Finished result and final thoughts

Here is a low quality version of the final Guinness Animation which we decided to call "The Catch".

HD Resolution - http://vimeo.com/38564523

Overall I think the animation turned out ok but it could have done with a lot done towards it. I thought the animation looks a bit choppy and the reason for this was because most of the shots were under animated. The final presentation looks quite amature and unprofessional also, but the film grain helps disguise this.

On the animated sequences that I did, in my opinion they turned out fine, although the fishing shot could have done with a few more drawings to express the weight on the rod.

The part that I hate most about the animation, is the end animated handwriting sequence; it looks messy and unprofessional, plus the hand writing style is hard to read.

In my oppinion, even though I have spent many hours on this project, I feel that my colaborative efforts have been fairly poor.

I spent so long animating the fishing scene I missed out on contributing to the other scenes, which I feel the others did alot between them than I did. In my defence I think I had the hardest scene to animate due to the length of it and the idea we wanted to express.

In the end though I think I did sort of make up the hours during the last scene and the editing process.

Colabrotive Editing

The next day after we had all the scenes cleaned up and exported, we needed to edit them all together.

While Chris did this process I sat next to him to suggest what to do. Infact I think I came up with the idea to apply the old film grain effect, the reason for this is because the animation looked too clean for the style we were going for, plus we had no colour so we had to add some sort of variation to it.

We also needed to find some background music for our animation,. So I had a look on newgrounds.com and picked a few. We then played these, while syncing it with the animation to see if they would suit it. In the end I found an Irish music style and that worked perfectly as the product we were working for was also Irish.

One last sequence to do!

We always had the idea of showing the final celebrations as a camera shot, and we wanted to show the competition slogan at the end.

I suggested that we show the slogan like how you would do when you sign a post card or write a caption on the back of a picture.

I offered to do the sequence where the handwriting would be animated. This took me all night and the basic process of doing it was writing each word separately on a graphics tablet while recording the screen. I then saved these as .png sequences and imported them into the final shot with Adobe After Effects.

Just doing this took me nearly all day and it wasn't till later that I realised this could have been done by a much simpler process using the scribble function in the software.

Helping out in the post process

The next step that was done was loading the scanned drawings into Toonboom to clean them up and see the animation come to life!

While most of the drawings didn't need much cleaning up as the inking process takes out the need to do this, there was one sequence which Craig did, where the lines were so thick they couldn't be inked, which meant we had to manually clean these images on the programme.

This part took quite alot of work and as Chris had done most of the other scenes, I offered to do this one so he could take a break.

Inking and Scanning : I felt like a robot...

The next day after I had finished all of my scenes they had to be inked so they could be captured clearly by the scanners. I had over 50 separate drawings to do, and this required going over all the lines all over again. Even though I asked Craig if he would help me it still took us most of the day to complete.

For the scanning process we made it easy on ourselves by getting into a rhythm because Craig unloaded the scanner, and I loaded the next drawing and pressed scan button.

Dog scene is finished

I finished the dog scene and it was quite straight forward, it was completed in 2 days with taking breaks in between.

The process was quite easy, since I created a template of the dog shape, and was able to move that into position under each new frame, then it was a simple task of tracing over the template, while tweaking certain feature like ears, fur, wrinkles and the eyes.

I was originally asked to only draw 6 frames, but i decided it would be best to draw 9 as i could achieve action i wanted the dog to do.

This is the final line test for scene 11.

Another scene to animate... Yeah!

After finally completing scene 5, I asked if their were any more scenes to animate, and out of the three left, I picked the close up side view of the dog pulling on one of our character's jacket.

The reason I picked this scene is because it seemed easy to animate and shouldn't be too stressful worrying about weight.

Here are the two key frames I was given to work with.

In the original key frames there was no foot included, so I suggested that I would add the feet to make the pulling action more believable and to read what part of the character the dog is pulling.

Finally the scene is finished!

Over the weekend I really got motivated to finishing my 4 second scene, and I think it hasn't turned out too bad considering i couldn't test it on a line tester as I were progressing through each drawing.

The only criticism i would give to it though is the bend of the rod doesn't look right and seems to make the rod change size through the animation, I would also comment that the part where the rod is pulled back towards the water doesn't seem like there is enough weight on the character as he seems to pivot back to a straight position.

Here is the final line test for scene five.

Three weeks later... still animating!

Its three weeks later and I'm still animating the same scene, while the others have already done two or three of their own scenes each. 

I do feel kind of guilty and frustrated that I haven't been able to contribute to some other scenes, however the scene I have been doing is close to 4 seconds long. 

I think the reason it is taking a long time is because I had a lot of frames to draw, plus I had to get the right balance between the bend of the rod and the pose of the character to make the weight that he is pulling believable.