Alisha L Animation (LAU): Extended Practise: Live Brief

Extended Practise
Live Brief - 11 Second Club March

I worked alongside Caitlin and Rachel to produce a quick animation for this month's 11 Second Club.

As Rachel had already started an animatic with her characters, I took the roughed animatic and re-drew it in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro. As the version sent to me was also incomplete, I needed to add an additional shot at the end to make up for the last few seconds.
I additionally followed Rachel's character sheets when cleaning up the animatic.
Here is Rachel's animatic, followed by my cleaned up version:

As we only had just over a week left before the deadline, we had to put together a quick Gantt sheet for the production. We didn't have any pre-production work, as the characters had already been designed by Rachel. This gave us a little bit more time to work on each shot.
Here is the Gantt Sheet:

I, then, started on the animation. We discussed that we were going to try keeping the movements simple, in order to get the animation done for the deadline. Therefore, I mainly followed the animatic for the keyframes.
I think that I have gotten much better at keeping on model with characters, as I was able to follow Rachel's reference sheets quite accurately.
Here are the keys:

Shot 1 Keys

Shot 3 Keys

Shot 5 Keys

I wanted to put more movement and expression into the keys, however we had such a tight deadline to follow, so I kept the movement simple.
Once Rachel had keyed their shots, I moved onto inbetweening those. For the inbetweening process, I made sure to only expose frames on 2s and 3s, rather than making them completely smooth. This meant that I needed to think about the timing of the poses more than the fluidity.

Shot 2 Inbetweens

Shot 4 Inbetweens

For Shot 6, however, I needed to adjust some of the keyframes, as the leg movements at the beginning of the shot seemed slightly wrong and would make the character jump slightly.
Once I had inbetweened everything, I went back in to do the lipsync, as this made the process much quicker.
For Shot 2, the lipsync seemed slightly too fast, at first, so I had to go in to make adjustments to that, exposing the frames on 2s rather than 1s.

Shot 6 Inbetweens

With the time restraints, we had to make the character movements much simpler and settle with frames that didn't seem too perfect, instead of going back in and making large improvements. This is something I would consider in future projects to shorter deadlines, by planning much more effectively or assuring that we have an appropriate amount of time for production.
I think that some of the lines vary a little bit in size and weight, when I was inbetweening. I will need to pay more attention to this in the future, by making sure my pen pressure sensitivity isn't too high or that the brush size is accurate with the keys.
The framing and camera position for Shot 6 doesn't seem to work very well, as it has the character moving behind the other. I think it would've worked better with the camera facing them from the front and Kaxer would then move forward, towards the camera.

Alisha L Animation (LAU)