Nutrigen Website Design Journal: Audio Visual

Showing posts with label Audio Visual. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Final Video

After preparing all the graphic materials, the video was compiled in Adobe After Effects along with the sound. A master copy was then rendered in order to convert into various formats. Special thanks to my girl friend Fing who lend a hand in basic color filling of the main character, Kenny Lim who is working in Animonsta for help in audio design, and my lecturers Mr K and Mdm Rina for giving the opportunity to try on the most graphically-heavy project so far in my life =D

Character Orbiting Animation

One of the scene includes a 90 degree rotation of the main character's upper body.
Since this could not be done with simple tweening, I decided to draw it frame-by-frame.
By skipping 1 frame at a time, I managed to draw a rather smooth rotation in 8 frames.
It's my first time to draw a frame-by-frame on a human face.

First of all, by turning on 'onion skin' in Adobe Flash, I used the brush tool to roughly draw the animation.

Next, by exporting all the frames into jpeg, I traced the pictures using pen tool in Adobe Illustrator for a tidier outline.

After that, I copied the outline to Adobe Photoshop as 'Smart Object', and added colors and shadows using brush.

Lastly, working in Adobe Flash again, I animated it along with the background,
and exported as JPEG sequence for compilation in Adobe After Effects.

Digital Painting

Below is the step-by-step process when painting the background.

First of all, the perspective grid was created and a sketchy outline was drawn

In a trial painting, I planned to paint basic color first and then enhance the edges, shading and details,
but I realized that this process is very inefficient as it takes too much time to finish a single drawing.

On a second trial, I first draw a vector shape using pen tool to define the area.

Highlights and shadings are then painted in a layer clipped to the vector shape.

After finish painting the classroom, I decided to take a few more hours to add in more details.

A few bags and books were added in the painting. Almost time to start the next background.

Lastly, to enhance the overall mood and feel, a color balance adjustment layer has been added,
adding some blue color on the shadow and yellow color on the highlight.

The same digital painting workflow has been used in most of the scenes in the video. The first painting took me about two to three days, however as I get used to the technique, it only took me three to four hours to finish a background painting.

Storyboard Digitalization

Most of the digitalization process took part in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The frame-by-frame motion-tweening part was first sketched in Flash, then traced and colored in Adobe Illustrator. All of them were done in a resolution of at least 1280x960 so that the resized version will look clearer and better. Please click the pictures for a larger view.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Character Redesign

Character redesign process

Since I wasn't very satisfied with the mascot design, I tried to enhance the character, first from the shape of mouth, then on the outfit, and lastly I added a pair of rabbit ears on it.

The reason why I choose rabbit is because rabbit somehow looks tame on the outside and naughty on the inside, which very much matching with the personality that I intended to inject on the main character.

Some reference on the character design includes Bugs Bunny, Usavich and Tuzki.

Storyboard

Click the pictures to enlarge

Character Design

Basic manga facial-expression study

Gamer avatar

Musician/Rocker avatar

Concept Arts

The world in the main character's head after drinking Nutrigen

Early Concept 3

Early composition, in reference of works by Jeremyville and Jon Burgerman

Sleeping brain cells

Improved design of brain cells (in reference to the basic shape of human neural cells)

Promises

Brain development
Good digestion

Benefits

Smarter
Healthier

Promise

You will have more power than anyone else, like a superhero

Direction

Cheering, happening, pop

Concept

Japanese anime, pop art, motion graphics, disco ball, concert

Idea

Colorful, mascot with strong personality

Reference

Early Concept 2

Everyone has an avatar that portrays third party perception of him/herself
(basically looks exactly like him/her)

In this concept, the pet is the avatar, the soul of the owner
(like the movie "The Golden Compass")

After drinking Nutrigen, your mind will be energized, and so does your soul