Hillary's Blog
My name is Hillary and I go by @hillareiart on social media. This blog will be a documentation of my final year Television Commercial (TVC) project in LASALLE.
The goal of this project is to create a 30-second animated commercial of an imaginary product with a unique selling point by the end of this sem.
Join along on this arduous journey ahead.
I am disappointed to announce that I unfortunately did not finish as much as I hoped to this week. I had planned to complete flat colouring all 8 scenes yet I have only ticked two scenes of my list. This is thanks to the very complicated animation of my product’s transformation.
As the flowers and vines are growing on the fairy as she is moving, it was quite difficult to get the timing of the flowers blooming just right. The dew is flowing down her wings as they move too. I had to hand-draw every single dew drop, moving them ever so slightly for every frame, and with the added fact that I animated the dew at 3am, I was practically half-dead drawing all the dew drops. :”)
Not only that but there is the scene of her wings flapping, in which I had to draw the detailed lines of the wings meticulously for every frame. This was absolutely gruelling work and took me a whole day to just line the wings for a 5 second scene.
However on the bright side, I experienced a happy accident. I used a clipping mask to change the colour of the wings from brown to yellow, and perhaps because the brush‘s opacity was not at its highest, it created this shadow-like effect and gave the yellow wings a very nice depth.
Here is the flat coloured scene 5 & 6:
It is quite polished now. However I find that it was a little too time-consuming. Luckily, the rest of the scenes do not have any more flowers or dew for me to animate but the wings are still an issue.
I will try to just roughly line the wing details, with less precision, maybe even in a sketchy style for the rest of my scenes to be faster. Hopefully, the roughness of the rest of the scenes will not be as noticeable since they are full body shots, making the fairy smaller and the details less important.
This is the last required blog post for school. The next time you see me I will hopefully have finished my final TVC. I want to thank everybody reading this for joining me on this journey. I am not sure if I will be posting any more but I do plan to add my completed treatment and TVC to my introduction after submission.
You are all amazing and whatever you may be working on now, I wish you all the best!
Thank you, and goodbye❤️ Hillary
10 April 2022
Oh dear. There's less than a month let to submission so rushing is now a necessity.
I spent this week blocking my character animation. Since she only wore a body suit, I had to make sure her anatomy is correct while animating. I found it easiest to do so with a "stick-man" construction so that is how most my of blocking looks like.
Due to a lack of time, I focused mostly on the character's body. I did not have the luxury to add on her wings, hair, and expressions to most of the scenes. I have also yet to animate the actual product itself. Nonetheless, the gist of everything is there.
I have received feedback, from Fanny, for the animation of some scenes and there are changes to be made. However, I plan to edit them as I line/colour to save time. I plan to finish colouring most of the scenes by this week so chop chop!
I also realise that my character is quite small in most of her scenes as a lot of them are full-body shots. This means I will not be able to add in that much detail. I'm thinking about going with an animation style like this gif by Simone Föhl. It is simple and lineless without much detail, but the shapes are so clear and the animation so flowy. I think this style will suit my character and story very well.
I believe that's all for this week! Blocking the scenes took up most of the time. Hopefully I'll be able to come back with my flat colours laid down next week. See you!
4 April 2022