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Character animation is defined, in general, as a specialized area of animation which involves bringing a drawn character into motion. That means making a character move in 2D or 3D context. As a first real character animation is being considered Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay. However, many people associate Walt Disney with the beginning of character animation, because he was the one who started focusing on character animation as a most important area of animation in his studios. His concept artists started creating character sheets and mood boards with a character depicted in different poses, showing different emotions. It helps animators to understand characters in the animation they are making, to be able to relate to them, their traits and feelings, which make the character more relatable to the audience. Disney´s core animator, called Nine Old Men, who were creators of the most famous Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all became masters in ap...

Synopsis Nighttime. Walking alone. That paranoid feeling of being followed by someone. Anxiety. Everyone knows that. Night town can be a dangerous place for a young girl. She is a typical modern teenager. Looking at her phone, music in her ears, oblivious to all dangers around. Obstacles on the road, slippery pavement, strangers, catcallers or even rapists. What will she do when she notices, she is being followed by someone? Just remember, do not jump to conclusions too early. Treatment Title: Umbra Length: 1:30      This short digital animation can look like a thriller for the first glance but it´s actually a light-hearted story showing us a strange relationship between two strangers, girl and a shadow creature, and it makes us realise that we cannot judge others by the first impression, which can be wrong.      The animation is hand drawn by two aspiring animators Karolina Sedilekova and Kristina Krc...

As a new task, we got to make a narrative animation. I and Kristina decided to work together again because we know we can make a better quality animation together than alone. At first, we planned to work on something more experimental, maybe even a bit abstract. We tried to choose a text to start with but in the end, we both agreed we are far from abstract fine art artists to make something like that. We chose a short text from a Tumblr blog, which we found appealing and we both had ideas about visuals to the story.  Link to the blog here After that, we brainstormed our ideas, wrote down a rough timeline and everything that is going to happen in the animation. The name of the animation, Umbra, is related to the shadow character. Umbra means the deepest part of the shadow. We needed to think about the characters, their personalities, their purpose and all obstacles they are going to overcome.  Our main character is a teenage girl and she...

After all preparations, watching the play rehearsals and then splitting the play into small pieces to get the right time for all our scenes we started working on the animatic. The first difficult thing for me was to get the correct time. It was a theatre play so the time was never the same, it varied in seconds, maybe even in few minutes. I was not sure how to get it right, I needed to think about backgrounds which will be more than repeating gifs but it would be fine if part of it was missing. My scenes were Scene 10 and Scene 12. I made visuals of backgrounds and I loved Kristina's design of the Gardener so I went with it.  For the first scene, I decided to animate a cycle of waves and clouds with the hoopoe bird which Kristina designed.  When it came to the sea design, I was playing with pastel shades of blue, turquoise and pink/purple for the sky. At first, I wanted the sky to be lavender but it was not contrasting enough so I used light pink...

In this module, I have learned a lot of new things and I improved in each of them. In the beginning, I was worried that my skills in Maya will not improve quickly enough, I was confused most of the time, but I prioritized this module to the point I understood what I was doing and I knew what I wanted to do. Although I know I've still got a lot of room for improvement to be really good and skilled in 3D, I think it is not bad for my first 3D character. The final look of my character has changed a bit during the process, I wanted her to look both, human and non-human, at the same time. That is why I changed few proportions of her face, to give her more "alien" look, to show she is not completely human. Her glowing eyes without pupils add to the extraterrestrial look. Another change I made was the denim jacket. I didn't make it to show the texture of her jumper more because I think it is the best part of my character with all those details. I also changed the shoes ...

UV mapping and texturing were also done during the Christmas break but I decided to make a separate blog post for them, together with lighting. In the beginning, I had some problems with UV mapping. It just did not work and I was already in Slovakia so I contacted Kristina for 3 days crying how it is not working at all. Crying helps, I guess, because after that I successfully UV mapped everything in one afternoon.  For textures, I combined photos and digital painting with filters. I also used bump maps for every texture, I just didn't include them all in this blog post because most of them were so subtle, that they just looked like grey squares. Photos of my knitwear were used for the jumper which was the most difficult texture I made for my character. I had to tweak those photos without damaging the pattern and connect it in places where it was not connected in the photo. For the texture of the skirt I had to make a texture which looks like thick fabric...