STOP MOTION PROJECT (THE NOTEBOOK)

WHAT WAS THE SCOPE OF THE PROJECT?

The scope, or plot of my group project was about a group of office supplies, consisting of a highlighter, notepad, and stapler remover. They reside in an average cubicle office where they have fun adventures together when their human leaves the desk. One day while the human is away grabbing his Hot Pocket, a nearby composition notebook swallows the gang into a hand drawn world of graphite sketches. In this hand drawn world inhabits a tribe of scribbles, hairy like pencil drawing that attack the office supplies. An army of scribbles storm and attack them. The office supplies then make it to the edge of the paper world, into a portal back to their home world. Everyone then celebrates for making it out alive, until the human opens the door to return back to work. The objects freeze into their normal positions closing their googly eyes to sleep.

WHAT WAS YOUR PROCESS OF MAKING THIS PROJECT?

My process of making this project involved many stages; pre-production, idea and concept, storyboard, sketches, production, editing, and revision.

Pre-production: For the pre-production, a plot had to be formed that would make sense that would take about a minute or two to tell, like reading a children's storybook. Which would have to include an exposition, rising action, climax, falling solution, and resolution. My group thought that if the story had to be simple, the characters should be as well.

Idea/Concept: The original idea came together as a spinoff of another idea. One of my group members original ideas was to use water bottles with goggly eyes having a business meeting and getting into a fight. Branching from this idea came the concept of using writing materials and office supplies coming to life. Thus, our plot was made.

Storyboard: The storyboard involved switching from stop motion, live action, and 2D animation using After Effects. Each sketch had to made very quickly due to the lack of time given to have the project be the best it can be. The storyboard was used as a guideline for timing every composition in After Effects and as a template for drawing the office supplies in Photoshop.

Storyboard Page 1 

Storyboard Page 2

Storyboard Page 3

The three storyboard pages indicate the different scenes. The first page majorly sets the stage for the cubicle office and the typical office life, with office supplies springing into life.





The second page mainly features the notebook world that the object mysteriously enter into; only to be encountering rough black and white sketches. Conflict then approaches as the characters meet the scribbles. One of the rough scribbles pokes the stapler eater's eye out, and then devours it for hurting the eye. This then makes the scribble clan upset and chase the office supplies back to their own world.

The final storyboard page features the highlighter, notepad, and stapler eater returning back to the office, and celebrating for successfully coming back home safe and sound. They celebrate, and immediately return back to their old position because they heard the man open back the door to return from lunch break. He then wonders why his supplies have moved, and continues back working.

                                                        
Editing: The editing took some time of reviewing each frame an fixing the lighting rate of frames per second, and redoing shots. An example is shown below of the lighting changes made for this project. Along with lighting being fixed, the audio also had to fixed at times. Some of the sound effects I found were too loud and needed to have the volume turned down.

Before Lighting was Edited

After Lighting was Edited

Conflicts: Despite the great effort our group made for the project, there were some pitfalls to our project. One consistent problem we had was lighting. Since the project was filmed and shot at the animation room, where only half of the lights are on, we had to turn on all the lights to match the lighting for all of the frames. We didn't realize this until the middle of our project. The lighting was then fixed on After Effects so each frame has the same lighting. While taking pictures with these lights, the stop motion process was hard because if one shot was messed up, or we didn't get enough pictures taken, then we had to restart taking the stop motion frames.



Post-Production: After having the group project being interviewed by my class, they suggested some changes for the final edit.

• Have the characters' sketches overlaid on the notebook before they entered in to indicate their movement from the real world to the notebook world.


• Not use the copyrighted sound effect on the climax frame.


• Fix some of the lighting on the frames to match the yellow lighting present on a majority of the frames.

These changes were then quickly made with the crunched time our group had remaining. I help clean up the project by drawing the highlighter, stapler eater, and notepad. I also contributed with the overlaying process, color correction, and final revision of the project as a whole.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ALONG THE WAY?

Highlighter and Notebook Meet Donald Trumpet

I've learned how to efficiently use a drawing tablet on Photoshop, so I could draw the office supplies at ease. This skill will be necessary for me when I continue doing 2D Animations.

Along with that, I learned that you don't need to use the same brush for each project. In the past, I'd use the default brush for Photoshop, and not bother trying new brushes. But since I had to use a new brush for making the objects, I have learned for myself that the various brushes available are very useful.

Highlighter and the Anime Head

I've also learned how to make Stop Motion Animations in real life. I've had some knowledge before doing this project, but that has now expanded.

One last thing I have relearned is how to use a DSLR Camera and its basic features. I even found out how to change the lighting, a big bonus for my group when shooting!

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

There isn't much I would do differently. If I had time to hand draw every frame for the 2D world, them I would've done it. But because of the crunched time, I had to rely on After Effects for animating everything. I would also have been more observant and avoid as many mistakes as possible.

General Thoughts:  Each group member was productive during the whole making of this project. One member of my group wasn't productive and only made contributions to the Credits for the project. Every group member who participated was open to communicate their thoughts and ideas, making sure everyone was on task, and meeting their deadlines.

VIDEOS 

Notebook World Rough Draft

Note World Final Product (No Audio)

The final product is posted on Youtube. Go check it out!

GROUP MEMBERS

Emma Johnson
Maddie Culotta
Brock Townsend
Nathan Goldberg 
John Pace

ONW NOW FINAL CHANGES

After having my project evaluated by my teacher, he noted a major change that needed to be made. He stated that the compass had to be changed because since the project was made to represent e-Communication, not the whole school, the compass had to be replaced with the e-Comm logo, as shown below.

Here is the e-Comm logo, which replaced the compass for this project. (The white appearing inside of the E wasn't shown on the composition.)

As I placed the logo on the composition, I noticed some problems with the image, and decided to play around with some border effects for the logo.







My first idea was to give the logo a black border. I made it by changing the color hue to black and slightly scaling it up to a thin layer. The result of that is shown below.

I merged the two layers together, placing the black border behind the blue logo, which I think is nice.

Another experiment I did was on the composition, I made a white border around the E to put focus on the logo. This didn't turn out to be my final idea because the white border was overwhelmingly bold and shifted the focus away from the logo.

As you can see, the white border overpowers the logo, and doesn't look very clean.










For my backup plan on the border, I proposed the idea of having a faded border, created using the Glow Effect with the original colors placed.

After the different tests run, a final product was made with the guidance of my animation teacher, who pointed out the flaws the details provided to the project.

One idea he thought of was that since the compass was covering up the spinning effect, he suggested that I should zoom into the center of the project, and make the e-Comm logo jump out.






Through this transition, the spinning layers' opacity decreases, and the logo's opacity and size increases. Optical Flares is also added to brighten up the fading layers.

The Optical Flares continues on and slowly dims away to nothing, matching the audio fading away.








The last sound effect made is put into motion with a blue glow, where it's intensity increases, and goes back to normal, ending with the whole composition fading to black.







These final details changed the whole purpose of the animation, where attention is placed on the many details that form this big picture. Though there were times I had uncertainty on what editions had to be included, having another set of eyes improved my thoughts on animating and the outcome of the animation as a whole.

Here is the final render of the ONW NOW Ending. Enjoy!

ONW NOW PROJECT EVALUATION

Yesterday, I got my animation project evaluated in class. I presented my project infront of the class, summarizing how the project was created with specific details and steps made, along with my personal thoughts and struggles of the project. I received some good feedback about the project from my teacher, which wasn't expected of me.

One compliment received with my project was  the arrival of the compass. When it comes to the screen, the compass jumps, and slightly decreases in size, creating a smooth transition.

My teacher also liked the small glow texture shown here. It quickly appears at the peak of the animation, where the compass is at it's largest scaling point, or greatest size.

Another compliment received from me was the great timing with Optical Flares. I felt relieved about that compliment since it was my first time using this plug in.

Within my other classmates, not many commentary was given, but all the feedback received was positive.




Despite the positive comments given, there were mistakes made in my project. One of them was that since the compass popped up on the animation and covered up the original project, there was a sense of emptiness given with my original project. My teacher told me he will talk to me about alternative transitions that could be made to close this gap.

ONW NOW ENDING FINAL UPDATE

Today is the day, that I have finished my project. Because of this accomplishment, I can now explain my final steps using the wonderful Optical Flares, and evaluate my project with Video.

Here are some screenshots of the Optical Flares effect, available on Video Copilot. In this effect are multiple options of how you can make your optical flares appear, but I chose the default one because it best fitted the animation.

This is my first optical flare shot, where the intensity is increased, and creates a blue background. I like this optical flare because it introduces the effect by flashing it's light out and making the audience feel excited about the rest of the animation.

The second optical flare shot was slightly dimmer, but had a large outer glow in the background. The way I set each optical flare, by brightness, radius, and direction of motion is set up to match the audio.

The third optical flare has a small radius but strong intensity. It moves diagonally across the panels like a flickering firefly. The optical flare may be short in time length, but it adds a sense of syncopation.

This is the last optical flares shot, where the light is shined at the center of the composition to make it appear come out of the panels. It started out with a huge flash, then dimmed out to a tiny speck.

Here is the optical flares combined with the original animation. They both look good together because of the blue color scheme, glowing light effects, and syncopation with the audio.

While making the optical flares, I encountered some problems, like the opacity. I originally wanted my optical flares to decrease in opacity and not appear when the beat didn't sound. This lowering of opacity formed a light blue background from the Optical Flare's brightness. This really confused, and then solved the issue by turning the brightness all the way down when I didn't want it to appear.

Along with the creation of Optical Flares, I made an outer ring for the panels. Why? From the original animation shots, the outside looked very odd, and was missing something on the outside to fill this emptiness. I then filled it with an outer ring by making two circular masks. The outer mask was set to add, and the inner mask was set to subtract to get rid of the unwanted space. I then moved this layer to the Adjustment layer to match the color scheme, which turned out amazing.

Now that I have explained all of the final detail of the composition, everything is merged together and looks nice. Here is the ring put together with the whole composition, which by viewing it, does fill an empty gap that was placed before.






Over the past month or two, I have made the ONW NOW Ending, using the Advance Spin FX on Video Copilot. My original plan for the project did not come out as planned, but these adjustments made the project great. Overtime, I did get tired of watching the tutorial, but I persisted in the hard challenges when I couldn't understand material from the tutorial. The tutorial felt long and tiring, but  felt more energized the quicker I worked through the animation.

If you enjoy working with After Effects, this would be a great intermediate level project to work on, since it teaches many tricks on After Effects and improves your After Effects skills.

Here is the animation I rendered out. Note that this isn't 100% done, and changes will most likely occur as my work progresses.

ONW NOW ENDING UPDATE 2

This past week of wrapping up the ONW NOW Ending Project has been full of incorporating additional details that play a big role of determining the feeling of the project as a whole. My last update concentrated on the foundation of the looks, but this update will continue onto the secondary parts of the project, as I follow the Video Copilot Tutorial.

The next major step of the video tutorial after compiling the rendered compositions together, was to create white circular panels. I began the creation of these panels by making a white square, and adding a fast blur.

I then duplicated the square three times, added a wiggle lighting effect, which randomizes how often the square will blink. I also aligned the squares parallel to each other with the align layers tool. This new feature to me was very helpful for me since I like my objects straight in order.

My next major step was to add the polar coordinate effects to the squares to form the panel. I then set the conversion to "rect to polar", and increased the interpolation all the way to 100 percent.

After completing the panel, I duplicated it, scaled it to the outside, added glow and tint effects for appearance, and rotation expressions so the panels may rotate like the other compositions.

After testing the background color using color collection and curves, I played with the alpha, red, blue, and green channels to match ONW's raven blue color, as shown on their website below.

Olathe Northwest High School

Animating with the Bulge effect was tough. I encountered problems with the bulge as it scaled down. Here below are some screenshots of the various bulge conflicts.

One thing that bothers me about the Bulge effect as it scales down is that it leaves traces of feathery ends in the outer panel.

The problem occurring here as the bulge moves is it touches the middle electrical layer. As that happens, the bulge layer creates a water effect, which I happen to find to be very "electrifying" (pun intended).

I took a break from animating the whole project, and decided to add in electric layers on the inside of my project.I constructed them by copying my original composition, and made different changes to each composition.

Significant changes like the force motion blur effect and multiple frequency spheres were used. The audio was also changed because the audio for the final project has been used multiple times, and I don't want these projects to match that audio.

The bottom one is very hard to see because of it's very low opacity.

Animating the projects was very complicated. I had to match keyframes with the audio,which is a very lengthy process. I do love how After Effects displays the frequency bands for the audio, a useful guideline of where to place keyframes. Effects that were edited with keyframes include the opacity, rotation, and scaling. Doing this taught me how to animate with audio and keyframes.

This is a screenshot of what the composition looks like without the compass logo, as mentioned in my previous blog post. The process was time consuming, but at the end, all of the layers flowed well together.






My major challenge was getting the panels to rotate with keyframes,since they were set to rotate with an expression, and had to manually delete the expression and replace the rotation with keyframes.

The last major step I need to make is to add in Optical Flares with the help of a senior experienced with this effect.








I only have a few days left to finalize the project, and get it to the best of it's ability. My goals to be completed are to meet with Video and evaluate the project. I also plan on meeting with one of the seniors who did this project in the past and let him judge what changes need to be made.

ONW NOW LOGO PROGRESSION

For the past few days, I have thought about ideas for the ONW NOW Logo for my project. So I thought that it would be a good idea to blog about it.

My first thoughts of planning out the logo, was to do something related to ONW and the raven mascot. I then googled some raven logo ideas, and thought this image would be a good example. I would use the text,"ONW NOW", and incorporate a raven shilouette on the letter W.

This idea made me think of eCommunication's "eMagine Festival", an annual event at Olathe Northwest where schools across the metro area meet and compete against all of the school's finalists on projects pertaining to graphic design, web design, animation, and video. The most successful logo concept for this event is the raven and the branch, where the raven represents ONW, and the branch represents each strand, which connects together in a tree.

After some reflection, I realized that this idea did not fit my project. I then came across the school's compass logo, as shown to the left, and appreciated this idea. The compass logo works out very well for the ONW NOW Ending project because of it's circular shape, similar color palette, and the three radii  present, which looks similar to the multiple circular layers in the original project.

Here is a screenshot of the compass covering the spinning layers. Added details like the frequency bars appeal to me because they move up and down to the sound effects. The glowing navy blue background emphasizes the movement of the compass and it's points. Also, since the compass is the main focus right now, it shows how important ONW is compared to all of the other details placed in the project. 

After this experience of planning the logo that will be placed in my project, I have learned that things don't always go as originally planned, and that I sure do prefer this plan over my original plan of meeting with the Graphic Design and Video teams to discuss this. It would also help save some headaches because both groups are busy this week for helping out with Homecoming events this week.