Poster Clean Up

For the poster, Cara had the idea of doing two posters that fitted together nicely to make one big A2 one if we wanted to put them next to each other. I agreed to draw/re-line the characters since I am most familiar with them, which would also leave Cara with more time for editing what we have so far.

I did the lines for Cake Man on one side of the poster and placed Johnny on the other side, which was easier than expected as he was around the same size on his turnaround, and since he isn't in a different or complicated pose (although that would have been interesting to think about if we had more time), I was able to paste him in with his lines being exactly the right width to go next to Cake Man. I sent this back to Cara, who then put in one of my placeholder cake designs. The cake's lines were still way too thick when scaled up, so I thought it would be best to change it to another since redrawing all of the lines for the above design would take forever. In the future, I should probably try out Illustrator so that it is easier to keep things at the right size instead of scaling and redrawing, but I haven't had time to go in and learn it recently and it takes less time to redraw it since I don't have to make the journey to uni to do it.

After taking the poster back, I tried one of my other, simpler cakes which would be a lot easier to re-do the lines for, but it was awkward to get the symmetry right with the 3 cherries originally on it and the lines in the middle of the cake. I looked through my finished prop designs and thought that a cupcake might work. It wasn't wide enough to work since it made the Cake Man stand right in the centre of the image, leaving empty space. Eventually, I had to change it so that the posters weren't joining which was a shame, but then we found a way to kind of link them anyway; Cara had colour coded cupcakes on the DVD cover already, so we thought that maybe we could reuse them but put the Cake Man colour one on Johnny's page, and the Johnny one on the Cake Man's page. I would have to redraw them again, because the DVD cakes were absolutely tiny and were extremely pixelated when scaled to the right size, but it was worth it.

I think that they actually work really well, and I think that it looks very appealing to our audience with the bright colours and of course, cupcakes. I think it would still definitely be nice to have these alongside each other though, since the colours on the cakes complement each other well.

Clean Up Compilation

So far the clean up that I have done has reached about 1 minute in length. It took a lot longer than expected, but I found that taking shortcuts and using turnarounds directly (as long as I redrew the lines the the right width) made my job a lot easier. There were some parts that I had to mess around quite a lot with the animation though, because when I fixed the proportions of the characters to be accurate, they no longer fit in with the scene/what or who they were interacting with. The actual lines themselves didn't take too long which I was thankful for, although I don't think I would really be inclined to do any clean up again after this project if I had the option.

Cake Props

Because of the constant changes in storyboards and animations, I didn't know exactly what props we needed for the animation. I had to do some last minute, mostly for floating around in the space-time continuum, so I just drew a variety of different cakes inspired by the research I did at the start of the project. I didn't have a lot of time for development or explanation which is a shame because it would be really fun to try out new ways of coloring these, but I had to go with basic flat colours. Still, this means that the cakes are probably more likely to fit in as opposed to if they had been slightly textured, for example. They should also work in a lot of different scenes as well, since plain colouring means that they are less likely to clash with any backgrounds.

Hopefully next time everything is completely decided a lot earlier so that I have time to develop things a lot better, but at least I know that I can whip up something quickly if need be.

Lip Sync Clean Up

The lines were a lot looser and less opaque for this little talking scene so cleaning them directly would take too long. Since there is only little movement, it was easy to again use the turnarounds as reference and redraw the lines to the right width above it to keep the characters on model.

 For the mouth I drew directly on the layer, but there were a few transparent parts that I couldn't really tell if it was supposed to be coloured or not, so I had to guess in some parts.

I also coloured this sequence since Cara still has a lot of editing but it obviously didn't take long since it was only really two frames and then the mouths that had to be coloured in, so this was relatively easy to do.

Walk Cycle Clean Up

One of the first things I cleaned up was Rebecca's walk cycle which, line-wise, wasn't too bad. The proportions were quite off though, so I had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get it back on model. I pasted in the front turnaround view of Johnny, since that's how we were originally considering animating, and used that to fix the rest of the animation. I lost a little bit of the squash and stretch while doing so, but the walk cycle isn't on for long and we were working to a very, very tight schedule.

I feel like it is effective at least for what it is supposed to do; it is a walk cycle that works, and looks how Johnny is supposed to.

AA: Feedback

Though our feedback from both the crit and peers was generally positive, there were a few issues that we needed to address.

It is agreed that the background is way too saturated - it distracts from the characters in the front and doesn't work too well with it. The blue is also a little too close to Johnny's hair, so maybe adding a bit of magenta before lightening and desaturating it would look better. At the moment we are moving on to the animation stage and I am finishing designs before moving onto clean up, but hopefully we have time to do a few tests between us with the colour. This is less of a priority than the animation though, considering we have a lot less time than we intended to finish this, so a minor colouring issue can be addressed much later on.

Another issue that was brought up, but I don't necessarily agree with, is the scale, there were comments that Johnny looks too small, and that he should be scaled up - the only problem being that 1. it makes his head look crazily big, and 2. it puts him to nearly chest height when scaled to the suggested height. 

Here is the original [left] and the changed one [right]. The right one looks extremely out of proportion while, when put right next to the Cakeman, the original Johnny looks the right size.

The Cakeman is supposed to be tall anyway, but it around the right height compared to an 8 - 12 year old child. I think that the difference might look larger because the two characters are not standing level with each other in this test, since they have a full cart between them both. They do not stand like this often in the animation if at all - the characters are constantly moving around the cart and in scenes without the cart, so I think that the audience will be able to see and understand the scale much better within those scenes.