FMP Report
Report as an Essay:
FMP Report
Character Design
Ellysia Manuel
Introduction
For my Final Major Project, I have chosen the role of Character Designer, alongside my other two supporting roles which are Storytelling and 2D Animation. My project is going to combine all three of these elements by creating an interactive children's story book. The book will consist of small stories, told through the voices of the two main characters and through small comic strips. The interactive elements will make the book feel like a scrapbook in which the reader can create their own ideas alongside these characters. For example, the characters will have a page where they tell the story of how they got their first pet followed by a picture/ drawing of this. Next to this page will be a similar template in which the reader can also write about their experience of this and insert a picture of a pet of their choosing or make up a story about what pet they would like and draw a picture of what they would look like. Following on from this, there will be elements in which the reader can learn how to draw the main characters featured in the book with a step by step guide and have a page next to that to try it themselves with discrete guidelines to help start them off.
Another element that I want to make interactive, is to have certain elements of the book in AR. This would mean that the reader could place their phone camera over an image and watch the picture come to life with a short animated loop. If this doesn't go to plan, then my backup option is to use a QR code which links them to either an Instagram Page or YouTube channel with the same interactive feature.
To help improve on my skills and to help towards this target, I am going to:
Main Body
Presentation Pitch
For my March Presentation, I pitched my working idea what my project will be and how my work leading up to this would fit into this. I presented my work from the start of the term which included my character designs, research and then discussed my ideas for my final major project concept. For my FMP, at the time I planned to create an interactive children's book, which featured AR (augmented reality) elements, and physical interaction including how to draw characters, and doodle pages. Overall, the feedback was very positive and with a few pointers, set me off on the right path for creating this final piece of work.
Research
As part of my research, I created a selection of Mood Boards made out of related images to my idea before creating my designs.By doing this, it provided me with reference and inspiration when approaching the designs for things such as characters, buildings and in particular, the book cover. By making a mood board for the cover, it helped provide me with other designs which have been successful and with the same style that I wanted to work towards. I felt that this really helped push the design development for my final outcome and pushed this design further. With each change, it inspired me to make the design better. It also showed how important this element of the book is as it will be the first thing the reader sees and will impact if they want to read it or not. Especially for the set target audience. Some of the mood boards also included real life reference, especially for the bear character design. In particular: how they stand, what their hands/feet look like, and their facial features especially looking at the shapes and how they could be portrayed as a 2D character.
Another element that I researched into was the Costume and Design, focusing on the human characters. The main focus for this was for Thomas’ outfit. At first, I was struggling with the body for this character, but after looking at clothing online for his particular age range, and placing them onto a rough sketch it helped to define the character's body shape. For something that I was originally struggling to do, this had a real impact on the lower half of the character and helped get the proportions right. This also helped with the costume colour code and showed me what works together and what didn’t. On my blog post (FMP, Research) shows a timelapse of the different outfits being placed onto the character.
Experimental Work
Making a 2D Rig in After Effects
As part of my experimental work, I wanted to see how I could go about creating a 2D Rig using Adobe After Effects. I thought that this would also provide me with future reference into how I would need to provide my characters to animators or riggers. This actually helped a lot because it taught me from experience, how I needed to provide the files for Nadim which turned out to really help her: Providing each body part separately, giving her a character sheet of all the body parts so she knew scale levels, where they go and what they were. Without this, I don’t think my collaboration would have been as successful.
After this, I wanted to see what other animation based softwares Adobe had to offer and discovered Adobe Character Animator. This is an application that specialises a whole range of character animating features, especially facial animation and lip sync. You are able to link to a photoshop file of your character which needed to be layered with the different facial features that you want to animate for example, you need the main facial base with your eyes, pupils, eyelids and eyebrows on different layers which then syncs with Character Animator and by using a live camera stream of your face it matches your movements to that of the characters. You are then able to record your movements and change them after where necessary. For the facial rig, I was able to use an Adobe template, to see what layers I would need to create and how they needed to be organised in Photoshop. After looking at the template, I separated the facial features for my character Thomas and began to add them into the Photoshop file. I then created a load of different mouth shapes for the lip sync element using reference images. When I linked this file with Character Animator, I was able to see how it worked and what other sections of the face needed to be created or made to have its own layer. The facial rig helped by showing me what I needed to design in addition to just a flat character pose. It was a real insight into these extra details that I wouldn’t have thought to add in my previous designs and helped to develop the design with these factors in consideration.
Modelling with Clay
When designing the character turn around for Bear, I struggled to design the side and three quarter view. What I had designed didn’t seem 100% accurate, so I had the idea to create a model of the character in clay. By making a model, it helped show me the different angles of the Bear which I initially found harder to picture. Seeing it there in front of me really helped
Making the T-Shirt
I was able to see the design from different angles and positions which helped when creating the character pose sheet and turn around. If I was ever struggling with this, I could just look over and use a reference point.
Collaboration
For my FMP collaboration, I was approached by another student Nadine who saw one of my recent experimental character designs on my Instagram account. These were bug-like characters created using shape and colour. I wanted to see how I can use a similar style to create a design and change this by alternating the size of the circular shape and changing the colour to depict the different body types apart from each other. I made them with the intention of extending my portfolio and to have a variety of different design types to show design and target audience ranges.
As mentioned before, by attempting to rig my own character in Adobe After Effects, this gave me an insight into what I needed to provide the rigger and really helped give me an understanding of how difficult it can be. By using this previous experience, I knew what files Nadine would need to be provided with, so with this knowledge also created a PDF File of all the files together to scale and labeled so that she knew what was what and where they should go, especially as this was a character made out of shapes so a lot of the pieces looked the same (See Blog: FMP, Collaboration). After she rigged my character, she also created a short animation to showcase her work and by doing this really captured the personality within the character. Overall, I feel that the collaboration was a huge success as this benefited the two of us for both our chosen roles.
The Book
When I first started to plan what the page layout would be in the book, I created a blank template of all the pages that I was aiming to fill and started to pencil in what would go where. When a page was completed, I would add this into the template, see blog (Final Major Project, My Project) for image reference. I struggled initially with the layout and inside page design for the book as I wanted to have a similar theme throughout.I played around with a few different background designs and then eventually decided to use the same yellow background as the front cover, and place a lined paper template on the page to write on. This seemed to give the inside a more professional look and kept the bright colour inside too which fitted with the front and back cover.
Front Cover Development
As said earlier, research really helped to influence the front cover design, looking back to my original design which was based on a school book which the characters had drawn on was not as successful as my final outcome. It didn’t have any real eye catching elements. For my ideal target audience, they need something bright and colourful which will catch their eye easily and will interest them enough to read the book.
The order:
When ordering the book, I needed to take a lot of things into consideration. The first element was the size of the book. I chose to go for an A4 size because of the nature of the activities inside. Some of the pages include how to draw instructions and with the next page designed for the reader to follow along with the steps to draw their own version of said character. If the book was to be a smaller size, it wouldn’t provide much space to do this. With the target audience for the book being younger children, the bigger the book means the larger the text which will make it a lot easier for them to read. If they were to see a lot of small text, it may distract them to not want to read it. With the combination of one page having an image and the other being made up of text, this should break down the amount of text for them to take it and make it easier to stay invested in the stories.
Another element that I had to take into consideration was what paper the book would be printed onto. The default setting was to a glossed texture but once again, if the reader wants to be able to draw on the pages, this wouldn’t have worked so I decided to go for the closest thing they had to normal drawing paper which was unglossed. The book also comes with a hard cover because I thought that once again due to the younger age, it would make it a lot more sturdy.
On my blog, I have found a way to display the book with flip pages on my Final Outcome Tab. I have also screen recorded this on the printers page to show the completed product and how it will look as a hard copy.
Issues and Solutions
Covid 19
With the effect of the Covid 19 lockdown, I initially found it very difficult to focus working from home as this had more distractions and was a different environment to working in the University building. The solution to this was of course finding a working environment that worked for me and having a quiet place or using headphones to block out any surrounding noise. On a more positive note, being at home has given me more time to work on my project and when I am focused I managed to get a lot of work done including additional research to normal which has benefited me in a way and has taken my level of work to a much better standard.
Book Printers
When the book was sent to the printers, the first thing they came back with was that it needed additional bleed space for the front and back covers. The files that I uploaded didn’t seem to work and I wasn’t 100% sure how I could fix the problem. I looked into the answer and found an adobe help page which explained how you can save a file with a bleed space on InDesign. The first few tries still didn’t work but after multiple attempts I managed to get the right bleed size to fit the online template for the printers. The book was made and sent off on time but because of the corrections that were needed, it may have delayed the printing process but also, the delivery could also be slower due to Covid-19 delaying postal services.
Technical Issues
I had a few issues with the apple pencil that I was using which delayed some of the creative work and the speed in which it was produced. I managed to get a replacement in the final few weeks which helped speed up the work process during the most crucial time. In the last few weeks, my Macbook also started to have a few technical issues and if overworked would shut down which resulted in some of my work being lost. I have recently found a way to deal with this issue but most importantly I had to save my work a lot more than often just to be sure I won’t lose any again.
Changing and Developing My Idea
I started to run out of time while making the project and decided to make more time for designing the book pages and art showcased on them instead of adding in animations. This is still a field that I want to add into the project after the deadline and have left this open for the future by creating an instagram page for the book where I will upload additional work and animations for people who read it to see.
I still hope to add an AR addition to the book in the future and after the project is over. My research into this field by going to the Tate Britain has shown me that this is possible. I have created an Instagram page for the book where I intend to upload these animations and additional work.
Promoting Myself and my project
For the degree show, I plan to showcase my work through having the book printed off ready for when this does go ahead alongside printouts from some of the pages and the online book present for people to look through. Alongside this, I have created business cards for my project which links to both the social media pages that link with the piece of work and my own personal pages. The cards display the same design as the front cover of the book on the front, with a picture of the two main characters on the back with these links clearly displayed. The socials medias displayed on the business card are my Linkedin, Instagram (both for my personal work and for my project), and the personal website I created for job applications
Throughout the year, I have been applying for Jobs in many different creative fields from character design jobs, to studio art department positions which involves sending them my work and portfolio website. So far I haven’t heard back from many due everything happening and studios not wanting to take on new people in times of uncertainty. I applied for the Art Internship at King Studios in London late last term but this was unfortunately cancelled due to the Coronavirus outbreak alongside a few other job positions that I applied for.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I feel that the project was a real success and that I am really proud of the work that I created. At the start of my third year, I wouldn’t have seen the level of work I was producing to improve this much and for the end result to have been to this level. What I could have done better firstly would have been my work pace as the original speed that work was being produced could have been a lot faster but it did start to pick up once I had a template of what I was working towards and knew the layout and artworks that needed to be made. Having a page design and layout really did help the design process. If I was to do the project again, I would start designing the book earlier as I feel that this might have then given me more time to animate. I would also have liked to create more comic strips as this really added to the content in the book and was fun to make, they just look a long time. Overall, I am proud of the work that went into it and hope to continue on this project and make more pieces to go towards it and the Instagram page that was made for it.
Character Design
Ellysia Manuel
Introduction
For my Final Major Project, I have chosen the role of Character Designer, alongside my other two supporting roles which are Storytelling and 2D Animation. My project is going to combine all three of these elements by creating an interactive children's story book. The book will consist of small stories, told through the voices of the two main characters and through small comic strips. The interactive elements will make the book feel like a scrapbook in which the reader can create their own ideas alongside these characters. For example, the characters will have a page where they tell the story of how they got their first pet followed by a picture/ drawing of this. Next to this page will be a similar template in which the reader can also write about their experience of this and insert a picture of a pet of their choosing or make up a story about what pet they would like and draw a picture of what they would look like. Following on from this, there will be elements in which the reader can learn how to draw the main characters featured in the book with a step by step guide and have a page next to that to try it themselves with discrete guidelines to help start them off.
Another element that I want to make interactive, is to have certain elements of the book in AR. This would mean that the reader could place their phone camera over an image and watch the picture come to life with a short animated loop. If this doesn't go to plan, then my backup option is to use a QR code which links them to either an Instagram Page or YouTube channel with the same interactive feature.
To help improve on my skills and to help towards this target, I am going to:
- Work on the characters line of action to help push my poses
- Work on life drawing skills
- Try and push facial expressions
- Create comics to help tell stories
Main Body
Presentation Pitch
For my March Presentation, I pitched my working idea what my project will be and how my work leading up to this would fit into this. I presented my work from the start of the term which included my character designs, research and then discussed my ideas for my final major project concept. For my FMP, at the time I planned to create an interactive children's book, which featured AR (augmented reality) elements, and physical interaction including how to draw characters, and doodle pages. Overall, the feedback was very positive and with a few pointers, set me off on the right path for creating this final piece of work.
Research
As part of my research, I created a selection of Mood Boards made out of related images to my idea before creating my designs.By doing this, it provided me with reference and inspiration when approaching the designs for things such as characters, buildings and in particular, the book cover. By making a mood board for the cover, it helped provide me with other designs which have been successful and with the same style that I wanted to work towards. I felt that this really helped push the design development for my final outcome and pushed this design further. With each change, it inspired me to make the design better. It also showed how important this element of the book is as it will be the first thing the reader sees and will impact if they want to read it or not. Especially for the set target audience. Some of the mood boards also included real life reference, especially for the bear character design. In particular: how they stand, what their hands/feet look like, and their facial features especially looking at the shapes and how they could be portrayed as a 2D character.
Another element that I researched into was the Costume and Design, focusing on the human characters. The main focus for this was for Thomas’ outfit. At first, I was struggling with the body for this character, but after looking at clothing online for his particular age range, and placing them onto a rough sketch it helped to define the character's body shape. For something that I was originally struggling to do, this had a real impact on the lower half of the character and helped get the proportions right. This also helped with the costume colour code and showed me what works together and what didn’t. On my blog post (FMP, Research) shows a timelapse of the different outfits being placed onto the character.
Experimental Work
Making a 2D Rig in After Effects
As part of my experimental work, I wanted to see how I could go about creating a 2D Rig using Adobe After Effects. I thought that this would also provide me with future reference into how I would need to provide my characters to animators or riggers. This actually helped a lot because it taught me from experience, how I needed to provide the files for Nadim which turned out to really help her: Providing each body part separately, giving her a character sheet of all the body parts so she knew scale levels, where they go and what they were. Without this, I don’t think my collaboration would have been as successful.
After this, I wanted to see what other animation based softwares Adobe had to offer and discovered Adobe Character Animator. This is an application that specialises a whole range of character animating features, especially facial animation and lip sync. You are able to link to a photoshop file of your character which needed to be layered with the different facial features that you want to animate for example, you need the main facial base with your eyes, pupils, eyelids and eyebrows on different layers which then syncs with Character Animator and by using a live camera stream of your face it matches your movements to that of the characters. You are then able to record your movements and change them after where necessary. For the facial rig, I was able to use an Adobe template, to see what layers I would need to create and how they needed to be organised in Photoshop. After looking at the template, I separated the facial features for my character Thomas and began to add them into the Photoshop file. I then created a load of different mouth shapes for the lip sync element using reference images. When I linked this file with Character Animator, I was able to see how it worked and what other sections of the face needed to be created or made to have its own layer. The facial rig helped by showing me what I needed to design in addition to just a flat character pose. It was a real insight into these extra details that I wouldn’t have thought to add in my previous designs and helped to develop the design with these factors in consideration.
Modelling with Clay
When designing the character turn around for Bear, I struggled to design the side and three quarter view. What I had designed didn’t seem 100% accurate, so I had the idea to create a model of the character in clay. By making a model, it helped show me the different angles of the Bear which I initially found harder to picture. Seeing it there in front of me really helped
Making the T-Shirt
I was able to see the design from different angles and positions which helped when creating the character pose sheet and turn around. If I was ever struggling with this, I could just look over and use a reference point.
Collaboration
For my FMP collaboration, I was approached by another student Nadine who saw one of my recent experimental character designs on my Instagram account. These were bug-like characters created using shape and colour. I wanted to see how I can use a similar style to create a design and change this by alternating the size of the circular shape and changing the colour to depict the different body types apart from each other. I made them with the intention of extending my portfolio and to have a variety of different design types to show design and target audience ranges.
As mentioned before, by attempting to rig my own character in Adobe After Effects, this gave me an insight into what I needed to provide the rigger and really helped give me an understanding of how difficult it can be. By using this previous experience, I knew what files Nadine would need to be provided with, so with this knowledge also created a PDF File of all the files together to scale and labeled so that she knew what was what and where they should go, especially as this was a character made out of shapes so a lot of the pieces looked the same (See Blog: FMP, Collaboration). After she rigged my character, she also created a short animation to showcase her work and by doing this really captured the personality within the character. Overall, I feel that the collaboration was a huge success as this benefited the two of us for both our chosen roles.
The Book
When I first started to plan what the page layout would be in the book, I created a blank template of all the pages that I was aiming to fill and started to pencil in what would go where. When a page was completed, I would add this into the template, see blog (Final Major Project, My Project) for image reference. I struggled initially with the layout and inside page design for the book as I wanted to have a similar theme throughout.I played around with a few different background designs and then eventually decided to use the same yellow background as the front cover, and place a lined paper template on the page to write on. This seemed to give the inside a more professional look and kept the bright colour inside too which fitted with the front and back cover.
Front Cover Development
As said earlier, research really helped to influence the front cover design, looking back to my original design which was based on a school book which the characters had drawn on was not as successful as my final outcome. It didn’t have any real eye catching elements. For my ideal target audience, they need something bright and colourful which will catch their eye easily and will interest them enough to read the book.
The order:
When ordering the book, I needed to take a lot of things into consideration. The first element was the size of the book. I chose to go for an A4 size because of the nature of the activities inside. Some of the pages include how to draw instructions and with the next page designed for the reader to follow along with the steps to draw their own version of said character. If the book was to be a smaller size, it wouldn’t provide much space to do this. With the target audience for the book being younger children, the bigger the book means the larger the text which will make it a lot easier for them to read. If they were to see a lot of small text, it may distract them to not want to read it. With the combination of one page having an image and the other being made up of text, this should break down the amount of text for them to take it and make it easier to stay invested in the stories.
Another element that I had to take into consideration was what paper the book would be printed onto. The default setting was to a glossed texture but once again, if the reader wants to be able to draw on the pages, this wouldn’t have worked so I decided to go for the closest thing they had to normal drawing paper which was unglossed. The book also comes with a hard cover because I thought that once again due to the younger age, it would make it a lot more sturdy.
On my blog, I have found a way to display the book with flip pages on my Final Outcome Tab. I have also screen recorded this on the printers page to show the completed product and how it will look as a hard copy.
Issues and Solutions
Covid 19
With the effect of the Covid 19 lockdown, I initially found it very difficult to focus working from home as this had more distractions and was a different environment to working in the University building. The solution to this was of course finding a working environment that worked for me and having a quiet place or using headphones to block out any surrounding noise. On a more positive note, being at home has given me more time to work on my project and when I am focused I managed to get a lot of work done including additional research to normal which has benefited me in a way and has taken my level of work to a much better standard.
Book Printers
When the book was sent to the printers, the first thing they came back with was that it needed additional bleed space for the front and back covers. The files that I uploaded didn’t seem to work and I wasn’t 100% sure how I could fix the problem. I looked into the answer and found an adobe help page which explained how you can save a file with a bleed space on InDesign. The first few tries still didn’t work but after multiple attempts I managed to get the right bleed size to fit the online template for the printers. The book was made and sent off on time but because of the corrections that were needed, it may have delayed the printing process but also, the delivery could also be slower due to Covid-19 delaying postal services.
Technical Issues
I had a few issues with the apple pencil that I was using which delayed some of the creative work and the speed in which it was produced. I managed to get a replacement in the final few weeks which helped speed up the work process during the most crucial time. In the last few weeks, my Macbook also started to have a few technical issues and if overworked would shut down which resulted in some of my work being lost. I have recently found a way to deal with this issue but most importantly I had to save my work a lot more than often just to be sure I won’t lose any again.
Changing and Developing My Idea
I started to run out of time while making the project and decided to make more time for designing the book pages and art showcased on them instead of adding in animations. This is still a field that I want to add into the project after the deadline and have left this open for the future by creating an instagram page for the book where I will upload additional work and animations for people who read it to see.
I still hope to add an AR addition to the book in the future and after the project is over. My research into this field by going to the Tate Britain has shown me that this is possible. I have created an Instagram page for the book where I intend to upload these animations and additional work.
Promoting Myself and my project
For the degree show, I plan to showcase my work through having the book printed off ready for when this does go ahead alongside printouts from some of the pages and the online book present for people to look through. Alongside this, I have created business cards for my project which links to both the social media pages that link with the piece of work and my own personal pages. The cards display the same design as the front cover of the book on the front, with a picture of the two main characters on the back with these links clearly displayed. The socials medias displayed on the business card are my Linkedin, Instagram (both for my personal work and for my project), and the personal website I created for job applications
Throughout the year, I have been applying for Jobs in many different creative fields from character design jobs, to studio art department positions which involves sending them my work and portfolio website. So far I haven’t heard back from many due everything happening and studios not wanting to take on new people in times of uncertainty. I applied for the Art Internship at King Studios in London late last term but this was unfortunately cancelled due to the Coronavirus outbreak alongside a few other job positions that I applied for.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I feel that the project was a real success and that I am really proud of the work that I created. At the start of my third year, I wouldn’t have seen the level of work I was producing to improve this much and for the end result to have been to this level. What I could have done better firstly would have been my work pace as the original speed that work was being produced could have been a lot faster but it did start to pick up once I had a template of what I was working towards and knew the layout and artworks that needed to be made. Having a page design and layout really did help the design process. If I was to do the project again, I would start designing the book earlier as I feel that this might have then given me more time to animate. I would also have liked to create more comic strips as this really added to the content in the book and was fun to make, they just look a long time. Overall, I am proud of the work that went into it and hope to continue on this project and make more pieces to go towards it and the Instagram page that was made for it.