.

As the these characters are real life people. I didnt have much to visualise as I ready knew how they looked and how the CG world.

The challenge left was getting to know and draw the characters in different perspective.

Mother

young george

adult george

Once all the assets had been fully modelled, I then textured them all. Even though the final animation will be in Black and White, adding textures produces different shades to the objects once the black and white filter has been added on.

For the render I know what I wanted the outcome of the animation would be. I wanted it black and white in some scenes to reflex the past and the coloured would be when adult George is narrating the story. I also wanted the outcome of the render in a more cartoony style

The process I went about rendering this scene. Making sure that the settings is turned to mental ray. I then added an image Based Lighting going into its attributes and changing the type settings to texture. I also made sure that final gathering was turned on, to endure that the render comes out smooth and crisp.

After doing this, I then went into the hypershader adding a ramp and info sampler to give the character a fake rim light so it could stand out from the environments. I also added a use background shader to the floor plane. This allows the shader to take any colour thats from the background, added the same colour to the floor plane.

I then selected the camera and made sure that the background colour is also set to white.

I also start an animation with a blocked animation. This allows me to focus on the poses on the characters and get the timing right. To do this I changed both the default in Tangent and the default out tangent to Linear and Stepped.

Once the poses and the timing are right on point, I then go back to the preference and smooth the animation. Changing both tangents to plateau. This will allow to the animation to flow and automatically adding in-between frames to the set keys

Refining in another importance in animation. Doing this helps make the animation more realistic and move fluidly. This process is basically adding more details into the movements of the character. The graph editor help with this process.

Once the animation was done, its was time to composite. I took the rendered images into after effects, adding all the sounds and background music. Black and white was the main visual in this project. To do so in after effects I went to effects colour correction black and white.

Even though this animation dont contain many effects, it did however have one or two scenes with the smoke effects. To so this I had an alpha video of a smile file. All I had to do was import the file and drag to the scene. I then opened the graph editor in after effects and changed the ease in and ease out on the smoke animation. There is the final result.