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A1. Informing Ideas
A2. Communication Skills
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A5. Approach Method
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Level 2 A2
Final Major project
Level 2 A2
Final Major project
A2:Creative media project
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A1. Informing Ideas
A2. Communication Skills
A2.1 Carry out investigation for a creative media project.
A2.2 Use communication skills for a creative media project.
A2.3 Use practical skills for a creative media project.
A2.4 Carry out development of a creative media project.
A2.5 Use productive approaches to working for a creative media project.
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Oliver Burch
Student
A5. Approach Method
A1. Informing Ideas
A4. Development Skills
A2. Communication Skills
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
Logos for my hypothetical business
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A1. Informing Ideas
A2. Communication Skills
My survey to gather information on animation:
A multiple choice question on the content in cartoon animation that I sent out to my peers for primary research.
With this data, I know what my audience wants rather than what i think the audience wants out of a cartoon
My Final Media Project;
The Adventires Of Oliver
My Final Media Project;
The Adventires Of Oliver
My Final Media Project;
The Adventires Of Oliver
Scene backdrops and sets
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A1. Informing Ideas
"The Tree Of Life"
A set of hills Oliver is born on. The Tree Of Life (left), lives and dies here. The text in the top is not visible in the final product as the sun covers the text; this was for reference where the sun would go.
"Hedgehog Hovel "
Hedgehog Hovel was the first scene I edited myself, it took a couple of days as I had next to no experience in Premier Pro. The same as the last scene, there is a marker as to where the armchair was going to be placed. The light pouring in was poorly drawn in hindsight.
"Bathrume"
A very tall bathtub that was used to change the scene from an interior area to an exterior (Hedgehog Hovel to The Blaetes Concertgrounds).
The hanging sign on the left side makes fun of the pronunciation of the word "bath".
"Bathtoube"
The inside of a very tall bathtub. The water is not shown in this screenshot as it is a prop. The water is made to move downwards to simulate the water draining.
"The Blaetes Concert (noprops)"
This is the concert but without the instruments on screen. The corpse of The Tree Of Life can be seen on the far left side of the screen.
"The Blaetes Concert (props)"
Has instruments this time.
"The Night Drive (Propless)"
An unanimated image of a roadside. This was later given a 2-frame animation by adding road lines and lamp posts.
"The Night Drive GIF"
This is the animated version of The Night Drive.
"Outside The Blaetes House"
Final version
previous version before remaster
The Blaetes House, located next to the Beatle's house the Yellow Submarine,
has a cracked wall that frequently gets broken. The house was originally going to be 2D but was recreated last minute to be 3D which allowed for a scene of a vehicle smashing into the wall and transitioning the scene.
"The Blaetes House"
This is the Blaetes' house interior, a capacious living room that is missing all the active props such as the door, wall on the right and fridge door.
The wall on the right has 3 different props to it; the wall crack, top and bottom of the wall. The wall crack dissapears once the Blaetes van crashes through it, but the top and the bottom of the wall stay. They are layered so the van is in the middle of these two wall parts to give off the illusion of depth where the van is partly inside and the backend of the van is still outside.
"The Blaetes House (NoBackgroundColour)"
It was suggested by a member of our group to avoid putting colour on the same layers as the drawings so editing and colouring would be easier. While this does take longer, less mistakes were made and I shall be employing this for future works such as this.
"Outside The Bedroom"
The hallway that connects the Blaetes livingroom to the rest of the house, the door was originally going to be openable but due to time limitations we opted to have the character enter the keyhole instead as that was our next logical means of entering the room.
"The Bedroom"
A bedroom with the basics. The props were drawn by one member and relocated by another.
"The Bed"
A simple top-down closeup of the bed, currently missing the sheet. The sheets were made a second image to allow for the sheets to be animated.
"Room 101 Hallway"
the holder of one of my biggest fears; failure. A reference to Orwell's 1984 where room 101 holds the victim's biggest fear as a means of torture. The walls are darker and the paintings have changed to propaganda posters with my face on them as I am the one who controls this world.
"Room 101 Interior"
In the project, 'Failure' whispers constantly; voiced by friends. 'Failure' also makes the 2001 A Space Oddesey's Monolith's ringing sound. Failure is one of my biggest fears so this is a representation of that fear.
"Infinite Strawberry Fields"
The land inhabited by Zeus. This location is an obvious reference to the Beatle's Strawberry Fields. I got this after asking one of our members to "make Starberry Fields however you want" and received this which was what I wanted.
Logline:
A1. Informing Ideas
A strange creature called Oliver drops into a whole new world to discover the meaning of life with the short help of The Tree Of Life, will it survive on its perilous journey?
Early version of my script.
The whole script was unfortunately never finished but in terms of only unwritten; the rest of the script was as intended in the recording studio as I knew what I wanted.
my evaluation of the project
The Project proposal
The Project itself
Research into popular animation/cartoons
A1. Informing Ideas
A2. Communication Skills
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A5. Approach Method
Characters; early designs, concept art ect.
CONCEPT ART; UNUSED CONTENT
Oliver being drawn early on
The way how most of my characters are designed is by taking my face, removing the features then using it as a template head with whatever features i wish to add. The rest of the body was then drawn in segments and took over a week to get to the final design to use.
Why does it look like this?
Oliver's old design
A common design choice with my animated characters is to have the joints highlighted to aid with animation. Unfortunately, this model on the left was unable to be rigged with bones for one of two reasons; Either I could not because I did not know how or it was not possible because of the methods I attempted.
Oliver's newer design
The Tree Of Life
The neck is an upside down nose,
the mouth, nose, eyebrows and eyelids are from one of our groupmembers
and the eyes come from Roary The Racing Car's "Big Chris".
Big Chris (right)
The Tree Of Life
This is the first character to appear in my final product. The tree gives birth to Oliver but dies in the process as it gives its last burst of life away.
The tree is canonically only a few weeks old.
The Tree Of Life after serving its purpose dies. It's purpose was to create Oliver.
The tree of life is an edited version of a tree
from the
Netherlands;
Theme Park
Efteling.
The tree has a cowboy hat-like design after editing as the canopy was too intrusive to the rest of the scene.
Mr Hedgehog
This is a reference to Disney movies where a family member dies at the start of the story.
Mr Hedgehog is a simple man.
He works late at night to provide for his wife, McMouse and enjoy life during the day. The house they both live in was built by Mr Hedgehog.
Mr Hedgehog has human hands and reads the news. He is an avid reader.
McMouse
McMouse is the wife of Mr Hedgehog. A loving and caring spouse of a marriage that has lasted for 4 weeks in canon time.
McMouse's design is a rodent that has human hands and a wheel which is used for mobility.
McMouse has odd magical properties. Loves cheese.
Cheese
Cheese.
(these are the cheeses that McMouse summons for Oliver to consume.)
It's The Blaetes! Not to be confused with famous rock band, "The Beatles", The Blaetes is the new hit rock band that performed live in the area. The group members are,
John Lemon,
George,
Pull My Cart Knee and
Ringo.
(Pronounced Blaye tes)
The Blaetes only have one song out that is called "We Eat Rocks". As they are a rock band, their songs are about... rocks.
John Lemon is the Blaetes member that speaks the most throughout the production and is the leader of the group. His character is an edited version of John Lennon's face stuck onto a lemon which was then attached to a random body.
George is simply George Harrison but mildly frowning. It was decided that just having George was more odd than having a photoshopped version of him, causing people to look for a visual gag but there isn't one.
Pull My Cart Knee is Paul McCartney but he has had his face put onto a rickshaw cart. Like the other members of the Blaetes, this interpretation is a pun and is a simple visual gag.
Ringo is Ringo Starr's face added to a star. Ringo is never referred to as Ringo Starr as the pun is that he is Ringo Star.
The Crowd
The Crowd is a reference to Star Wars; The Phantom Menace's podracing scene where the crowd was a bunch of painted cotton buds made to move by wind.
Her Majesty The Queen
The Queen can be seen driving past the Blaetes house. The Queen is in the production because I saw one of our members doodling the Queen during a break and thought it was very funny and added her to a scene.
Zeus
Zeus is the physical embodiment of the people who worked on the project. The final version was originally going to have all of our voices into one amalgamation of a voice, but ran out of time. Zeus smote Oliver because it was his time to die as he had completed his purpose in life which was to find out the meaning to his life.
Sad Lampost
Can be seen in The Night Drive scene as the van passes by. The lampost is sad because it stops existing once off screen.
The Props section (significant props)
The Boogie Bus/van
The Boogie Bus is a GIF used for the driving scenes in the project. John Lemon is driving as this represents his status in the group; he is the one literally and metaphorically steering the group. Oliver is in the back alone as he's only just met these characters.
The Boogie Bus
George is strapped to the roof for fun.
Here is a PNG version of the Boogie Bus. This was animated in Adobe Animate by repeatedly compressing and expanding the vehicle.
Mr Hedgehog's chair
The chair that Mr Hedgehog sits on.
The Rusty Pipe
this pipe was used in the scene transition between the Bathtoube and the Blaetes Concert. The pipe has been colour corrected to be green to mimic that of the Super Mario Brothers Warp Pipe. It was originally going to have the iconic sound from the videogame, but was dropped for reasons.
The Blaetes Wall Hole (exterior)
The Blaetes Wall
To create a sense of depth in one of the scenes, I had to layer two images in front and behind the Boogie Bus. These are those images.
This is the unbroken version of the wall; another prop to be toggled.
Used for the outside wall when broken. A fun play on perspective.
Doorway to the Bathroume
The same concept as the wall holes above.
Zeus' Thunder
A short GIF created for the character Zeus for when he ends Oliver at the end of the project.
A short GIF created for the character Zeus for when he ends Oliver at the end of the project.
Moving Doors
These are the doors that got animated in the project.
Various Assortment Of Props
Various props that made their way into the project.
Blaetes Instruments
A poster
Bedsheet
Blaetes TV/TV stand
Blaetes Couch
Blaetes Fridge
Fun Trivia!
Oliver's purpose was to exist for this project, the reason why it dies at the end is because the project is over.
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
Premier Pro screenshots; The Production Process
A5. Approach Method
As I used GIF images rather than video files, the entire project is filled with repeated GIFs over and over. The darker purple chunks in the timeline represent these GIFs.
Here we see the effect controls window. This is where half of the project's animation time went to with keyframing positions for characters and props to move at. The motion editor is being used in this screenshot of Mr Hedgehog in Hedgehog Hovel. We can see the blue stopwatch to the left of the word 'position', this means that it can record specific key frames that have been inputted into either directly into the editing window or moved along the X and Y axis with the two numbers in between the miniature timeline on the right and the position editor on the left. Each keyframe that has been saved is represented with the grey diamonds on the effect controls timeline. If any other effects in this window were used (e.g, scale or rotation), they would be displayed in the same way but neatly in line with their parent effects.
When creating Zeus' debut to the project in the scene Strawberry Fields, I not only wanted Zeus to look like a God and act like one, but to sound like one. The panel above is the audio editor to add reverberations to the recorded voice lines of Zeus. This took around 30 minutes of tweaking to find what I was looking for and copied across the details to each separate voiceline so they would all sound the same way. As this was a new concept that I have only just began to grasp, I cannot explain exactly how I achieved the booming voice of God.
For the nightmare scene, I had many people come together and record a short clip of each person whispering 'failure' a few times over. These voicelines were then implemented together and slightly edited to make each one sound unique which was a lot less work than having to find over 10 different people to voice act. This scene also samples "2001: A Space Odyssey" by taking the loud ringing from the monolith and cutting it off at it's apex.
A2. Communication Skills
Coordination, cooperation and conversation with group members
As the spearhead of this production, it was down to myself to delegate tasks and map out the plans we were to follow. An effective way that I did this was to create a PowerPoint document that was updated daily and shared with those assisting the project. Here are some panels:
Keeping a strong team morale was one of the hardest tasks through the duration of the project. It got a little rough at certain points but it all turned out perfectly fine in the end and the satisfaction of the finished product made it all worthwhile.
The early storyboard
A3. Practical Skills
A4. Development Skills
A5. Approach Method
Final thoughts on The
Adventires Of Oliver
The past few weeks of working on this project has been one of the most fun and memorable experiences at college. I hope those who enjoy our project enjoyed it as much as I did whilst making it.
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