AGI Studio 1 Folio Plan 2

This is the folio plan 2 for the second half of AGI Studio.

RATIONALE: Why are you doing it?

My overall goal for the studio hasn’t changed much. But it has evolved a little. I still aim at creating a storyboard for the animation I have in mind, that can serve as the key frames for the shots. I have dedicated a lot of time to simply practice drawing digitally on the ipad to get comfortable with the process. I was happy with my final character designs of the 3 main characters (out of 4) and I tried to incorporate as much character in their design keeping in mind it was ultimately for animation.

I want to make sure that I bring some of the characters I grew up with, to life through animation. Having developed a design and aesthetic I am content with, my next primary goal along with the storyboard is to create some animation loops and action. After talking to Emmette I have decided to work on some animation loops of the characters simply standing and breathing, working on the subtle nuances of each character which tells more about them through these simple loops. I also want to animate the characters performing some attack action, to display more about them through weight and movement. Though I am not religious, I still feel the stories these characters tell are very interesting and fascinating. And I want to start by learning to animate them by showing their characteristics through a short, animated piece.

CONTEXT/FIELD: Who else is doing it?

Having studied a lot of digital artists for the initial process, it’s not that I will stop referring them, but I will slowly shift more of my focus towards animators. I will also start looking at some artists who specialise in storyboarding. Some of the initial artists and styles who I will look into are as follows:

• Studio Sideline (Vaibhav Singh, Sailesh Gopalan, Derek D’Souza, Preetham Gunalan)
• Framebyframe_animation (Instagram)
• Sakuga Animation (Eiichiro Oda, Makato Shinkai, Hayao Miyazaki)
• Tom Barkel

METHOD: Iterative Loops and reflection

I did fall short of some of the goals I set out for the first folio. But having said that, a few of the things mentioned there have also changed a little. A rough idea for the weeks ahead:

Week 7: Draw a look for character 1 to see how they would look. Start working on developing the storyboard.

Week 8: Animate the other 2 characters and develop the storyboard further.

Week 9: Continue developing more of the storyboard and test some longer animation sequence.

Week 10: Try and finish a rough version of the storyboard.

Week 11: Start working on finalised version of the storyboard. Try some more animation loops or sequences.

Week 12: Get to the point of drawing some key frames for animation and look into creating backgrounds using the 2.5D method to simplify the process to animate backgrounds (need to research more)

TOOLS: How will you make it work?

For the initial loops of animation, I will continue using ProCreate. I am going to look into TV Paint and ToonBoom for animation before committing to any software. I might change that decision as I research more as well. I am going to study and investigate After Effects for background creation at a later stage if I find the time.