BAA! - Making an Ident for BAA 2022 (3/3)

Well, once again I have ignored this blog for the sake of finishing module work...

But, I have finally finished the ident itself, so I'll do a bit of catchup work!

So, after starting the initial blockout, I found that my storyboard was way too long. So there was a lot of cutting early on so that the ident would fit the 25 second upper limit set out by the brief.  This did mean that i wouldn't need to create transitions between a walk cycle and any non-cyclical actions though - which meant I would get a final product created in a timely manner.

Following the initial cuts, I began animating the sheep. However, I quickly realised that I forgot to model a plane.... and to fix the grass.... The main issue with the grass I had originally created was that it was sparce, and extremely patchy. As it was an integral part of the scenery, I spent some time modelling a tuft of grass to then instance around the field instead of using the default hair particles to fill in the empty space.

The original grass, that I later replaced with mesh grass to fill the space.

The animation process passed by smoothly, and the final piece was eventually rendered out. However, I received feedback that suggested that I add motion to the grass, so that the static grass would wave as if a breeze were pushing it. So I got to work and attempted to achieve this effect using Blender's built in physics simulation tools. 

I am very new to physics simulations of this type - and in retrospect I can see what needed to be done in order to fix many of the grass' issues. However, I found that I didn't have time to play with the settings and inner workings of this process as much as I could have - so my grass was eventually left moving too fast and erratically than intended. I'm considering revisiting this project and trying to fix the grass simulation so that it isn't nearly as buggy.

As for the rest of the ident, there was one change made to the final edit. After showing the indent in what was its original and final form, it became apparent that the context of the story was lost due to the amount of cutting that was made to the original concept. So, I added an extra shot to the ident that helped clarify that the sheep on the stage were, in fact, sheep and not a larger sheep slattered onto a piece of wood. 

I should've boarded these shots, but I didn't. In the end, I think it would've benefitted from a storyboard greatly, but it does its job well.

I also took time to create custom emoticons for the sheep, as I realised in retrospect that an ident isn't long enough to have readable subtitles (which was how the information was to be communicated to the audience originally). I used the reaction sprites from Animal Crossing: New Horizons as inspiration for how these 'emoticons' would look:

(Startled)

(Shouting)

(Exclamation and Question Mark)

After editing these piece of 2D animation into the final shots, I found that the style of these effects suited the style of the sheep and their set really well - and played into the 'marshmallowy' appearance of the sheep's wool as well as pushing the 'cuteness'/

After this, not much else was really done to it - except for adding some sound to the final piece. This was a very fun and enlightening project to work on: I made every last object from scratch, modelled and rigged a functioning character, animated it, created my own 2D effects and composited it all together with sound design added at the end of the whole thing to pull together the mood of the ident. I wish I took the time to source some music for this, honestly, even a subtle bit of clarinet and bassoon might've added a bit of a more lighthearted feel to the animation. Oh well! 

This was by no means the only thing I worked on over this module, I have made other pieces of work - but as they are completely irrelevant to the ident, they're gonna get their own pages for their processes. Here is the final thing (not listed as public as I don't know if this is going to get uploaded elsewhere after submission...)

I will begin working on a page for this project eventually, but its more likely that I'm going to take a break after all the work I did over the past five weeks - I'm gonna need to prepare the first Team Project of this academic year....