Final Updates: Final Project Documentation

Proposal/Abstract: 

My original proposal last week included some things that I didn't end up adding, and didn't include some things that I did end up adding to my project. The original proposal was to add multiple cameras to my animation of a frog jumping across the lily pads in a pond. 

Research / Pre-Production: 

Since this was also my midterm project, I have basically been slowly adding on to it since close to the beginning of the semester (Week 5/6). I used the original bouncing ball tutorial to help me with a lot of elements of this project, considering I didn't have any experience with animation until I completed that tutorial. I didn't necessarily have an end-plan when I first started this early on in the semester, since I was essentially adding onto it with each weekly exercise that we did. However, throughout the semester I referred back to the tutorial and exercises (assignments involving NURBS models, materials/textures, lighting, motion path animation, etc.) to improve the scene. Because I started on this so early in the semester and just slowly added on to it, I didn't have an initial storyboard for it since it came together gradually, but now that it is complete here are a few key screenshots depicting the overall story of my quick animation:

Production Log: 

The frog is a sphere in which I assigned an image of a cartoon frog face to. I used the tutorial to help me do this, although I had to do more research and preparation to make sure the image I chose would look right on the sphere. I found the best image of a cartoon frog's face I could find for my purposes and brought it to Photoshop to remove the background, then saved it as a .tiff file all so that it would appear correctly on the sphere. This took a long time to get the frog to look anything like a frog, and even through this process, the face didn't turn out perfect. I intended for the face to have more than just eyes, and for the eyes to be even, but after messing around with it for weeks I settled for this look for the frogs. To improve the recognizability of the frog, I also decided to apply the squash and stretch approach used in the bouncing ball tutorial in order to make it look more believable and give it more character. I followed the same steps in the tutorial, other than changing a few numbers such as the factor attribute of the squash, since the spheres in this scene are a bit smaller than the one used in the tutorial. A last minute addition that I added this past week was another smaller frog, the baby, which required me to repeat the same process I used for the mother frog but scale it smaller and add new animations for it by setting keys. As the mother frog leaps across the pond toward the baby frog, changing the direction it is facing depending on which lily pad it is jumping to, you will also notice the baby frog looking around to the left and right for its mom, and then leaping toward her when she lands next to it on the grass. That is the extent of the story/animation element, as the rest of my focus was on making the scene look visually appealing. My goal was to create a bright, very cartoon-y scene, with a background to match it. The very first steps of this project were to create a plane, add a spotlight reflecting a light blue color to give the effect of a pond in the middle of the plane, and create four flattened spheres that resembled lily pads spread across the pond. Later, I added a background that matched the theme of this scene I created, changing the color of the plane as needed to match the light green color of the grass in the background. I played around with the color and positioning of the plane a lot until I got it to blend in with the background as much as I could. Then, I added another light to the scene (directional) to make it brighter and give it a sense of sunlight, again to match the background as much as possible. Another spotlight was added in the last few days, the light green one focused on the baby frog. I decided to make the scene more focused on the baby than the original frog jumping across the pond, so putting a spotlight in that area felt like an appropriate way to bring attention to the baby looking around for its mom, and then jumping toward her at the end. I made the spotlight green 1. so that it didn't reflect a different color off the frogs, therefore making it more difficult to identify them as frogs, and 2. it could also be interpreted as just a brighter patch of grass rather than a light shining down on the area.

Self-Evaluation: 

Overall, I am content with what I was able to accomplish considering how little experience and knowledge I had about animation at the beginning of the semester. I mostly focused on the cinematography aspects such as lighting/color, character animation/movement, and other elements of the tutorial that helped me a lot. These were all things I found enjoyable to work on, and things that I felt I was pretty good at, in comparison to other elements of animation that I left out in my project. If I were to continue this animation and add anything, it could definitely be improved by turning it into a camera animation and rendering the scene, both of which I didn't really get as good at or enjoy working with as much as the other elements I mentioned. 

I planned to use more cameras initially, but I sort of ran out of time at the end as I was more focused on improving other visual aspects of the scene. I attempted to render the scene a couple times as well, but there were problems with the lighting which I couldn't seem to fix, and I felt too rushed by that point that I chose to focus on getting the animation to look good in Maya first. Given more time to work out how to render the scene properly, my next step would've been to put the animation into Adobe Premiere and put it into video form, with some cartoon music in the background. I wanted to find a short clip of some spring-type sounds, with maybe some birds chirping, frogs croaking once or twice or some bouncing sound effects, just something to match the environment and the story of my animation.