Creating animation

During the this project I have created earlier last year I had to think of a story. I wanted it to be a funny story nothing too serious. As most of the Londoners I take tube every day and my attention was caught up by the online dating adverts. I know it has been around for ages, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it until now. There so much reliance on people honesty in something like online dating. I was thinking about exaggerating it a little and change the couple about to date from humans to couple of monkeys.

As with anything I have written a proposal which is a good way to clarify any project.

Treatment for Monkeys and online dating

In my work on this project I wanted to work and point out how technology is changing our world. I picked topic of online dating as something what is getting more and more prominent in the world of social media and people living more and more attached to their phones and screens. These days no one is communicating normal way and people are getting more and more isolated in their own little worlds.

Let’s say one wants to test the online dating, posters are advertising it everywhere in the tube, billboards, magazines and etc. It is still scary to think as when one is setting up profile and putting the image of oneself how one sees themselves and it is all very subjective to do such thing, because it just my own imagination and one subjective projection of a person. In my work I would like to have a bit of a different point of view, bit twisted point of view.

No one is checking the profiles if they are real or not as it is very simple to fake such a thing and it doesn’t really have to be me on the picture I am declaring it is me, but in reality it can be my neighbour, because she looks prettier.

I based my story on bit of a play as some people haven’t that good morals or are not always playing fair. I picked for my two character two chimpanzees trying find love. They haven’t got the morals or understanding what is going really going on so there will be bit of twist. In reality I know very well that wouldn’t be possible, but for one time only why not. As it is everywhere said to sign for online dating should be simple for anyone. As it is proven we are apes in the sense on the first glance bit related to monkeys so why not. It is bit of fairy tale as well as we are bombarded by media from all sites that finding love is something very simple and straightforward something crucial and we all live in happy everlasting relationship till we die. Which is lovely and we all need bit of love in our lives.

I want my animation be happy and funny. I might change the story too depending how the creative process will go and if the idea proves good one or bad one.

There will be bit if a happy end at the end as none of my characters see themselves as monkeys, but as normal people hence the illusion of one projecting themselves as they think they are or as they see fit. My two chimps get lucky and see the other is the same so all is good. But sometime things don’t always work in ones favour and can get really messy. There is a bit of a mystery in the story, because no one is really sure how that person really looks like till the last moment.

After this been clarified I created a moodboard I wanted to find out what kind of visual language I am going to use and also colours applied within the story. I searched for images typing online dating into the search engine. The moodboard has got photos of real monkeys as well just to see if I can dress the monkeys in human clothing.

I love drawing, but I can’t draw monkeys just from my head so I needed the real photos to make it all look more realistic and believable so I used real monkey photos from the internet. My story was clear Next stage was to create a storyboard and before storyboard was to finalise appearance of the main characters “Chimp Jane and Chimp Lee”

This is my Chimp Jane when I knew

how my main character looks everything became easier as I knew the direction I will take now. I could make people have a connection with my Jane.

Now there was a time to work on my story board. I had to create 2 one for action the other for explaining what is happening in the story below you can see a copy of the first story board I did explaining the frame by frame what is happening.

After this initial stage was done. I had to go back to the drawing board again and draw each scene. I worked mainly in Adobe Photoshop using simple methods colouring each drawn scene after it had been scanned using paint bucket. I also knew that was just one layer of the each scene the second layer with the characters was the one to be later animated. I am adding an example of the first scene featuring just camera in Adobe AfterEffects a software I predominantly used to create this animation with finishing it Adobe Premier Pro.

At this stage I had the scenes set, but there was huge amount of work to be done and it is drawing the characters in all the possible poses they will be in including the variation of lighting conditions too. But first I want to show how I was able to turn the photos into animated character. See the image below.

I am adding the lighting effects and other positions in form of a slideshow.

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I have kept a screen grabs of the creation process as well so I can back track myself when ever I wish. I will ad some single scenes as I see the transformation of the photo of the monkey interesting. I have also kept the notes on quite few of this images too including different colour options or colour palette used.