QUINN MCPHEE
Much of my time was spent on the development of the storyboard and animatic, trying to condense the storytelling I wished to get across down to somewhere around 1-2 minutes.This storyreel was made in ToonBoom Storyboard Pro over the course of several weeks alongside the following assignments.
DEVELOPMENT
CHARACTER PASS
Alongside the creation of my animatic, I worked on refining the designs of the two principal characters.
This involved turn arounds, prop development, and expression sheets.I particularly enjoyed the challenge of designing two cloaked characters while attempting to distinguish their silhouettes.
Many of these were made in my main program, Clip Studio Paint.
BACKGROUNDS
I created a number of hand-painted backgrounds as my first round of finalization after the animatic. I was able to finish roughly 5 of these per week while also creating the rough animation passes for many of my already-finished shots .I created these with partial inspiration from 'Over the Garden Wall', which is a major inspiration for me. I, naturally, did all of the digital painting within Clip Studio Paint.
I tackled the main interior backgrounds using a pipeline that started with a 3D model in Maya that I roughly lit and textured. I then brought it into Clip Studio Paint to do a uniform compositing pass that made the backgrounds fit within the aesthetic I wanted.It took a few tries to get to this conclusion, and I ended up making a good number of rougher backgrounds before transitioning to a 3D first method.
ROUGH ANIMATION
This pass consisted of ideating and developing the rough animation bases for each of my shots. Its mostly self explanatory, but I faced a good number of challenges for these shots, and took a more simplistic volume approach, giving myself more work later. Much of the animation for this project was done at a very low FPS, sometimes reaching being on 8's while other parts were on 2's. This was mainly due to the scope of the project, as well as a personal stylistic appreciation for low FPS animation.
This was also my first fore into actual long-form animation within CSP, so I learned a great amount about the pipeline I would follow for the rest of the project within it.
CLEANING ANIMATION
Viewed to the left is one of the many reviews done during the latter half of my final year. This was midway through the combined process of cleaning lines and filling in color. I faced a few challenges during this time, particularly within the space of learning a process that made coloring as easy as possible, as it would otherwise be a very time consuming process.
I also had to make sure that the coloring I was doing was suitable enough for my following Post-Production pass, i.e. no gaps or holes. This involved making color mattes to ensure a clean export.