Finished!

Here's the final animation. I'll conclude it after you've watched it .

(Apologies for the poor narration).

List of things I'm unhappy with-

• The voice over was a last minute thing (I knew I'd need narrations from the very start, but instead of recording my sound in the first few weeks in the booth at Uni, i waited until the last minute and used my headset which in turn means poor quality).
• The music although passable, isn't matched to the animation. Getting someone to watch my animation and write a piece of music to it would of probably been the best choice.

That's pretty much it, the sound side of things I'm stupidly out of my comfort zone and i have no real idea of how to work with it inside Flash (or outside).

I'm happy with the style that was eventually used, you can see it get progressively better through the animation, the first background for example looks worse than the second and third backgrounds. I doesn't look BAD, but the second and third backgrounds were better (in my opinion).

In terms of animation, due to me leaving it to the last minute (again) (as always) (idiot) i had to use a few shortcuts like doing less inbetweens than i would have liked to (or in some cases doing none at all (cookie jar/Stroppy cross arms).

All in all it's been fun doing this animation and if it had a little better narration (Which i may change in the future) it's done it's job. Numerous people have said "Aww, naughty baby" which was the reaction i wanted (which means it's done it's job). The moral i feel is there (not as forward as I'd like) but it's noticeable. I just feel pacing it differently would of been a better idea.

Next time i really need to stop working backwards and work the NORMAL way. It's used by animators world-wide for a reason, who am i to break a working methodology?

V-CAM! SAVIOR!

http://bryanheisey.com/blog/?page_id=19 

This little tool saved me a lot of hastle in the second scene.
 

Late addition!

Boiling.

I've known about boiling for a long time now and loved the way it looked, with boiling nothing is ever truley static. Big Trains - Staring contest is a absolutely PERFECT example of this. The "animation" is pretty much a still. Boiling makes it less static however and gives it some life.

Now although this isn't everyones cup of tea, i was at a loss when it came to still shots in my animation. I hate when nothing is happening on screen so i decided to add this boiling effect. Although it's a lot slower on Big Train and to be honest a lot more noticable there's still enough there to keep it "moving".

(Appologies for the weird twitch, Flash's exporting is failing a little).

Now i personally believe that it works better than having still frames, and in a way it a little nostalgic look back at hand drawn cel animation.

I work so backwards it's scary.

So yeah, during animating (THE END PROCESS) I decided that i wasn't happy with the background and went back into GIMP.

I produced 2 backgrounds (The 2nd BLUE one of which i'm most happy with) the problem came when i threw my character onto it. The styles did-not-mix at all...Not even a little. It's too late now to reanimate the character in a new style so i'll have to leave it but now i know not to work backwards (I knew not to work backwards before i started but i did it anyway....Self sabotuer?)

Scene1-ish

Just a little update on some of scene 1, all that's left (if you remember the scribblematic) is for the baby to hide the jar behind his back and act like nothing happened.

The narration will be done after as i'd rather work my narration around the character than my character around the narration. (I know sound is initially done first and then animated around it, but for narration i'd be more comfortable doing it this way).

Little tweaks.

As you can see from the videos i decided to go with the original first design i came up with. The "Animal hoody" baby just didn't seem to have the same impact. This baby could be calculated and smart where as i feel the other one just looked too innocent

Originally when i showed this to people the response was (So what's inside the box) ((Obviously i intended for it to be a Cookie jar (AMERICANISM) so i had to quickly add something (I was working in frame-by-frame though so i had to edit each frame..)

All i did was add a simple cookie design and it seemed to twig with people a lot easier (May be that i told them what it was supposed to be before changing it). Personally it does make it a lot clearer so i'm happy with it in that sense.

STYLE?

I originialy stated that my intent was to do a water-coloury "pooh" like art style...How wrong i was. I attempted to even remotely make something that looked good, and i failed, this is how far i got.

   Before facepalming and shaking my head. 

The art style wouldn't have worked in animation (For a more experienced and practiced animator maybe) but for me and the time-frame i gave myself, it just really wouldn't have worked. Maybe i can come back to it on my second module? Who knows.
 
COLOURS?

There's an interesting piece of journalism that i came across when researching "colours".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4474725.stm

Now although this is talking a lot about babies (4-9months) i feel that it's still an interesting point. Are children favoured towards certain colours? Are boys favoured towards blue and girls pink? The article discusses it.

  Colours in childrens animation are very important, before i chose the final "light blue/baby blue/sky blue" that you can see above i did try a few more pale colours. 

 The reason for chosing blue wasn't for any other reason than it worked best with the background.
 
Green - It was ok, but didn't really do anything.
Blue - The chosen colour and i think suited the "innocent" baby thing perfectly.
Purple - Same as the green, it was ok..But not quite there.
Yellow - Clashed with the yellow background.
 Red - Just wasn't a fan.
Pink - This was 2nd favourite next to blue 
Orange - Clashed too much with the cookie jar.
Grey - No. 


Below is an example of what i meant (Compared to the background).

 BACKGROUND?

My original idea for a background was pretty much the same as my idea for the art style of the animation "Water-colour". Once i realised i really couldn't do what i wanted in photoshop i quickly threw myself back over to something i knew, Flash!


With this in mind i still didn't want to do something vectory and none experimental, although what i came up with wasn't out there and wacky i think it worked. I tried to remember when i was a kid and the way i would coloured things in colouring books. Was pretty much scribble but it somehow worked because of the lines around the scribble, this is what i went for, and personally i feel it worked.

A drastic colour change for the background of scene 2. I did this because the pale colour didn't work in contrast with the hand-prints. Also as the second scene is intended to be a living room, i don't feel pale colours would of worked as well.

I added a simple boil to the paintbucket as it's the foremost object in shot and it looked a little static.

First ideas?

  In terms of a story, it's a lot like my other projects in that there's no real brainstorming or much "Thinking" about it at all really. I just came to me, and seemed like a good idea, Asking a few other people they confirmed that it was a good idea.

A few early doodles - (Excuse the quality).

Pay attention to the 2 different "baby" designs below. I originally planned to use the "Flower head" design but after looking over it again, i'm not sure. I think the whole "Animal hood" has a bigger factor of adorableness (Which will help push the animation forward, i believe).

I'll have to decide over the next few days.

There's just ONE glaring problem....I don't know how it will end.

It starts with the character (below) Sitting in a room with the camera slowly panning across. Stops on the character central and zooms in. The character has its hand in the cookie jar but realising that the "camera" (Audience or narrator or parental figure) is watching it, it quickly hides the cookie jar behind it's back. "Were you eating those cookies (Name)?" To which the character shakes his head to suggest "Nope, wasn't me". To which the Narrator/parent replies "Ok...I believe you".

(A quick SCRIBBLEmatic of the first "scene" so to speak).

I want it to kind of be a take on "The boy who cried wolf", but there's differences within the story that don't make the end punchline work. I originally thought of doing something drastic but then realised it was a CHILDREN'S animation so i had to restrain the idea. I still have no idea how to end it, 5 weeks left. I'll have to keep thinking.

Examples?

Once again Pocoyo is at the fore-front of my vision for this animation. The white background is something i'd like to carry over to my animation (Although i plan on having a pale watercolour-esque background).

Simplistic is the word i think i'm looking for.

MORAL : Well...There isn't one. Steven shoe horns "Laughing is good for you, even if you aren't sad to begin with", which isn't a Moral.

I originally had lip syncing as one of my goals for specialist study one, but i feel that for what i want to do an over-all narration would be the better choice. Can you imagine Pocoyo with voice overs? (Obviously Pocoyo himself has a few squeaks and giggles, but not proper "dialog").

MORAL : Patience is a virtue maybe? I'm not 100% once again if there is an actual moral or not, but this was a little less confusing than the first.

While watching back a few of these i realised that Pocoyo has something that i don't really intend to put into my animation....Viewer interaction. You sometimes hear Steven asking the viewing masses "Can you tell Pocoyo what he's doing wrong"(Or any other variation). I don't plan on having this interaction with the audience, but i do plan on the audience knowing something the narrator doesn't so they do feel that sense of "I know!" Alot like Pantomime's.

Another thing if you watch through the videos are sound effects and how key they are for Pocoyo. Each step of the characters has a sound effect on. Each head turn, each jump,each arm movement. It plays a huge role in Pocoyo and i'll have to keep looking back and testing my animation to see if it would gain something from having the same idea.