Evaluation of 2D animation module - Matthew Lindfield

Evaluation of 2D animation module.

Matthew Lindfield

For this module I needed to produce a series of 2D animations for various projects, an animated ident for the St. Winifred Hospice promoting their ‘Crafty Friday’ club, an animated branding for the ESCG to show their new logo as well as a personal 2D project of my choice, I wanted to explore a range of styles in all of these projects, including to make a project using physical materials instead of digital.

The ESCG logo.

The first project I worked on was the logo for ESCG, in it I wanted to show a change between the old logo and the new, current logo. I came up with a few initial ideas such as the logo morphing into a bunch of particles, going from the old shape to the new one, another idea was having the birds “hatch” out of the circles in the logo. I found these ideas to either be too bland or too hard to pull off in a short space of time. I also needed to consider that the animation would have to be short and simple for it to be used in a promotional sense.

When working on the particle idea, I found a system in Houdini that allowed me to grow shapes out in a simulation, the idea I then had was to allow the image to grow out and have the bird logo grow inside of the new shape. I did some experimentation with this idea and modified the system to turn the original thin-style logo to grow it out to expand the size as I knew it needed to fill up most of this are for the bird.

After having a system that allowed this to happen, I masked out the shape of the bird and had anything outside of the mask dissolve away, this allowed me to transition from one shape to another. I then applied the texture of the bird to all the shapes, having it blend from the old logo to the new one. This gave me a fully procedural system in where I could change any aspect of the animation  and have the scene automatically update for me, this would be important for any colour changes that I wanted to make, or to adjust the dissolving animation if I didn’t think it looked right.

The first test I ran involved only one of the birds as I thought that having all 5 birds in the logo would look a bit messy and hard to give detail, but I eventually decided to go for all 5 of the birds to stay more in line with the new logo, having built my animation to be procedural allowed this process to be quick and efficient as it was a matter of just replacing an image and retiming the growth and vanish effect.

Crafty Friday.

The next project I worked on was for Craft Friday, an animation club ran by the St. Winifred Hospice in Eastbourne, this was an event aimed towards children themed around arts and crafts, I knew for this kind of promotional advert it would need to stick to this theme of crafting but also to be aimed towards children, an initial idea I had was to have the logo be formed out of various crafting materials such as crayons, cardboard and so on. After doing some research into other animated logos I found one animation which featured shapes made of card being animated and having a digital layer on top to give these shapes detail. I thought this effect could work really well for my animation so I decided to replicate it.

I started with animating everything in Adobe Animate as I wanted to get my entire animation completed beforehand, my idea was to animate it digitally and then animate it by hand, moving various shapes to fit the image on-screen. I focused the animation around things that would be kid friendly, having the first scene full of various crafty objects such as paintbrushes, the next scene would involve a dog jumping around and other scenes would contain other elements, with the final scene showing the name “Crafty Friday”.

After the animation was complete, I purchased a range of materials such as felt, coloured paper and card. I used the shapes I animated digitally to laser cut out everything as these shapes would represent their digital counterpart.

After all the shapes had been cut out, I got access to the university photography room, and created a set-up of having lighting, a back reflector and a table for putting the shapes on. This would give the animation a high quality look with it being fully lit from all angles, also with it having been animated beforehand it would give me an advantage of knowing exactly how the animations motion was going to look.

After capturing all the frames using Dragonframe I took them into Adobe After Effects and made a composition with the images, fixing issues such as lighting and touching up any slight mistakes, I rendered these new frames out and imported them into Adobe Animate and on top of these frames I created a digital layer, giving detail such as lines emphasising movement, adding eyes and tail to a dog and adding a cartoon rocket to a space scene. This gave my animation a more finalised looking with an interesting style of compositing live action and animation together.


2D Rotoscope

The next project was a personal animation where I was given freedom to animate in any way I wanted, for this I wanted to experiment with rotoscoping as it’s not a technique I had ever used before. My first idea was to record my own footage of a dog as I wanted to draw a suit of armor or some kind of clothing, but after reviewing some footage I recorded I didn’t think this kind of technique would work for me. As an alternate idea, I wanted my animation to take on it’s own style as one problem I have with a lot of rotoscoped animations is they look overly fake, with the motion being too unfitting for a 2D style as most people just outline the shape of the subject in their source material. I looked for other animations that have done this kind of thing and found an animated music video for the song “9” by the Japanese band group_inou.

This video was rotoscoped by animated in-twos to give it a low framerate appearance, but the rotoscoping itself was fairly stylised with lines coming across as hand drawn and not uniform, this gave the animation a more hand-drawn style than a generic rotoscoped animation would.

With this in mind I looked for a video that would allow me to get this effect, I found one of a dog playing in a park that I decided would work for what I wanted to achieve. I put this video into Adobe Animate, rotoscoped each frame but used a very simplistic approach of using straight lines to outline the rough shape of the dog, in motion it achieved the goal of looking like the dog but remained very abstract. I wanted to also achieve the look of group_inou’s video with a pixelly/dithered affect, using photoshop on all of the frames I managed to render the background with this style.

I also tracked the motion of the motion of the camera in After Effects, allowing me to attach some digital text to the scene that made it appear as if the scene had writing inside of it. I then combined this effect along with the rotoscoped drawing of the dog to achieve the final outcome. 

Overall I feel like I’ve learnt lot with this module, allowing me to explore a range of styles, with a digital automatic simulation, a traditionally animated physical idea and a stylised rotoscope animation. This has given me a good idea on the kinds of avenues that I’d like to go for in the future, as I believe that if I was to attempt these methods again in the future I’ll have a better idea on how to approach them with having gained experience in these projects. Ultimately there are still a lot of improvements that I would like to have achieved but I can apply this knowledge if I go down the route of working on these styles again.