Brainstorming Session
During the first initial group meeting myself, Angelina and Simon sat down and decided which of the options we wished to develope.
Mind Map 1 Chosen three of the options from the list and developed ideas to identify which of the three we could
First Initial Script
Drink Advert
From shots 1-10, lions is a skinny thing
Shot 1
Mid shot of fruits jumping off from a leaf
Shot 2
Zoom in on fruits coming together
Shot 3
Close up shot of fruits collide
Shot 4
Close up shot of fruits turn into fruit juice
Shot 5
Long shot of juice dropping into oasis/lake
Shot 6
Long shot of oasis/lake changing colour
Shot 7
Close up of lion lying on the floor
Shot 8
Close up of lion crawling to the edge of oasis/lake (Add a few drawings for this?)
Shot 9
Lion lifts water in his paws to his mouth
Shot 10
Close up of lions eyes – half closed and dead
Shot 11
Close up of lions eyes – wide and full of energy
Shot 12
Mid shot of lion doing a spin in the air
Shot 13
Close up shot of lions muscular thighs
Shot 14
Close up of lions muscular biceps
Shot 15
Birds eye of lions face with a fierce facial expression as he growls
Character Designs
Character Sheet: During preproduction, Angelina designed a character structure sheet displaying the construction of the lion with facial expressions.
Character Designs
The character is now shown in numerous poses, conditions with expressive posture, body language and facial expressions
Environment Designs
The first initial concepts designs of environment took a very seclusive rainforest/ jungle vision creating a private oasis setting.
Storyboard
First Initial Storyboard
The first initial storyboard was presented to the group, we analyzed each shot making annotations in ours thoughts and agreed amendments
Amended Storyboard
The Amendments were made and the second version of the storyboard was presented to the group
Final Storyboard
Through much discussion and thought the final storyboard was constructed creating the perfect sequence of shots which would then bring our idea to life
Animatic
Once the Storyboard was finalized the Animatic was constructed through more detailed sequence defining every chain of event creating the final concept for the final animation.
Finding the right title and slogan was the tricky part because the slogan and title needed to stay true to the animation however to be catchy and memorable. We finalized the name FruitBlast King of the Jungle.
Draft Animations
Angelina created the draft animations of the lion
Fruit Textures and Designs
Simon worked on the 3D concepts and models of the fruits and the textures
Fruit Experiment that wasn't used
Environment textures
Final 3D Environment Design
Sophia constructed the 3D environment creating a secluded oasis
Final 3D Drink Bottle Design
Simon constructed the final packaging for the product.
Final Animation
The Final Animation
Missing Scene
Experimenting with Alternative Character Design
I was eager to experiment with the idea further in my own time to create a few alternative tests and ideas
Character Test
Drinking position Close Up
Stages in the Hair Flick- I was thinking l'oreal
Colour Test
Impact of drinking the Juice quick design
Lion Animation Walk Test
Walk cycle test for character - Healthy
I was researching the tale movement but didn't leave myself enough time to apply it to the other tests
Walk cycle test for character- Starting to feel thirsty
Walk Cycle test for character- Fatigued
Final Animation
Vimeo Link
Group Project Diary
Meeting 1
First, a presentation was conducted to explain the brief. The class must form into groups of 3 or 4 and produce an advert for one of the items’ named of the list. Simon, Sunny and Angelina formed a group, limiting the original list to the ideas that were most interesting to them. These were an advert for:
-Drink
-Bullshit detector
-Time Machine
After contemplating seriously over their options, they decided that the best option to choose was to create an advert for fruit juice as it was most realistic and can easily be related to the audience. They got together and looked at a range of drink adverts such as ‘Krushem’ and ‘Ribena’, which helped them to form an idea of creating an advert for a drink, advertising different and unusual tastes to attract the audience. Angelina came up with the idea that the advert should consist of an animal that the audience can relate to e.g. like the cats in the ‘Krushem’ advert but changing the animal to a lion. Simon and Sunny expanded the idea and suggested that the character should show positive changes after consuming the drink to show the audience the benefits of the product and the outcome that could happen to them, which was referenced to ‘Pop Eye the Sailor Man’. Angelina created a brainstorm for the initial ideas, whilst Simon produced a PowerPoint presentation to present their ideas to everyone for the next week.
Meeting 2
Sophia (me) joins the group. After hearing the current ideas from Angelina and Simon, Sophia suggests change the advert slightly so that it is promoting a fruit juice, doing something similar to the ‘Vimto’ advert, which shows fruits in a car that rocks up and down, causing the fruits to hit together and splats into fruit juice.
It was finally their go to present their ideas, going through their initial thought processes and the final idea that they wanted to work with. The feedback from the lecturers was positive so the group decided to plan the storyboard for the advert. This is the story they wanted to follow:
-A lonely lion walks through the jungle, tired and thirsty from its journey. The fruits of the jungle become playful and jump off the leaves of the exotic trees, hitting into each other, causing them to burst and their juices to fall into water of the oasis. The lion struggles to the edge of the oasis, where he takes a drink and is suddenly filled with energy and is rippling with muscles.
The advert would consist of both 2D and 3D properties - 2D for the lion character and 3D for the background.
Tony kindly suggested creating cuts from the lion to the fruits to help build the first of the character.
The roles were then allocated to each individual
-Director – Sunny
-Project manager – Sophia
-Character Artist – Angelina
-Environment Artist - Simon
It was decided that Angelina and Sunny will be responsible for the 2D aspect of the advert whilst Sophia and Simon take up the 3D side.
Angelina worked on the lion character design and possible poses. Meanwhile, Sophia produced a quick sketch of the appearance of the environment, constructing it by using a lot of reference images from the internet and composing it into one piece. After that, she made a script that detailed on the series of events that were to take place in the advert and handed it over to Sunny, who began roughly sketching out the storyboard.
Meeting 3
Sunny was not present for the first half of the meeting for personal reasons so the rest of the group carried on with their designated tasks. Angelina resumed to drawing the lion character, concentrating on poses during its worn out stage and the facial expressions to express its fatigued state. Simon and Sophia began sculpting trees in Maya and were playing around with different methods of how the leaves should be created for the scene. The best method was to apply leaf textures onto plane with segments, as an alpha map, so that only the painted leaves were visible. This method will make things more time efficient.
Sunny arrived after and the group conducted the meeting with Meg and Tony, thoroughly explaining their expanded ideas on the advert and their current progress within the making. Sunny gave them the rough storyboard that he created, whilst Angelina showed the sketches that she did for the lion character for feedback. Tony responded by giving Angelina a few tips on how to maintain the shape and the size of the character.
Meeting 4
Simon did not attend, due to short notice of scheduling the meeting. Sunny presented his storyboard, taking on Tony’s advice on switching the camera from the lion to the fruits to build the lions thirst. Sophia and Angelina pointed out a few changes and amendments that were needed to be made on the storyboard to make it more fluent.
Meeting 5
A workshop was organised for the group to get together to do work, which everyone attended. Sunny worked on the storyboard, changing the advert slightly towards the end. The ending changed from: the lion drinking the oasis water and suddenly becoming muscular, to lion drinking the oasis water, whips his hair out, blows water off of his paws in a charming way towards the birds on the trees. Angelina began creating test animations of the lion during the beginning of the advert, when it is wearily make its way towards the oasis edge.
Sophia began creating the environment for the animation. First, the floor was created using a plane and the vertices in the middle were pulled down, forming a ditch for the oasis water. It was then textured to look like a jungle ground. The oasis water was also made by applying an ocean shader onto a plane but there were some issues that were encountered because the settings for the water was very hard to change. Also, Sophia wanted to create a sky dome and build the environment inside it so that it wouldn’t look flat but there were major issues with lighting as it wouldn’t shine correctly. Simon assisted Sophia with the environment creation but also continued experimenting with creating leaf textures for the trees.
Meeting 6
All group members resumed to their designated tasks whilst waiting to receive some feedback from Meg and Tony. Sophia discussed with Simon the issues she had with the sky dome and they both came to the conclusion that the best method to tackle this problem was to use a default sun and sky, changing the settings around slightly to give a sunset sky, and to create a mountain border around the environment to stop it from looking flat. Simon began working on the grass textures, playing around with colour and shape from the references that he was looking at on the internet. Sunny showed Meg and Tony the changes he has made to the storyboard and was advised to change it again slightly. The lion should emerge out of the water, flick its hair back, squeeze the bottle of juice in its hand, which will then burst and reveal the logo and the name of the drink.
Meeting 7
Angelina did not turn up to this group meeting but the rest of the group members attended. Sunny began working on the animatic, drawing out the beginning shots and experimenting with the art style and colours he wanted to use. He finally decided to go for a quick and sketchy style. Sophia continued to build her environment in Maya and began texturing the mountain border that she built for the environment, adding bump mapping to make it more realistic. She also created the waterfall, experimenting with a few different ways of approaching this but decided that applying an ocean shader was best suited to texture the model. To give the environment a bit more of a jungle image and to give the illusion of a waterfall, she added a fog volume within the scene. Simon started modelling the fruits that were going bounce off the trees. He started off with the kiwi fruit but immediately found it difficult to texture it and explored different methods of approaching it, trying to make it look realistic. The outcome was to unwrap the model fully so that each individual part would be textured slightly differently to each other so that it blended in more.
Meeting 8
Simon had finished modelling and texturing the fruits, which consisted of a lychee, a strawberry and a kiwi. Sophia and Simon decided to work on the environment together, where they focused on trying to populate the jungle with leaves and trees. They found a way to use one of the functions within Maya, called visors, which contains ready-made textured models of plants. Using this, Simon and Sophia took turns into applying these into the scene.
Meeting 9
Everyone met up in the Wacom room to finish off their designated work. Simon and Sophia continued to work on the environment, aiming to finish the scene by the end of the day. Angelina continued to clean her animation drawings and Sunny continued perfecting the animatic.
Meeting 10
In this meeting, everyone but Sophia attended because of personal reasons. Sunny, Angelina and Simon presented their work to Meg and Tony, showing the progress they have made so far. Sunny explained his responsibility with the animatic, showing the additional shots that he has drawn between the key frames of the storyboard. Angelina displayed the extended rough lion animation that she had continued to work on, where she attempted to perfect the poses of the character. Simon showed the 3D models of the strawberry and kiwi that he created in Maya, which would star in the juice making process.
Meeting 11
Sunny and Angelina thought about possible names for the fruit drink and decided that the name ‘Fruit Blast’ was the most suitable. They also had a workshop session where Sunny carried on drawing stills for the animatic and Angelina began cleaning her animation.
Meeting 12
Sunny continued to work on creating stills for the animatic, whilst Angelina tidied the lion animation.
Meeting 13
Sunny and Angelina did the same as last meeting. They both had a workshop where they worked on their respective parts of the advert production.
Meeting 14
Simon did not attend to this workshop because he was ill. Meg and Tony requested to see everyone’s animatic and a presentation of their work progression. This was very difficult because Sophia was missing for a week because of personal reasons and could not submit screen shots of her work in progress and Simon was off sick for a while. The presentation was quite unorganized but the group was still able to present some of their work to show everyone their progress.
Meeting 15
Sophia and Simon met up to work on the 3D environment and had completed importing the fruits into the scene and have it animated. The issues that we still had with the 3D environment was: the textures on the floor because it was not convincing enough, the lighting in the scene was too strong and ended up bleaching the animation, and to get maximum results for the animation we should render the animation in mental ray but could not do this because of the visors that we used in the scene. In order to fix this quickly, Sophia scheduled professional help from Mat Garey.
Meeting 16
Sophia and Simon attending the meeting with Mat, discussing the issues they had with the 3D environment. Mat made a few suggestions to fix the issues:
-Lighting: there were still lights within the scene that were present even though the physical sun and sky was deleted. We needed to delete the excess lights and play around with their properties to adjust the brightness.
-Floor: The floor had to be textured again because it was not suitable for the floor.
-Mental Ray: Mat advised that it was best to delete the visors because they consisted of too many polys. He suggested repainting all of the textures onto planes and adding segments to them so that the shape can be manipulated.
After the meeting, Sophia and Simon began making the improvements to the scene. Sophia worked on rebuilding the trees to match the branches to the old visors, whilst Simon began playing around with the light properties.
It was decided that the two will go away and come back with textures for the scene: Sophia needed textures for the leaves and Simon will have textures for some leaves and the floor.
Meeting 17
Sophia began creating planes and applying the plant textures that both she and Simon made, bending and scaling the planes so that it was the correct shape and positions within the scene. Simon took over and applied the new floor textures. Sophia took over again and textured planes with the red flowers that Simon created. Simon positioned the flowers on the floor along the oasis, whilst Sophia positioned some of the flowers in the bushes.
Meeting 18
Meg and Tony reviewed the work but decided that the light was still not good enough since it was bleaching out the strawberry during it close up. Also, some of the fruits were not lit properly, making it dark and difficult to identify the fruits. They advised that we should work on the camera movement during the close ups because it was moving too much, making them feel queasy. They were impressed with the appearance of the environment, stating that to look a lot better. Sophia and Simon began changing the properties of the lights again and played around with the ‘incandescence’ settings to help illuminate the object better. Angelina carried on with cleaning her lion animation and colouring it in. Sunny began creating a short animation of the bird in the trees.
Meeting 19
Sophia and Simon changed the camera angles and movements to make it smoother. This was quite simple to do. An extra camera was also added to film a medium shot of the fruits colliding with each other. The animation was the left to render over the weekend in top quality.
Meeting 20
Because of the quality of render, it has taken much more time than anticipated so this meeting began with waiting for the file to render. Angelina worked on her lion animation a little more but has just completed it. Sunny is still working on the bird animation. When the rendering was finished, Simon rendered out the appropriate files for Angelina as the background.
Meeting 21
Everyone had attended this meeting. Simon and Sophia began putting the rendered animation into After Effects, fixing it together so that it matched the animatic sequence. As they finished and waited for the other parts to finish, they began downloading sounds and music for the advert, applying it to the appropriate places. Sunny had finished his bird animation and gave it to the 3D team, pasting it in the correct order. Angelina had also finished her animation but because the images that were given to her were stills, the water was not moving and did not make it look as good. She requested help from Eva, who taught her to mask a video of water underneath the water image, creating the water wave illusion. This was finished and then put into After Effects for some additional editing.
Meeting 22
The final part of the animation was the colour transition of the waterfall and oasis. This took an extremely long time to complete as we underestimated the work we needed to do for this part. Sunny took on the role of completing this task, along with a little help from Sophia, and had completed this by the end of the day. Sophia continued searching for sound effects for the animation and made sure that the animation sequence was correct to the animatic. Simon investigated on way to try and improve the colour quality of the animation, attempting to make it brighter. Simon took the animation sequences back home to put together and put in the title and slogan for the advert in Premier.
Report
Group Members
Sunny Bhakar
Simon Campbell
Angelina Georgieva
Sophia Qu
Sophia Qu
When working in a group it’s very important to form a solid team containing individual talents, a strong bond and respect for one another, the thirst to push each other and every boundary to create something magical, mixed together with a lot of imagination. I formed a group with colleges, who have inspired me through their work and I believed our talents and imagination combined would create a great piece of work.
When we first looked at the project brief we immediately all were drawn towards the idea of constructing a fruits drink advert due to the idea being very broad and the idea developed into many exciting prospects. We quickly developed the idea of a character to advertise the product creating a fun and witty short story creating a desire and attraction for the juice, to send a message the audience must try this juice! Sophia joined the group very soon after and brought a positive energy and organizational quality to the group and we categorized each member to which section of production we would all focus on. The final agreement resulted in me and Angelina working on the 2D and Simon and Sophia on the 3D. I worked mainly on preproduction, which I thoroughly enjoyed because I feel I developed a much deeper and positive understanding on the construction and arrangement of storyboards and animatics.
Production began very stressful due to personal issues I suffered as well as each member struggled with personal issues. I was elected as group director however due to my state of mind and health being affected I was set back and felt I went into the role of director with a very naive approach. I was absent the first group meeting due to personal issues and felt I never recovered from this point in regards to a leadership role. I felt I let the team down because of my absence and tried make to perfect the storyboards and animatic too create a solid foundation for my group to work from. Through the guidance of my lecturers I quickly found my feet again, discovering my hunger and determination to create a great final piece. Each member of the group dived into their roles and worked very hard on their given roles. Lack of communication was an issue due to misunderstandings and through complications alternative routes had to be explored, however, the appropriate time management were very fine. In my self-analysis I feel I wasn’t assertive enough and didn’t acquire dominance in my role as leader and as the project originating from my vision. I would have liked to have had more contribution with the character design and the environment designs to contribute with creating a rich and luscious environment more suited to a tropical and refreshing theme, and a character with more expression and explore the different character models of a lion. However in future projects would like to have more of a role in the production side, I believe I could have offered a lot more to the project. To conclude the project, my thoughts are the project was a success, production and development process was successful, I have learnt a great deal from my experience in which I can grow develop and improve in the future projects.
