By Robert Holder

Synopsis
Hibernation Frustration sees our protagonist, Hal Witser, left to defend their
homeland from music infused meteorites that are corrupting anything they
touch with the power of unruly melodies. If Hal stop that racket, maybe they
will finally get to hibernate in peace.
 Table Of Contents

Introduction.................................................................................................1

Pre-Production
Character Design.........................................................................................2

Storyboarding..............................................................................................3

The Animatic................................................................................................5

Character Modelling.....................................................................................6

Character Rigging........................................................................................7

Scene Modelling...........................................................................................8

Production
Music (Collaboration)....................................................................................9

Animating................................................................................................................10

Post-Production
Texturing...........................................................................................................13

Extra Graphics............................................................................................14

Editing........................................................................................................14

Conclusion..................................................................................................15
 Introduction
For my FMP I want to develop a short intro cutscene for a video game concept
I have. This would be a roughly 1 minute long animation that would introduce
you to the main character, some of the environment, the main story device
and would have a unique soundtrack composed by a collaborator.

This project will be the biggest thing I have developed and is allowing me
to show off and improve my animation and world building skills, while also
allowing me to try new things and step out of my comfort zone. I am planning
to do everything in this project, apart from the music, myself. These sections
specifically being: storyboard, animatic, modelling, rigging, animating, basic
lighting and any post production.

The main aim for the end of this unit is to have a finished animation with an
understandable narrative that will run for under a minute. Another aim for me
is to stay committed to this project.

1
 Pre-Production
Before I even thought about animating I had to go through a few pre-
production jobs, these include: Character Design, Storyboarding, The
Animatic, Modelling and Rigging. I will proceed to go through these areas
including the process and noting the possible areas of improvement when
needed.

Character Design
When designing my protagonist I wanted something cute, cool and simple
that would fit the world of my game. I knew I wanted them to be a squirrel, or
at the very least have squirrel attributes. My first design wasn’t to my liking,
so I looked to games with fantasy worlds with cute characters like Kirby and
Cuphead to gather inspiration and see what makes their character design
work. I narrowed it down to using simple shape theory to build my character.
I applied this to my character while redesigning them. I felt like this was a
major improvement for the aesthetics and likability a main character should
have.

2
 Storyboarding
After finalising my character I swiftly went into the storyboarding process.
At this point I knew the premise I wanted but not how to achieve it. I started
by sketching out what I did know I wanted and coloured with a lighter shade
of the sketch layer, so show some variety, Which is the first board below.
I then wrote a short description of the scene below so people wouldn’t
get confused or misled by the images. This first section went through few
changes with its timing and pacing, however the main story beats stayed the
same.

3
 Storyboarding pt.2
The second half of story I had a less clearer vision of what I wanted. While
the overall story of the second half didn’t change some of the scenes got
moved to different parts and some shots were removed in the final product
like shot 11 and 12. If I was to go back and re-do these I would give myself
another page of frames to work with so each scene could be fully fleshed out
before moving on to the next steps.

4
 The Animatic
I quickly moved on the animatic, I needed this done as soon as possible so I
could give it to my collaborative partner as they can start making the music
while I’m animating (as long as my animatic had good timing). I started to
make the animatic by first importing all the frames from my storyboard into a
new photoshop file. Then I sketched out some in between frames to give the
scenes some motion and to show camera movement where it was needed. I
also used this time to fully realise my ending.

After all the sketches were done, I refined the drawings with neater linework.
I did not keep the shaded elements in because I felt I didn’t need to waste
production time showing depth and contrasts between the character and
other elements in the scenes because I (and my colaborator) thought it was
easy to see what was going on. It took me about 4 iteratons of the animatic to
get the timing right, and then I gave it to my composer to start thinking about
the music.

From The Animatic

5
 Character Modelling
The next step in my process was to model and rig my main character. This
was the first time in a while since I’ve modelled or rigged a character, not to
mention the fact that I’ve only rigged humans and I’ve only modelled basic
objects before. Luckily I designed my character with this information in mind.
I first imported the sketches onto an image plane, then lined up the image
plane on the Axes so I could model accuracy.

I started with the “bean” shape of the body. This was made from two sphears
combined together with some manual smoothing to make it as seamless as
possible in the neck area. The hands and eyes were very simple, just being
basic sphears, which the palms of the paws being shpears as well. The feet
were also a shpear, before being cut in half by a cube to make the flat edge.
The ears where made by extruding (and later hollowing out) a cone shape. All
of these mentioned above were then duplicated and mirrored onto the other
side. The tail was the hardest part. I modelled the tain the the main curled
position it will be in most of the time by extruding out cylinders and changing
the rotation and width. If I were to do this again I would model it in a straight
positing as it would make the rigging stage easier. To finalise everything I
smoothed the wireframe to get less geometric edges.

6
 Character Rigging
Now that the character was fully realised in 3D, I could move on to the
rigging. I first started of by going into front and side perspective views to
make sure everything would be symmetrical when adding the joints. I also
made sure I had X-ray joints on
so I would be able to see the
skeleton through the geometry
No, not that type of skeleton...
I’m talking about the one seen
further down the page.

Most of it was made using

basic joints being parented to
the part they controlled, apart
from the feet and tail. I wanted
these to bets to be able to warp and bend, so I connected them to the mesh
via what’s called a blend shape. This allows the skeleton to directly effect
the mesh itself. I then parented the hierarchies so that some bones (like the
arms) would move automatically when other bones are moved (like the body).
I finally added controllers to each joint that needed to be moved by parenting
a NURBS Circle and parenting it to the necessary joint. For some of the
controllers I warped the circle so I could see which way is forward. I would
usually colour the controllers for different parts and sides of the body, but
since I knew it would just be me using the rig I decided not to do it as I had a
great understanding of what circles controlled what joints. I tested the rig out
before my final animation by
animating some simple walk,
run and idle cycles.

The Correct Type

Of Skeleton

7
 Scene Modelling
The Final part of the Pre-Production phase was modelling the different
scenes. The scenes, like my character, have a simple aesthetic. I used basic
spheres and cylinders of different sizes to make the general shapes of each
object. These objects being; Trees, Hills, Dirt and The Meteorites. If I was to
do this again, or go back and improve it, I would make more variety of trees
and meteorites so there is a little more variety than just sizes and rotation.
I parented the tree leave with the trunk so if I rotated one, they would both
move together. As I knew what camera movements I wanted I decided to
model to the camera; This basically means anything outside of the camera’s
range doesn’t matter how it looks because it wont be seen. The left side of
the screenshot is what the camera I’ll be rendering from will be seeing, and
the right side is the scene from the back. As you can see, if the camera was to
move in an unintended way, the background would not look as intended.

Some Models

8
 Production
Now that all the pre-production stages have been completed, I moved onto
the main production of the project. This section includes the music being
composed and the amination being made. This was the biggest section of my
project and included my collaborative aspect.

Music (Collaboration)
To lighten my workload and fill my collaborative quota, I chose to get an
outsider in to compose music for my animation. The collaborative partner
was a music student friend I have called Clem. We started off by talking
about what “vibe” I wanted and how many motifs the animation would need.
We came to the conclusion of a piece of music
around 1 minute, consisting of 3 motifs. The first
one would be calming introduction, the second
would be rising the tension and the third would be
an upbeat finale. They started on the work almost
instantly after we finished that convocation. At
first they worked on the music while I did non
animation work, this was so they could get
ahead of me and get the tempo and and main
beats done. I wanted it to be produced this way
because I wanted to sync up some key animations
with the beats of the music. We continued to talk
and message while completing and improving
and changing the music to best fit the animation. They’ve sent me over 13
different renditions of the songs, all at different levels of completion.

9
 Animation
I broke the animation process down into sections: Blocking Out, Main
Animation, Finessing The Little Bits, 2D Ending and the 2D Effects. As stated
before, the animation was partly produced simultaneously along side the
music composition. By the time I started blocking out the scene about half
the music was timed out, so I could get the timing exact. In Maya I blocked out
all of the scenes that had the music to go with in chronological order, which
were shots 1 to 5. Because I was working at a faster pace than the music was
being produced at I jumped a stage in my process and started to do the main
animation for those first 5 scenes, while the music for the next few scenes
were being written.

There was a slight complication in the music production, so before I finished

animating those first 5 scenes I went to block out the rest of my animation.
The composer had a hard time visualising what I wanted for the next couple
of shots, so while I was blocking it out I was also talking with them over call
discussing the ideas I was thinking about. We got over this problem very
quickly as I inspired them and gave them plenty of ideas to work with. After
this I went back to finishing the main animation of the first 5 shots and by the
time I finished those the first draft of the music had been almost finished.
Using this I moved on to animating the rest of scenes 6 to 10, out of a total of
11. I found animating with music already establish to be very preferable, a lot
of the timing aspects were already set in place so all I had to do was make
sure specific actions fell on the beats. As shot 11 was one I was going to
animate fully in 2D, I kept that in its animatic form till the very end, when I did
the 2D animation. With this in mind, after all the main bits of animations were
in place I went back to the first scene and started on finessing the little bits.

10
 Animation pt.2
When staring to refine the anaimation, the first thing I focused on was the
tail, when bulk animating the first time around I mostly left the tail without
any animation. This was a personal choice as the tail has the most joints on
the rig so it would be the hardest and longest part. I also considered it one of
the hardest parts because it wasnt going to move exactly like a normal tail, I
wanted it a little more stiff as the tail
is also a cannon. In normal gameplay
it would have to stay relativly straight
so the “bullets” fire straight. As
mentioned under rigging, if I was to
model and rig the tail in a straight
position I think it would have made this
stage significantly easier. Once the
tail had been fully completed i moved
on to the next hardes thing to refine,
the toes and the heels. Once again,
because of my amiture rigging skills, I think I made this section harder than it
needed to be. I had to move the toe and the heel so there as as little clipping
as possible and the feet looked like they were smooth when in motion.

The rest of the animation, although long, was quite simple; I added some
squash and stretch to some movements of the body to exaggerate some
movements, added some nose twitches when scared or surprised, some
more ear movements, so they aren’t always static and changing some arcs
and adding subtle movements to the arms. Overall I think the 3D animation
turned out almost exactly how I wanted it and I couldnt wait to move onto the
next section of my animation pipeline, the 2D section.

11
 Animation pt.3
The 2D process started off from me re-evaluating the timing I planned for
this shot by taking a look at the animatic I made. I decided it needed more
time before the action started so the audience could take in what was
happening. That was an easy fix so I jumped into Photoshop, my 2D animation
software of choice and started sketching out each frame on two’s. Later I
changed some frames to three’s and four’s for variety, but for the most part
the majority stayed on two’s. Before finalising it with the line art I actually
showed this part of my animation to a professional to get some feedback, for
the most part they had no problems with it, only telling me to add some more
anticipation and more movements on the squirrel. So that’s what I did. I went
back to sketching just to add those little improvements, then it was on to the
finalisation. The line art was quite straight forward as there were only three
entities that needed lining, the character, the meteor and the effects, not to
mention because my sketch was quite accurate I didn’t have to make up any
new frames on the spot. After all the lining was done it was onto colouring.
due to an unknown error I was having I couldn’t use the fill bucket, so I had
to colour every frame myself. While this was an easy task, it was quite time
consuming. And to finish this section off I drew on shadows that look like the
toon shader in the rest of my animation.

To put the cherry on top I put my whole animation, 3D and 2D, back into
Photoshop and started to draw small 2D effects over the top of most scenes.
The most notable places is the smoke trails for the meteors. I used the same
2D pipeline as before, where I sketch it out first and the go back and add
the line art, apart from the smoke trails, I felt it looked better without lineart.
I then coloured (by hand again) and added shadows when necessary. The
other effects I added include: Speed lines, pop effects for the bubble, impact
lines and some extra dirt effects.

12
 Post-Production
This is the final stage of my project, the post-production phase. This part
is where the last pieces of work fall into place, this is where I finalised the
colours all of my 3D scenes and edited all of my shots together, along with the
music and squirrel sounds.

Texturing
I did some reasearch while waiting for the music to be produced on what sort
of textures I would like, due to my project mimicing a game I went with a toon
shader. I blocked in some base coulours and continued animation. When I got
to post-production I took a look back at my work and analysed the colours. I
kept most of the colours the same, however I did tone down the saturation on
everything to make it easier on the eyes and more aesthetically appealing. I
next rendered out all of the different shots using high quality render settings I
found online.

13
 Extra Graphics
Before editing everything together I needed to create a few new graphics,
in this stage I created a 2D animated logo for the start of the animation, a
graphic containing the animation’s name for the end of the animation and an
end card that contains the credits.

Editing
Now that everything had been created it was time to put it all together. I
gathered all the final versions of my video files, music files and image files
I’ve worked on over the past few months and imported them into premiere
pro. I started by dragging in the video files and placing them in the correct
sequence, which was very easy as I had labeled my scenes 1 through 11. I
next had to line up the audio with the video, this was a little harder as there
was a moment of silence before my animation starts so I couldn’t just line
up the start of the music with the start of the video. this didn’t take me long
at all so next I added my animated logo before the animation and music, and
also the name of the animation and the credits at the end. I did a simple cross
dissolve transition between the final frames of my animation and the title card
with a sharp cut from that to the credits on the last beat of the song. I felt like
my animation was missing something so a friend I consulted offered to do
some sounds for my protagonist to make. I took him up on that offer and he
sent me about a minute of random squirrel sounds he had made. I listened
through them, chose my favourite ones then edited them in where I thought
was appropriate. I turned the main music down a little so you could hear the
sounds better and that was my animation complete.

14
 Conclusion
Most of the techniques I used in this project was a first time for me. But I
also refined a lot of already known skills. At the beginning of this journey
I set the goal of creating “a short intro cutscene for a video game” that
would be roughly one minute in length, with most if not all of the extra
production elements also. I have accomplished this with more success
than I imagined. The animation fits the style of an indie game, all of the
elements were modelled and rigged by me. The only parts of my project that
weren’t produced by me was the collaborative aspect, with the music being
composed by Clem and the squirrel sound being voiced by William.

Although my project came to a great conclusion there were still challenges

and difficulties I had to overcome during the creating pipeline. Like using the
very simplistic rig I made, working with a collaborator for the first time and
creating an animation that spans over multiple different Maya files. While I
conquered all of these issues, I didn’t expect to run into some of them.

In conclusion, I have met the main aim for the end of this unit. Which was to
have a finished animation with an understandable narrative that will run for
under a minute and stay committed to the project.

15
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