James Annandale MSc Animation

  Seeing as I use Procreate a lot for my design work I thought it would be a good idea to see what kind of results I could create as far as making glow effects are concerned, having come up with some pleasing work in After Effects I wanted to compare the two programs.  At this point I wasn't too concerned with lighting the whole image, I just wanted to continue experimenting with making the blade glow. Above is my first attempt, here I simply added a layer below the blade and used the medium nozzle spray paint brush and then dropped the opacity down to 75%. This was ok but not as visually pleasing as the After Effects output and looked more like a haze or mist than a glow. Next I found a tutorial on a YouTube channel called Muzenik Art showing the process of creating an initial shape then duplicating the layer and on this layer selecting the Gaussian Blur option in the adjustments box, then changing the layer type from Normal to Add and duplicating again before playing around ...

Once I finished creating an animated glow and textured boil for my sword design I thought it would be interesting to see what this looked like with a glow on just the blade. So I went back to my Procreate file, duplicated the sword layer twice and renamed each layer Blade and Handle respectively. Then on the one layer erased the blade and on the other erased the handle. I then saved a PNG of each layer, they are shown below... I then imported both files into After Effects and followed the steps discussed in my last two blog posts except this time I only used the Blade PNG to duplicate and turn into a drop shadow to create the glow. I then dropped the Handle PNG on to the timeline, seeing as I created both PNG's from the same image the blade and handle lined up perfectly. Here is the test of the animated glow...   Once I had animated the glow I added a white textured boil to the handle like in the previous sword test as well as a blue textured boil on the part of the handle next to ...

 Creating a glow for the sword design was only the first part of what I wanted to do, I thought it would be really cool to animate this glow and also try out the textured boil technique I'd used on the Keith Haring mural background. Here's how far I'd got at this stage... Following on from the instructions from the tutorial I was using, the next stage was to create a keyframe at the start of the timeline on the Amount option of the duplicated Glow effect then move one second along the timeline and change the Amount to 20. I then selected the 'placeholder' layer and clicked 'U' on the keyboard before holding Alt key and clicking on the stopwatch to open a text box in the timeline. Here I typed 'loopOut('pingpong'). Then I went to Glow Intensity and held Alt and clicked on the stopwatch and typed wiggle(2,2) into the box. Then finally to the Drop Shadow 2 effect and again held Alt and clicked the stopwatch next to the Opacity option and typed in wi...

 While I was researching ways for animating the background of the Keith Haring mural I came across a tutorial for several different ways to create a glow effect in After Effects and thought it would be fun to see if I could use this with my sword design. Here was the unsuccessful initial result...  Not at all what I wanted to create so I tried a second time following along with the tutorial. The problem I had with the attempt above was the sword itself was being affected by the process used to create the glow, whereas I wanted my original design to still be visible. Then I thought, 'why don't I just drop another sword on a layer above and see what that looks like... This worked and was certainly more like what I was hoping to achieve however I prefered the blue from the first attempt so adjusted that and tried again. Below is a description of the steps taken to create the glow... You start by importing your design into After Effects and dropping it on the time line, then go to...

 Following on from my last post about dividing up the background into sections and having each section fade in to the shot one by one, next I wanted to experiment with adding an animated texture to the different colours as suggested by my lecturer Kieran. He very helpfully sent me a YouTube tutorial video by Ben Marriot walking you through the process of attaching a grainy texture to a shape layer in After Effects and making it boil. I'm not at all very technical and to be fair struggle a bit when it comes to using software in too much of an advanced way but I followed along as best I could and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. The first thing I did was work on some practice tests on just one area of the background, going through the process several times playing around with the settings until I'd found a combination I was happy with. My intention for this was to try and replicate the highlights I'd added in Procreate and bring them to life, so I chose shades of each...

 I wasn't completely satisfied with how the finished animation looked timing-wise, I thought it was actually too quick. I think the playback settings in Procreate may have had an impact on this so I decided to alter the timing in After Effects by having each drawing hold for an extra frame essentially putting it on 2's. Here is the slower version... I shared this version with the team at our last meeting and asked which version they preferred. The feedback I received was that they liked the faster animation (shown in my last blog post) better but agreed that it would be good if the scene was longer. At this point the quick version was only two seconds in length, Heather and Eve had allocated four seconds for this scene so it was suggested that we could extend the beginning, end or both by having the background fade in to shot in sections and maybe have one of the characters continue to wave or move.  Knowing how long the initial animation took to animate, clean up and colour I...

 I had totally forgotten how laborious and time-consuming 2D animation can be...my god, but this is equally balanced by the joy felt in watching your animated figures spring to life when you're finished! Here is the finished animation... This was the first piece of animation I had created in Procreate as well as being the first animation I've made in about a decade and the choice of software brought its own challenges, for example, when using the animation mode in Procreate each layer becomes a frame so everything needs to be redrawn or coloured each time especially when at the clean up stage. Now there probably is a way to do this more efficiently by copying and pasting etc but considering this was my first time I was just figuring it out as I went. So the way I got round this when it came to cleaning up the first draft was to use the final frame of the sequence which had all the characters in place and work backwards from there. So I cleaned up the final frame and then duplic...

  Above is a colour test for how the final animated clip of the Keith Haring mural will look. This was made using both Procreate and Photoshop.  In Procreate I created a new layer below the one above and using the Script brush I selected colours from the photo of the original mural that Keith Haring painted in the Palladium, the image is below... As you can see I only used the top half of the mural in this design. With regards to the colour I started by selecting a pink/purple and drawing an outline for the sections that were going to be filled with this colour. I then selected the nearest shade of blue and did the same again and so on with each colour until I'd created a fully interlocked outline. Before doing this I decided I'd join up each section of colour because I had to take into consideration the fact the characters were jumping into shot one at a time and none of them are obviously in their final positions to start with and I didn't want areas of white in the backg...

 My word it's been a slightly testing day so far, so much so I thought it would be a good idea to make a note of it and share the simple but valuable lessons learned... Yesterday I started work on a cleaned up animation test with the aim of having part of it finished to show the group at a meeting this morning. That's right, school began last night...  Lesson one, when exporting PNG files from Procreate make sure the background layer has also been unticked! This little beauty cost me a good half hour of playing around and researching and it was nothing short of glorious when I realized the mistake I was making regardless of how basic. Lesson two, when exporting more than one PNG file from Procreate choose the option of Animated PNG which will, as you've probably guessed, export all your layers in one go saving you having to do it one at a time, you beauty! Knowing I had a meeting at 9:30am I dragged myself out of bed at 6:05am to crack on.  Lesson three, everything ALWAYS...

 Over the weekend I went back to my rough animated clip inspired by Keith Haring's mural and began the process of clean up.  Click the play button twice to watch... This was, as traditional clean up always is, very time consuming and labour intensive but looks a lot better. It's still not perfect but once I've added a coloured background and put the two together in After Effects it should start to come together.

 Here are some developed sketches for the Robo Samurai character, still very rough and basic but definitely moving in the right direction. As mentioned in the previous post the legs have been replaced by a motorized wheel. Next I'll be looking more closely at motor bike wheels and how the body will attach, I also want to try and strike up a good balance between designing a character that's both futuristic but traditional with regards to the Samurai culture/aesthetic.

When designing this sword I played around with a couple of different styles of finish, considering this I thought it would be good to share the method I chose to use for the finished design. Below you can see stage by stage how the sword progressed from line drawing to fully rendered illustration. To start with I chose the colour palette by referencing this photo...  Here's the line drawing and colour palette, the colours to the left are the shades, the ones in the middle are the base colours and the highlights to the right. The top row are for the grip of the handle, next three for the blade. The three underneath were used for a previous attempt but not in this one and the bottom three for the metal part of the handle. I kept it to three shades of each colour for simplicity... I then changed the setting of this layer to multiply and worked in layers below this, the first layer being just for the base colours.  Then I added the darker shades on a layer above, having decided th...