Production Stages

Once the final storyboards are finished, the next stage is producing the animation. Normally each second of time in a film consists of 24 frames so that would mean 24 separate images/drawings have to be produced for the animation, each frame with a slight change or different pose from the previous one. The methods, single animation and double animation, are commonly used.

Single animation ("on ones") is of course when 24 images have to be produced for all 24 frames in a second. Double animation ("on twos") is when the same image is shown in 2 frames, so only 12 images are used in a second, but these two techniques are often combined to keep the animation at a certain pace, depending on how the animator wants it to look. For other media, such as Saturday morning cartoons, "on threes" or "fours" are commonly used, meaning that fewer drawings/images are shown in a second, approximately 6 to 8 in that sense.

 When the images are successfully produced and photographed/scanned and played in a continuous sequence, the objects/characters in the scene appear to move of their own accord, this is known as the persistence of vision.

Most of the animation I produced was by using an old fashioned light box which is a good piece of equipment for 2D animators who prefer to do hand drawn styles. The plastic translucent disc where the paper rests and the light behind enables the user to see through several layers of paper so to determine how much of a different position the character must be in the next frame.

My light box, with some of the images in development.

PENCIL TESTS

In traditional animation, pencil tests are of course one of the early stages of animation, it gives you a basic idea on how a certain scene looks when you have produced all the images for the sequence. After all the drawings are cleaned up, they are photographed or scanned into a computer and previewed to decide whether the animated scene needs any improvement or any changes.

First I had to produce the key drawings for the shot, the poses that the character or object would be in and then I had to produce breakdowns and in-betweens, which are of course the kind of transition from on key drawing to another. The quantity of breakdowns and in-betweens that you produce has an effect on the amount of time it takes to get to that particular key drawing, the more the amount the slower and smoother the animation will be. Less makes it crude and jumpy.

Below are a few images of key drawings, breakdowns and in-betweens for the jelly maid shot that you will see later on.

Key Drawing No.1

Key Drawing 02

Breakdown

In-between

In-between

In-between

Key Drawing No.3

Final pencil test of the jelly maid character.

Rough pencil test of the main character after going through the same progress.

CLEAN UP PROGRESS

Once I've done sketching and drawing the rough key drawings and in-betweens, I go through the process of clean up. Which means I had to actually clean up each image that going over them and creating smooth clean crisp lines for the scanner can pick up really rigid lines. Each image was scanned in black and white mode so I didn't have to go through the trouble of sorting out tones and shades in grayscale mode. Then I produced all the clean up progress in Microsoft Paint as I found it easier to do than in Photoshop, went over outlines in red and then got rid of all the black before changing the colour of the new outline. Then of course, all blank areas of the image were filled with the appropriate set of colours.

Almost near completion, some areas of black still need to be disposed of before colour of new clean outline can be changed to black.

COLOURING & TEXTURING

Once every image was cleaned and coloured, I moved on to shading/texturing and additional colouring in Photoshop. Each colour was shaded so that it would add to the effect, used the colour range mode assigned to a certain colour first so that a barrier would produced around said colour and the rest of the image would remain unaffected and I then set the brush mode to overlay so that the colour would change in tone instead of just applying white and black colours to the selected area. Also the white backgrounds were removed make the images easier to composite later on in post production.

As the boy character was reading a book in the original story, I had to add more effect to the book he's holding in the shot so I typed a title and a short paragraph of text that was supposed to be relevant to the plot, I just put "Life Beneath the Waves" and distorted the text so that it would fit better on the book, whatever angle and position it was in and I did this for each image in which the book was shown. 

A screen shot of the boy's hair, as you can see, the shade and tone of the hair colour differs in particular areas to make it stand out more.

For the jelly maid, I selected a purplish like colour for its body, originally the colour was going a shade of blue but I decided to use a shade of purple to make the creature stand out more, and also as the creature is originally female, I wanted to give it a nice colour. 

As the jelly maid possesses bioluminescence (the ability to produce light by organic systems or origins, sometimes similar to "cold light") the tips of its "dreadlocks" (the tentacles from its head that are to imitate hair) are supposed to develop light so I had to use lens flares, but I achieved that later on in After Effects instead of Photoshop as I would have more control over then since the jelly maid was going to move in the scene.

Also as the creature is composed of mesoglea (a translucent gelatinous like substance that makes up the bodies of certain life forms such as jellyfish) it had to be see through so I simply lowered the opacity of the creature's body or used the eraser set to a low level.

BREAK DOWN TEST

Below is a YouTube video showing a sequence of how I went from one stage to the next in the process of producing a animation shot of the jelly maid swimming away off camera.

BACKGROUND/ ELEMENT DESIGNS

Image of final background design, without additional lighting effects.

Texture image file of a brushed metal surface I had produced before in Photoshop. Achieved the look using a combination of gradient colours, directional blurred noise specks and lighting effects.

Same background with lighting effects added.

Applying shading and texturing to chair image.

Background without additional lighting.

Background with altered lighting.

Once all the images that were to be used in the final movie were completed, I set about compositing them into sequences using After Effects.

AFTER EFFECTS

This is where the magic happens, now that the images are done, I could start importing them into After effects and setting them up in different sequences ready for compositing together. I had to use several compositions to avoid getting mixed up with everything and also made it easier to apply certain effects nodes to each sequence if necessary.

As I mentioned earlier, the jelly maid has bioluminescence so light is supposed to be emanating from the tips of its "dreadlocks" so I used a solid where I assigned lens flares and applied a curves node to alter the lighting a little bit. Then for the images where the jelly maid changes position, I key framed each lens flare to a certain point where the tips of the dreadlocks would be so that the lights moved with them.

Shot of the jelly maid with lighting and lens flare effects added and set to 3D mode.

There were other effects that I had to add to the scenes, for example there were some specks of microorganisms that were to pass the submersible pod. To achieve that, I used an advance particle system that would also work with 3D cameras and altered the controls in the systems to make the particles look more like little white spheres and then added a slight glow effect to make them more interesting. 

Also as the pod was in an underwater environment, there of course had to be bubbles, so I applied what was called a "foam" effect to another separate solid. The purpose of this effect was to generate CGI bubbles that could be rendered in any size, shape and texture. Then I set key frames to the producer node of that effect so that the bubbles would appear in certain places such as from the back of the pod where the propellers would be.

Finished shot of the jelly maid creature swimming away quickly from window, with the effects mentioned.

Each shot/scene had to be pre-rendered out individually for editing later on, which of course took great quantities of bytes, depending on the size and quality of the scene.

AFTER EFFECTS - 3D PERSPECTIVE

To give the scenes a 3D feel, I converted all images into 3D layers and set up them up in a composition. Each layer had a 3D mode that could be activated from the small button that was located in the modes panel, then I had to alter the position, scale and orientation and if necessary, set key frames for certain images to make it all fit and look good in the shot. This process actually helped a lot as it would have been more difficult to create certain camera angles and movement that could not done with images alone. 

Also lighting effects could be added to 3D scenes that could enhance the mood and setting of the enviroment more so I produced a couple of point and spot lights to all scenes, trying to keep the continuity perfect as possible. Shadows are optional and could be produced if the mode is enabled but I decided not to, as it would have taken more time to render. By the way, I was unable to render all AE scenes in a render farm, so had to go through the painful process of rendering each shot out.

Shot of the boy looking at the window off screen with lighting and effects added.

Screen shot of the "jelly maid at window" scene, shown in a custom 3D view. The camera has been selected so you could see where it is pointing in the shot and all the images are set to 3D mode and positioned.. 

Another 3D shot with images set up and a particle system added to the scene.

MAYA - SUBMERSIBLE POD

Although most of the animation was done with hand drawn styles, there were some scenes required that would be impossible to produce in traditional animation alone, due to time management so I used a OBJ object file of a small submersible pod that I had produced earlier for another project, imported it into Autodesk Maya and assigned a toon shader to the object to make it look more 2-D, including the use of only one or two colours instead of shading and assigned a black toon outline. Then I simply produced and set up a few camera movements for a few shots, set the Render settings to a suitable format and the number of frames to be done and then sent it as a Maya job into a render farm so I didn't have to go through the time consuming hassle of rendering each frame out myself, with a render farm you can render more than one frame at a time.

Screen shot of pod in different angles including front, side and camera perspective.

Screen shot of the pod in Toon shading, without lighting.