The sound was a missing part and I wish I had got the time to get it properly edited, it wa snot possible for this delivery but it will definitely be edited in the future for a showreel.
I was quite happy with the final result, even though the light was not how i wanted it to be, but it showed the development of my skills throughout the academic year and for that I am proud.
While polishing the last shot, when I could not tak it anymore I would do some other stuff needed for the project, such as textures, I was thinking of having none but that idea changed fast. It looks quite bad.
I found some good textures on polyhaven, what they have is limited but it had trees, ground and rocks, exactly what I needed. I did not find a good one for the cactus, so that is a non textured asset in my project. I wanted to have a displacement on the ground, a dry one, but it ended up being too much and I’m not an expert on textures and lights, it is definitely something I will invest my time in the future.
Textures:
hdri:
Also found on hdri haven, this is the only light source on the scene.
I did some research on how to apply the maps to the assets and tweaked some paramenters, like the raptors skin, ground, rocks specular values as everything was a bit too shinny.
Render
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on with the render farm and vm ware machines as it is way too slow, I could not open deadline window on one of the computers and the one that worked was super slow and kept crashing. Also I had a bunch of erros when rendering as the frames kept overwriting each other, so I had to do batch by batch.
Rendering is also a part of the project that takes a lot of time and so many obstacles can appear at this point, animation, rendering, lights, cameras, all these have to work together, final re touch is very time consuming.
When executing the first render tests in my computer, I remembered that I have ACES installed on my laptop, so the color spectrum is a bit wider, so when rendering on the render farm it looked like a night shot on some ocasions. I changed the lights accordingly.
The next and final part of this project is the final video editing and audio editing, although audio is still not a certain thing, as time is short and audio is a time consuming task
Before beginning to animate I usually make a camera sequencer playblast this is the last one made, as the next will not have all the right shots as they are on different scenes.
camera sequencer playblast:
Finally, the last shot, also an important one as both characters are in scene, I tried to erally push my skills on those two shots. I had also planned to have one final shot just from the seagull but the result was not the expected so I decided to finish with the main shot after the raptor runs away.
This shot was indeed a hard one, it included a last bit from the previous shot, which by my mistake suffered a lot of alterations as the blocking did change a lot. So it became an issue when rendering, as the lighting set up was made when all the shots were already polished. This also happened with shot 3 as it took so long, even if these were not the longest shots in the animation, they had specific movements that looked wierd if not animated properly, some still do, but it was helpfull to have a seperate scene where I didn’t have to worry to mess up the rest of the animation.
blocking:
The raptor was a tough character to understand, I ended up enjoying the seagull much more regarding animation, also it is easier to understand and of course is an animal present in real life so it always more familiar the aspects and characteristics to have in to consideration.
polishing:
The shot that follows is simple, a steady cam on the floor, where the seagull is in full frame and the raptor grabs her.
Blocking;
There was nothing really hard about this shot, other than figuring out how the hand should grab him, even if it doens’t look natural, it was the solution
The next shot was a tricky one, as I chose to do a birds eye cam when the seagull is shaken by the raptor, I don’t usually do this sort of angle nor really like it, these are for very specific shots but in this case I do believe it was agood idea as no other angle mae it look good, it is indeed a strange position.
Blocking:
Not only the shot but the animation was a bit of a risk but I really wanted to do this bit, so at first I tried to use AnimSnap plug in for MAYA but for some reason instead of parenting the control with the character to the hand root it connected only the neck control and bit of mesh, breaking the rig everytime. After fighting with this, I gave up and animated by hand. Let be honest, it wasn’t that many keys but it would have definitely helped having the plug in.
Anyway, the first part was the arms, I know it should have been the spine but it was making too much of a fuss regarding movement on that weird camera angle, so, just arms and seagull. This is the final result:
I like the way it looks, although the hand that is grabbing the seagull is making an awkward movement as I’m sure a raptors hand wouldn’t move that way, but I’m also sure it wouldn’t shake a seagul, so I think we can let this one go too.
The next shot is, in my opinion, the most important of this short animation, as it is the establishing shot where both characters can be seen and of course, the impact of both. It had major changes made while polishing, the blocking of animation was quite poor, I’ll have to admit as the project changes were so last minute.
Blocking:
Here, both characters were polished, the raptor still needed a lot of animation on the arms as I didn’t give it much attention before, now they were important for some overlapping action.
Finish of polishing raptor:
The seagul was the one with more changes, wings, neck, eyes and so on. Before having 2 characters on scene the raptor was the protagonist, the comic in play, but now the seagull has got the role the polishing needs a bit of a push if I want this to look anything like I planned.
I am extremelly happy with this shot, not only because I believe I was able to express anxiety from the seagulls perspective but because it was done is much less time than I expected, around 4 hours of work!
I wanted to have a shot from the seagulls view of the raptor grabbing her, a distorted view, at first I just wanted the raptor and maybe the beak of the bird, but it did not look well, so the camera was placed on the right side of the character where I got the distorted view and a bit of the limbs from the seagull.
Blocking:
Polish:
The next shot to polish is from the raptor, he will be the first one to hear the sound, this shot is his reaction, its a close up to his face where he starts looking around.
It was only when I got the cameras in place that I noticed how bad and shaky some movements were, this shot was one of them, his neck moves way to much like he is having an anxiety attack witht he sound he just heard.
The neck animation was a bit hard as the controls are not the best, I did made this a different scene as it was changing the animation from other shots. As it can be seen, I have the environment set up in the process of polishing this shot as I needed to do something else other than animate.
I was quite happy with the polish of animation of this shot, the movements are much smother and it makes it calmer.
Environment
For the environment, the idea was a desert, so I found a set of cactus models on turbo squid as well as the tree in the middle of the rocks, it was exactly what I was looking for but it does not have any textures. It would be amazing to have time to take care of those details, but for now the priority is really finish animation and all the rest comes as an extra to the project.
Environment preview:
Assets:
The next shot is from the seagull, when she hears a sound and looks back, stopping for a while and accelarating the flight. Again, this is where the birds short animation from pixar was helpfull as I was not seeing the wings flapping in every quick movement of the bird. The eyes are the main thing to express her fear so my thought was animate the pupil.
After a lot of tweaks, the final polish of this shot:
This is the part where an animator has to show their skills and make their art, it’s all in the detail as they say..
I split this task in four days as I was also writing the thesis paper, which has nothing to do with this project, so it might be a bit harder but t is also good to take my head of animating and focus on another research.
I decided to start by the beggining and not jump from shot to shot, so the walkcycle was first. Yes, a lot of walkcycles have been done before but none on a raptor, I did take a lot of time and he looks to happy to me and i haven’t been able to make him see less happy, I let it pass.
The key to animating the raptor is really the neck which is something I do struggle with as a lot of his personality and reaction comes from it. The tail is also a challenge, it is stiff and cannot move much or else it looks weird, even if it does not get in a lot of shots, I want to improve my skills on it, I will definitely need it.
After a few more tweaks I was happier with the shot and ready to move on to the next: a shot I forgot to include on the first camera sequencer playblast, where the seagull is peacefully flying.
Adding the seagull to the animation was out of my plans but it will be interesting to animate a bird, it is a good rig. I went looking for reference and found a video that helped understand the wings movement.
Also watching the birds short animation from pixar made me see that their root translation of the bird does not need to move everytime the wings flap.
Playblast shot 03:
As some changes were made to the project, blocking had to be re done. In the previous animation I used a sphere as the object that hit the raptor, which was quite helpful as I only had to replace the sphere for the seagull and animate from there. Of course, a lot of controls were now in play so after getting everything in place and in the right timings this is how is looked:
The next thing to do is understand how the story will be told, so the two main paths would be either a single camera and the whole animation would happen there or a set of shots which will help create a narrative and make it a bit more interesting. So after a meeting with Alan to discuss this I decided to do the shot setup.
At first, I was struggling as cameras are something I need to give a bit more time to understand and do it properly, there are so many ways to do it and its quite confusing, but I did sketch a small storyboard that ended up really being just a guiding point as nothing was done as I drew. With this I began doing some shots and organise them with camera sequencer and this was the result:
The timings and some camera movements need to be tweaked, although this is extremelly helpfull as it reduces the amount of work when polishing – the magic of cameras. Also, the last shot is still missing as I can’t seem to decide what is the best angle to end.
Drawing a sketch of the timeline with the frames of each character and which ones where using the same frame count, it’s very messy as it suffered changes along the projetct.
I was time to finally start writing but it was extremelly hard to know how to begin, how does someone even introduce a research. I did watch every session from Lawrence again, see if I got something more out of it now that I had the research and it did help. I was more aware of what I wanted to talk about and the subjects began to organize in my brain.
I made sort of a brainstorming of related subjects to the stereotyped representation of women:
This helped me split the writing in a few chapters and now it was really time to start. I made the mistake of wanting to start from the beggining, so I got stuck on the abstract and introduction for quite a while, but I gave up so I jumped to chapter 1.
The first thing I decided to speak about was the book “Gender Trouble” by Judith Butler, as mentioned before this is a very important piece of literature in order to introduce women and its representation. The book speaks about gender, sex, identity, gender roles and stereotypes among other things, it is all related to the perception of women, how they are percieved, therefore undermined for the gender they are.
Butler explores how gender is the cultural interpretation of sex and it can never be one or another but a spectrum of possibilities, the restrictions and rules imposed against this have never resulted in anything other than suffering and lost wars on human rights, from both sides. Why would there be a problem in a femine man or a masculine women and why is there only these two ways to refer to people inside this spectrum.
The first chapter of the study has the introduction as the beginning of the chapter, as it will serve as a guide and introduce the first theme, so it made sense to me.
The second topic’s title is stereotypes and gender roles and the main piece of literature here was an article by Carol Lynn Martin in 1995, “Stereotypes About Children with Traditional and Nontraditional Gender Roles” from the journal Sex Roles, vol 33 and the article “Gender Roles in Disney Films: Analysing behaviors from Snow White to Simba” by keisha L. Hoerrner where the impacts from stereotypes and gender roles in animated movies are exposed and analysed based on speech and behavior.
Both exploit both female and male characters in feature animated movies by Disney and conclude male display more anti social behaviour than pro social with a good outcome or even better than females who portray a pro social behaviour and little anti social being rewarded with fewer achievements. Verbal aggression is much more common in women not resulting in physical violence while males display more physical aggression and anti social behavior. This topic delves in to these stereotypes and how these reflect bad role models.
The next chapter will analyse the movies from the 3 main eras of disney and its evolution.
For this part of the thesis I created a document with the articles names and links and as I read what I found, I would write some notes to know what it was about, good or bad, useful or not, possible important quotes that might help explain my theory.
Of course, research takes time as there are things that do not matter, but as a researcher we need to read in order to exclude or not. I was quite surprised that there were so many studies and research on female representation in animation and interesting studies regarding the main eras of disney and stereotype evolution, evaluations on what impact it has on children. Exactly what i was looking for. Most of these articles are about gender and stereotype and mostly about disney, as much as I want to include other studios, the beginning of everything was indeed with Disney, so all the rest comes after.
Books:
The 3 books I believed were important are down to one: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. It is an extremely interesting book, everyone should read and try to understand, even spoken about more. This book is going to be addressed in the first chapter as I see it as an introduction to the subject, before understanding a problem, its origin must be studied. The subject is gender and sex, therefore identity is also a strong point in this books theory. It dismantles these 3 concepts and defends that they are manipulated according to culture and era where it is occurring (on each individual) and suggests solutions for a problem with so many years in society.
Articles:
Articles are the main information source of my thesis, I did find a lot of interesting papers, although I noticed a favouritism for frozen, literally everything speaks of frozen as it is such a great turning point in womens representation and storytelling in a disney princess movie. Another confusing thing is the characters that are princesses and the ones who aren’t, when speaking of representing women in animation everything is about princesses. Makes sense, unfortunately most movies where a female character is the protagonist is about a princess – who is not even the hero of her own story.
These articles all speak about the impact of stereotypes in animation on young children, what they retain from it and how they may express it during teenage years.
The research papers were also useful but will not be addressed as much, the referencing of those documents was used to look for more information. Of course, some of these articles are paid and it is hard to access some of them, I was able to due to my mother as she is a university teacher. Papers from other students are really good as a way to understand how the research was conducted throughout the study as well as referencing.
An interesting aspect I noticed is, dreamworks animation movies don’t really have females as protagonists, although there is a strong female presence, most movies are about male characters. I did look for more information on this, but it seems like its not a very spoken subject.
