AVALON

This Blog will detail my Production for “AVALON” a 2D animation project, created by Niall Parkinson and Myself. This project was something that Niall and myself had talked about doing before Christmas of 2016. Neither of us had much experience if any in animation but we were willing to push ourselves and create something that we both wanted to be proud of and learn from.

Concept Stage: Week 1 - 3

In the early stages of production we let are idea run wild making note of every crazy idea that came to mind not letting our skills and lack of experience cloud our imagination for what ‘AVALON’ could have been. A lot of early research into art style came from using Pinterest and dribbble looking at hundreds maybe thousands of different examples of landscape, characters and colour schemes making note and saving the images that we thought stood out from the rest and we could use them as an influence for Avalon.

Niall and I are both huge video game and science-fiction nerds and this common passion fuels early concept designs we thought about creating an underwater city like that of Bioshock or floating cities like the ones seen in star wars. We even thought about setting our piece in an huge city environment set on an alien planet, but after taking a step back it soon become clear that to create a animation environment on this kind of scale we would need more time if we more to create something that we would be happy with. It was now time to start toning down the idea making them something that we could create but also still be happy with.

After coming up with different ideas that were achievable in the time that we had I both felt strongly in the idea of a Sci-fi adventure story that would be a simple A to B adventure story. We wanted the piece to have more focus on the environment and backgrounds with less focus and screen time and on the final destination. To give this focus we wanted to create a 2D side scrolling animation something similar to want you would see in a classic NES game.

We decided on a simple story idea, “A lone explorer is on a long dead alien dessert planet on the search for ancient alien technology.”

Now that we had a general understanding of what it was that we wanted to create, we were able to start creating achievable concepts of what AVALON would become.

Pre-Production: Week 4 – 6

That is stage AVALON was still only concept drawings and ideas but when we moved on to creating story boards, this allowed for further reworking of the idea in one that we both kept confident in our ability to deliver to a high standard

Before the production of the piece we wanted to create more rough landscape designs before Niall started to develop the scene in Photoshop this just allowed us to experiment with different scene ideas before starting into animation.

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Production: Week 7 - 10

When we entered into the production stage of the project that was when the work really kicked in. My main role for the production stage of the project was lead animator, this meant creating a character rigging of the protagonist designed by Niall Parkinson and making an array of movements for the character including walk cycle, running cycle, run & jump cycle and finally a run and slide cycle.

The animation of AVALON would be done using Adobe After Effects. After effects is programme that I had some experience in before so I was confident in my ability to reapply past experience. For the character rigging I used Adobe ‘After Effects’ plug-in tool known as ‘Duik’ which was recommended to me by university lecturer Mark Cullen. This tool was completely new to me but after watching online tutorials coving the basics or the tools and reading up on character animation movements in the 2001 “The Animator’s Survival kit” by Richard Williams I was able to create what I felt was smooth and successful character movement.

Once the character had a range of animations, the next stage was to animate the character in to scenes which were developed by Niall Parkinson in Photoshop. By using animation notes which we had agreed on allowed for a smooth animation process, first animating the charter in the scene and then moving onto background animations like creating an active skybox, lighting any Foley effects. If you would like to read more on this topic you can read his blog here: https://niallparkinson2017.wixsite.com/lowpoly/blog

Edit and Post: Week 10 – 12

The rough cut of the animation was created on premiere pro by Niall Parkinson and was then cleaned up by myself and in this time we were able to view the scenes for any mistakes and correct them before the final render was produced.

The final finished piece can be viewed on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/216919895