Useful Networks

I found many useful networking sites such as twitter, deviantart and linked in. These are all very good for finding artistic people in the area you want to go into in my case it is stop motion animation.
Here are seven tips from Sacha Chua on networking

1. It's okay to be an introvert. Most networking books tell you to act like an extrovert. You don't have to fake it. Don't worry you can be a shy connector.
2. Change your perspective. It's not about selling yourself, it's about helping others. It's not about becoming popular, it's about learning and sharing. 
3. Give people reasons. If it's hard to talk to strangers, make it easier for strangers to talk to you. By blogging about your interests, being quirky and you don't have to be an expert to share.
4. Look for ways to help. What can you bring to a conversation? You can ask good questions that draw people out and make them think. You can recommend books and websites that help people learn. 
5. Give yourself homework. Promise to follow up with link/ resource/ etc from tip 4 (help). Follow up. Write it down. Use the network effect. 
6. Make it easy to get to know you. When you help others, they'll want you to know and help you too. Make it easy to find and know you. 
7. keep going, keep practicing. The more you think, the more you listen, the more you write, the more you speak, the more you figure out who you are, what you want to say, why it matters and how you want to say it and the happier you'll be. 

There are other sites you can use to network for instance youtube, Fuckyeah concept art and behance. There are loads out there you just need to find the ones that suit you and your career choice. The ones that I use frequently are Youtube and Twitter.

Understanding Copyright

In order to create the © (copyright sign) you need to press Alt+G for mac and for windows it's ctrl+alt+c.
Copyright give the owner the right to control their material and who uses it. Everyones work is automatically covered by Copyright, Design and UK patents act of 1998. These rights cover copying, adapting, distributing (electronic or otherwise) Communicating to the public (including on demand, live or broadcast) and public performance (busking etc). It also covers renting and lending. The kinds of materials that era covered by copyright are films, games, animations, music, computer apps and drawings/illustrations. you can basically copyright anything that has been produced by an  independent person or as a result of a collaborated effort. This includes stories, scripts, lyrics and other literary works. All content put on the internet in the UK is covered by these copyright laws. The person that owns the copyright piece generally is owned by the person who created it however if you have been asked to make something for a company, it is usually the company that would own or employer.  Copyright can be transferred, or sold to another party. However just because you own something doesn't mean you own the copyright e.g buying a painting, print or game. The rights have to be legally transferred to you. In the UK you do not have to legally register copyright as there isn't a system. Copyright laws generally last for 70 years but it can vary depending on what is copyrighted. You can get permission to use copyright products by contacting the copyright owner directly or you can go through an organisation who represents the owner. You don't always need to seek permission but generally if it is for commercial use you should. You can often use copyrighted materials for non-commercial, educational, research purposes or private study however this does not mean you can make copies.  You may want to mark your work so it is obvious to the public that the rights are own by you. You should mark it as © Your name and year of publication. To prove that you have originated the piece of work you should deposit the piece of work with a bank or solicitor or send a copy to yourself so that it has a clear postmark on it. You would the leave the envelope or package unopened. This would provide proof that it existed at that point in time. If someone is passing off your work as theirs you should talk to them first if that doesn't solve anything then you should take legal advice and proceed further by going to court if necessary. The same would apply if the content was online. International boundaries and copyright laws differ. It is recommended that you mark all pages describe previously and to what extent you will allow other to use you materials. If copyright misuse occurred outside of the UK you would have to take action using the laws of the country where the infringements took place. "Copyright is a play on words used to describe the practice of using copyright law to distribute copies and modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions free"- Wikipedia.

Creative Commons
Creative commons was founded by Lawrence Lessig in 2001, it is a non profit organisation that provide legal framework to allow people to 'share, remix, reuse - legally'. They provide standardised alternatives.  Unlike the all rights reserved way of © creative commons use different levels of licence that an owner of the work can apply.

Attribution - CC BY
This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work. Even commercially as long as they credit you for the creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered.

Attribution - ShareAlikeCC BY-SA
This licence lets others tweak, remix and build upon you work even for commercial purpose again as long as they credit you for the original piece and they have to licence their new creation under similar terms. This licence is used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution - NoDerivatives CC BY-ND
This licence allows redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution - NonCommercial CC BY-NC
This licence lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, they also must acknowledge you.

Attribution - NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA
This licence lets others remix, tweak and build upon non- commercially as long as they credit you and put their new creation under the same terms.

Attribution - NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CC BY-NC-ND
This licence is the most restrictive of the six main licences, only allowing others to download you works and share them with others as long as they credit you. They can not change them in any way.

All the information I collected from a presentation presented to us last years. These are mainly the notes taken from it.

Stop Motion Animation- Puppets

You don't just create stop motions using plasticine you can also use dolls, puppets etc. Ray Harryhausen is famously known for creating model animation known as 'Dynamation'. He has created creatures such as Mighty Joe Young, Rhedosaur, IT (Giant Octopus), Cyclops, Skeleton, Talos, Kali and many more. Armatures are used in creating these models in order to allow movements, the armatures are then usually covered in liquid silicon to give it the shape of the character. They then paint over the silicone to give it the colour of he skin ect. Sometimes mould are made and then the armatures are placed in the moulds with liquid latex and then again it is painted on to. Extra things can be added such as fur and hair. There are various ways to make different puppets for stop motions, the main thing that people need to do is experiment with different materials first. Different materials create different styles for instance plasticine creates a style like it's not brand new it's authentic so that may be the style you might want to go for.

Images are subject to copyright.

Notes on The Pixar Story

• In the last 20 years 2D artists and scientists have been bringing 2 dimensional animation to the 3D world.

Who brought Pixar to life;

• The creative scientist - Ed Catnall
• Entrepreneur - Steve Jobs 
• Talented artist - John Lasseter 

John Lasseter

• Since high school he wanted to make animations for a living. In 1975 he was accepted into the first program of Disney style animation at CAL Arts.
• The teachers at CAL Arts were previous Disney animators.
• Lasseter worked at Tomorrow Land as a sweeper for a summer job. He wanted to get as much experience as possible.
• He won back to back student awards for pieces of work he produced at CAL Arts. 
• He then went on to work at Disney Studios - His dream job.
• John handled the main character in the Fox and the Hound. 
• The film wasn't a big success due to the animation style loosing the audiences interest.
• John and Glenn got approval at Disney to experiment with animation using CG affects for the background. They got approval to make a script for 'The Brave Little Toaster'. John was fired due to his project not getting the approval to go further. The studios didn't know what to do with him.

George Lucas decided after making Star Wars to go in to computer animation. Many people came from all over the place to join Lucas' division. John was hired for the Lucas' computer animation area. They challenged him to create a short film. John inspired the technical team to create new software that would allow characters to be animated. The team created a special Pixar computer to create animations. To keep the team together they spun off a new division called Pixar. Steve Jobs went to Pixar and then invested ten million dollars to start up.

The group made a small animation that represented who they are John managed to make a desk lamp come to life this then represented the company as whole. There was only one computer that they shared in order to create the animations. John used to sleep at the site in order to get as much work done as possible. Bill Reeves and John Lasseter won an award for the best animation this was the first time CG won an award. Many people had to learn the computer whilst working on a piece. Pixar's software Renderman was getting critically acclaimed for the photo-realistic graphics. John presented a series of Christmas shorts based on Tin Toy. John had the idea of making a Toy come to life. Disney allowed them the opportunity to make a full length feature movies about the toys coming to life. They did not want to do a musical, or fairy tale etc... They wanted to be different. John had his heart set on the voice of the cowboy being Tom Hanks. John and his crew flew to Disney Studios to pitch what they had. The Woody character became a negative character. Disney forced them to shut down production. They worked day and night to create what they actually wanted to make and then presents it again to Disney. Disney thought it was good and they restarted production. The biggest challenge in Toy Story was the big film - the big sets, characters etc... It was hard for them to picture what it was going to look like from the drawings. Toy Story was a huge success. The academy of motion pictures awarded John a special award for the first full feature length CG animation.

Due to the success in the market Disney wanted to renew the contract but Jobs said that they would only renew if it was equal partnership 50/50 as it wasn't last time. The atmosphere in the work area is very child like and friendly. The problem next was are they going to be able to do it again. What worked on the first movie wasn't necessarily going to work on the second movie. The research for Bugs Life was literally done in their back garden with the use of a minuscule camera. Pixar seem to relish the idea of doing something difficult and overcoming problems. Bugs Life became the highest grossing film for that year. Lasseter finally was able to go home for a well deserved rest. Toy Story Two was in the making but it was having big problems. They needed to redo it. They decided the only course of action was to bring John back to take over the film. In a single weekend they totally re-changed the idea of the movie. Toy Story 2 was just as good or even better than Toy Story. From Toy Story 2 they learned that the important thing isn't the idea it's the team working together. They wanted to grow the company so that they were releasing one movie every year. For this to happen that meant that other workers would have to direct the films. Monsters Inc came next which was another success with a different director other than Lasseter. Monsters Inc was the highest grossing film for its time. Andrew Stanton was next in line to direct the next movie which was Finding Nemo. In 2003 Finding Nemo surpass the previous films and became the highest grossing income. The Incredibles came next with the director of the Iron Giant (Brad Bird). Pixar felt they were in danger of repeating themselves which they obviously didn't want to do. "Film is forever, Pain is temporary"- Brad Bird. The Incredibles marked as Pixars 6th successful film.

Hand drawn animation fear extinction as 3D animation have now taken over. It was a very painful period for two dimensional animation. Pixar and Disney had a slight disagreement as Disney wanted to take Pixar's characters and make sequels. Pixar didn't want them to do this. Jobs tried to make things right with Disney as the other wanted to be independent. Iger from Disney was ready to rebuild the partnership with Pixar. Disney wants to make 3D movies as well as 2D movies. John Lasseter returned to the directors chair and came up with the 7th feature film 'Cars'. John's a huge Disney fan, it was amazing for him to go back to his routes and went to Disney World to see the new attractions. Pixar is seen to a lot of people as an over night success, but this was an over night success that took a lot of time. 

Images are subject to copyright by Pixar and Disney Studios. 

Rainbow Loop

Here are the sprites I have drawn to make my animation.

Here are the colour versions I created using Photoshop's paint tools. I am next going to use Photoshop's timeline in order to make a GIFF animation of the flag waving in the wind.

Here is the final Giff that I created,

I got some really constructive feedback from Loop De Loop.
The feedback was that they said it wasn't engaging enough to the audience as it was only a flag, they said it may have been more engaging with sound. They also said that I needed to work more on the loop as it doesn't loop perfectly which I agree with. With more time I would have improved it but and re-entered the site. I would have improved it by adding more sprites in order to make the loop work properly and I would have put in more to make it more engaging.

Evaluation

This is the evaluation that I wrote about the project overall, I realise that I have gone over the word count slightly but I felt that everything I have written was all relevant. I have tried to cut my word count down but I could only get it to 1181. Next time I will make sure that I keep check throughout so that I don't go over as much.

During this project our initial vision was to create a western style animation with a supernatural twist. The plan was to have two typically western characters become embroiled in a duel.  We wanted to hide the supernatural element right to the end, this would be to add impact to his appearance, adding a twist. The twist was to be death himself, the Grim Reaper was toying with the two characters all along. Grim Reaper was to be present all along however only visible to the keen eyed.

However due to a multitude of reasons the production had to be scaled back considerably. I feel the largest contributor to the cutbacks was the turbulence caused by the groups changes cause upon us by external forces. These changes occurred without us being informed, we weren’t told until numerous days later. Prior to these changes  we had established roles in the group. I was to do the concept art and assist the other members with smaller tasks, Kieron was assigned character modelling and Finn was assigned environments. In losing our character modeller we had to reshuffle these roles as our newest member Dan didn’t feel comfortable in character modelling. Nobody in the group felt comfortable with character modelling but I  decided to volunteer for the role whilst retaining my smaller task duties. This left Dan with concept art and Finn remained on environments. As we progressed I attempted to coordinate the group often requesting updates but often times replies weren’t forthcoming. Communication could be improved upon, not so much in my direction but more towards group members replying to me. As we progressed with the project I became more persistent with my requests. Another reason is that some group members wasn’t contributing all the way through the project.

Whilst waiting for responses I used the concept art I had created in my previous role to start modelling the characters. The modelling went OK although I felt the face on the skinny cowboy was too sharp adding smooth to the model would improve this but would also take away the style we was going for, some of the animations were also quite wooden and the textures used did not tile as well as they could have, this could have been improved by spending more time in photoshop to make the textures tile fluently. I felt that I fully realised the Chubbier Cowboy. He came out almost exactly as I envisioned him. The curves in the face and stomach adhered to the tenth principle of animation, exaggeration. I thought that the flannel shirt texture of this character match him very well with his persona. His mustache also added to the exaggeration of this character as it was oversized and sharp. Overall out of the two cowboy characters, the chubbier one went better with the modelling and the style. For the skinnier cowboy I also felt that his textures match him as they were quite mature, which is what this character was aimed to be, more mature and serious. Stephen Wood an artist I know allowed me to use his gun he modelled, for the project as he had already created it whilst learning 3DS Max, I completed the guns texture in maya and created a flag that was to pop out of it.

It soon became apparent that Dan was struggling to meet the deadlines. This meant that I could not move forward with modelling the Grim Reaper. As the deadline came closer I became more worried about Dan being able to complete his task. It came to the point where Kieron offered his helping hands to create a brief turn around from my previous concept art for the Grim Reaper. As I had my hands full with completing the previous cowboy characters Kieron also offered to model and rig the Grim Reaper. I was rigging one of the characters when I realised I wasn’t able to rig both cowboys and animate all three with what time we had left. Dan then offered to rig one of the characters although he hadn’t done it before, group management comes into context here as Dan should have already known how to rig. I thought everything was going well until it came to a few days before hand in and Dan hadn’t got very far with rigging. Because of this as a group we change the idea so that we would only have to animate the character I rigged and the Grim Reaper. Dan was then given another task to create the new storyboard so then I could get onto animating, whilst leaving the character he was rigging how it was. We still incorporated the character that wasn’t fully rigged as a dead character laid on the floor in the environment.

The environment was one area where we scaled back considerably, the water tower and the wind turbine was missing from the final piece this was Finns task, however due to me not being able to assist him he was unable to get them completed in time. I did however still help out on small things like creating the graves for the graveyard. Even without the water tower and wind turbine the environment still came out looking rather good. Dan created the terrain as he hadn’t done much for the project so far, he offered as he was used to create terrains and felt comfortable in making one in the time we had. The terrain was very good as it matched the overall look we was going for.

The next task was animating, I animated the characters separately on their own timelines and then separated each animation in unity. Due to this method we had to make each scene separately. This was very time consuming and due to not having the environment I couldn’t create the animations together in maya with the characters interacting with the environment at the same time. I felt as though the animations were rushed and there were minor glitches that we simply didn’t have time to fix such as the gun flag doesn’t animate the way it is supposed to. In unity I applied toon shading to the environment and characters, this worked really well as it match the characters overall look and made the environments texture stand out more. As time was running out we realised we didn’t have enough time to code a way for each scene to play in order so we used quicktime to screen capture each scene and then edited it together whilst adding sound. I believe that sound went well with the overall video and Stephen created a laugh for us to use as the Grim Reapers crazy laugh, I thought that also worked well as it to me matched the overall tone of the video. Overall as a group we could have done better with time management, group management and helping each other out. I could have done better with my part by better time management, by making sure I have spare time for when things go wrong and taking a closer look at the small details.

Finished Cinematic

We have finally finished the video, we didn't have time to make a game video that opens up in unity, so we had to screen capture the different sequences for the video and then edit them all together.
Here is the final video.

Finished Video.

There are many areas that could be improved on such as the animations are very robotic and the camera angles could have been better if we had more time to experiment with them. I do believe that the sound works very well with the style and the style goes well with the overall theme.

Sound

For the sound we looked at Red Dead Redemption, Johnny Cash and free to use wild west music. We found that Johnny Cash songs matched our video more than the Red Dead Redemption theme tune but we also thought that lyrics wouldn't be a good idea considering that most of the lyrics would be missing due to the video only being 1 minute long. Through youtube we searched for a good back ground wild west themed song that would work well with the video.
This is the Johnny Cash music we were looking at.

This is what we went for as we tried it with the video and it fit perfectly as the tone of the song changes as soon as you get to the Grim Reaper which is a lucky accident, we used The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

We now needed some laughing sound for the Grim Reaper so I asked Stephen Wood to voice a crazy laugh. I asked him as I have heard him do crazy laughs before and thought they would work very well with the character.
These are the laughs he did for me, he did a few in case they didn't work then we would have more to fall back on.
Crazy Laugh 1
Crazy Laugh 2
Crazy Laugh 3
Crazy Laugh 4
The Laugh we decided to go for was laugh 3 as it match better than the others.

Videos may be subject to copyright.

Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption is a wild west themed game, we are looking at this for the outfits and the environment. This game has helped me to understand what style of outfits a cowboy would wear. These are some of the images I were looking at;

The environment is very beautiful in Red Dead Redemption, it is very much like a desert with small wild west themed towns.

We also looked at the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption as it is a very good example of what sort of sound we want to incorporate into our video.

Images and videos are subject to copyright.

Telltale games

Telltale games are very well known for there art style and stories. I have looked into Telltale games as they relate most to the style we are going for. We are using the same type of artistic style. Telltale game are very good at making interactive cut scenes an example is The Wolf Among Us. These cut scenes are very engaging with the audience and help the audience to choose their own path. They get a choice as to how the story will go. I am a big fan of Telltale games as they are incredibly wrote and are beautiful games.

Images are subject to copyright.

Cinematics in Games

There are cut scenes in pretty much every game you play. A cut scene tells you whats happening within the story and tells you more of the story. There can be interactive cut scenes like the ones used in The Walking Dead episodic game. One of my favourite cut scenes is from The Walking Dead as the method they use in the cut scenes is very engaging with the audience due to being interactive.

There were various ways that Lee could have died, I choose to leave him there as I thought that it was too much for a little girl to have to kill someone who she has got so close with. It is great that you have an option though as you can lead to different sides of the story, it makes you feel like you are actually making that choice in real life.
This one is when someone choose for Clementine to kill Lee.

The cut scene is really effective not only for being interactive but also for the sound, the sound is a very big part in this cut scene as the background soft music adds to the emotions that the audience is feeling. Not only do you have the soft music but you also have the background noise of zombies outside. This reminds the audience that there is still a threat even when something so sad is happening.

Videos are subject to copyright.

Props

To make the environment complete we needed to incorporate some props Dan is making the crates and barrel and I have made the graves, we did want to put in a tumbleweed that would blow in the wind but due to time restrictions we was unable to come up with one. I created 8 different graves, I created them by simple shapes and then apply textures to them which again I acquired from CG textures.
These are the final grave.

For the gun that we needed in our cinematic, Stephen Wood  created I only had to tweak the textures a little and create the flag that came out of it.

Textures (Graves) :

Textures (Gun) :

Textures collected from CG Textures
For the gun textures they are hand painted.