Mashed
and no I aint talking about the potatoes
During the final term of my second year at Ravensbourne we had two artists/workers from Mashed, a YouTube channel in cahoots with Channel 4 come in to work with us. They specialise in parody based animations based around the gaming industry. It was a group project in which I became the leader for 17 people. They gave us a script and dialogue recording and we each had to do a bit of animation to go along with the script and voices. Simple as. I can only show you my part of the collaboration, but enjoy the animation for what it's worth.
This is my segment of the collaborative Rick and Morty animation that Mashed colloborated with our class to make. Whilst admitadly this was done last year. Since it was the best bit of 2D work I have done before my third year. I included it as I am proud of this work more then the rest. I think it shows the best of my at the abilities to put it simply, and this was a great learning experiance for me, and learn I did. Suffice to say I feel pride.
First of appologies for the audio. It got bitcrushed by Adobe Animate. As you will have seen though that problem gets resolved rather quickly. So just bare with it for this one clip. Besides that this is basially the half way point between finished animation and the animatic you will see saw. I hope you can see the clear progression since the animatic and how it is on its way to become the final product. The foundations are there and that much is clear. which is my main point here. This is to show you I am capable of making my own foundations to build upon.
My animatic, which was critiqued and approved by the folks over at Mashed. Simple sure but what animatic isn’t? you'll probably notice how it has pretty much stayed the same from this animatic to the final product, and that is beacuse bar some minor detials one would only notice if told, they liked it enough that they said I didnt really need to change it at its core. One example of an actual change is when rick pulls in morty the screen closes in on the two by a small margin. So yea small changes, many posative notes. Not trying to toot my own horn but I am proud of the fact that from start to end on the whole mashed was very happy.
References
Since we were gonna be doing a Rick and Morty parody I thought best to do parody versions of Rick and Morty, thusly I went back to their origins. Doc Brown and Marty Mcfly. As I hope you can see from the refrences. Since it was a parody and the main body was animation I just did this one bit of charcter design no real need to do more. As mashed corroborated with me. It's clear from the get go what I'm parodying, provided you've seen the film, and that was the only criteri. So from that sense I nailed it.
This was just the basic room layout I made for everyone to use so at least when our animations were conbined it was clear they ocupied the same space. Simple but for a basic frame of refence its perfect.
Agian just a better larger image of my main references for the character designs.
This here is a shot from the actual show I used to establish morty's "roomal geography".
This here is a shot from the actual show I used to establish morty's "roomal geography".
Relevance, reflection, application and future
Relevance? well while I didn't make this within this term I still feel it's good enough to be put into my protfolio. So just for a start that is why this is here, but relevance? As a charcter animator I believe at some point I will undoubtedly have to animate towards a piece of audio and or dialogue. So this helped me gain experience two fold in that it gave me great experiance with lip sync as well as animating towards beat's within a time frame that are matching up with a section of audio. To a lesser degree the ability to parody which while not vital is a skill I plan to use in the future. lastly the fact that I was in a group and working with live clients was really great experience.
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Secondly reflection. whilst this was over half a year ago now I do belive for that the time gap has given me ample time to look at this with new eyes. I really like the character designs and how they parody Back To The Future as do I like the backgrounds. In terms of what I would change? I think the long noodle arms Rick has I could make abit more animated. I think looking back on it I underutilized them. Additionally when Rick walks in from screen left to face morty I would alter the timing and make it less smooth. It feels almost computer generated and not like a person actually turning.
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Thirdly, application. Start simple, the animating to beats within audio, not literal beats, more like key points within the timeline for the audio. So point a, point b, c, d, etc. This can be applied anywhere on any animation cuase when one breaks down an animation you will find it's just a sequential list of specific story of visual beats. Secondly, lipysync. This agian can in theory be used in any animation with dialogue or noises being made from characters of some sort. When you break down a word or a noise into its individual letters or syllables you begin to learn the mouth patterns that are made and how they are made, then all you need do is replicate that in your animation additionally I went a little overboard I feel here. cuase the lipsync is what I'm most proud of. Most animations have very basic lipsync since with few frames they make it simpler since you wouldn't see much of a transition anyway. Mouth flaps to be simple. Mastly the group aspect needs patience, compromise and trust which just needs to be applied to the team and the clients. Basicly just treat everyone like a human being and you should be fine.
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Lastly future. A character animator having a basic understanding of lipsync and beats is essential and always great skills to enhance over time to get your foot in the door to the industry. Addituonally I will do more animations like this over the years. Also the experance with a client can already go on my list of people I have worked with for stuff such as my CV. It gives me good connections to utilise in the future. So potentially since Mashed now knows me and my work they may hopefully come back to be agian.