During week 6 Sarah introduced us to the 5 second club task. The whole point of this task is to take a 5 second audio clip and create an animation that goes along with this. There is a large variety of clips and we students can choose to use whichever one we want. The only stipulation for this task is that we must create a storyboard and animatic to go along with our animation.
The audio clip to the left is the one I have chosen to use for my project. I choose this scream because I think it is the most simple out of the lot and means I wouldn't necessarily have to do a lot of lip sync. Using just this scream allows me a lot of creative freedom when it comes to the character and what they're doing.
My initial idea is to have a little ghost boi doing the scream. This is because I feel that the audio kind of sounds like that stereotypical ghost boo but just more drawn out, its in that same tone.
Once I had my idea I started looking for reference images and the first thing that came to mind was ghost in a Jar from Rick and Morty. This character has that cute little ghost shape and I thought this would be perfect for my character in this task.
I then went into procreate and did up a few sketches of what I thought my ghost boy could look like. I decided on this very simple design, quite similar to ghost in a jar but without the arms at his side. When I need the arms I decided that they can just appear from his being because he is a ghost and they can do that.
I then tried out some other key poses I thought I would need throughout, I suppose this is kind of like a character turn around. I had this idea that I wanted my ghost to turn and move so a side on pose was needed. I tried to add a bit of detail with the teeth , nose and "skin" lines, I think they look very good overall and just add to the character design. After I had finished these drawings I moved onto the storyboard for my animation.
I have shown the storyboard below, it is pretty simple overall. the main jist is that the ghost start screaming and then gets more dramatic as he moves with his flailing tongue and arms. At the end of the audio, just as the scream is about to stop the ghost hits a ghost proof wall. Not very common for ghosts but I thought that it would add a wee bit of comedy to the animation and I just find it funny.
Once I had finished my storyboard I moved into Adobe Animate and did up a quick sketch for what I thought my animation could be like. It is extremely rough and the timing is very much off but i just wanted to see what it could potentially look like.
I then took the sketch and decided I would try to animate out the turn of the ghost as he moves from straight on to right facing. Again the timing is completely off but I think when it is fixed up the added frames for the turn would work well and that it will probably look quite smooth as a result.
Once I had my sketch animation done out I wanted to create an animatic with the finished line drawn key poses. I used the sketches as an aid when creating my key poses and just tried to draw out each position that I think is important for the animation. I tried to do the timing as well with the audio, however the audio is not included in this clip as I couldn't get it to work properly at the time.
From here I then moved into my first animation attempt. Because I had created this animatic I was able to take it and essentially create in-betweens.
Above is my first attempt at the animation, as you can see there is a few different parts I didn't quite account for when I initially created my animatic. These where that the bottom of the ghost, tongue and arm all need to constantly be flailing. The hardest to animate correctly out of these three was the bottom of the ghost. This was because it has to essentially move from one end to the other in like a wave motion, so each frame needs to be correct in movement for the frame before it. Getting this to look right and cohesive was actually really difficult and even though it might not look like it, it took me a long time to get this to a place I was happy with. In order to get it to constantly repeat throughout the animation I was able to reuse a function in Adobe Animate called "create a Symbol". This basically allows you to create a scene within a scene. Within this symbol I was able to create my wave like movement and then in my proper animation scene it constantly repeats itself and then I was left with this cohesive movement throughout the animation.
The tongue was also a bit tricky as it too also needed to have this wave like motion, but overall it wasn't as hard as it wasn't necessarily a key point of the animation and it could afford to be a wee bit jankier. Again I made use of the symbol function and this allowed the frames to repeat.
Lastly the arms needed to be animated. Using the symbol function they were the easiest to do. I just had to create a few different frames which didn't necessarily need to be in cohesion with each other as I just wanted to create that crazy flailing arm affect. The arms and tongue allowed me to create a nice secondary action throughout the animation.
Above is the second iteration of my animation. I decided that the start had a bit of dead time were the ghost was just standing there doing nothing so I played with the idea oh having him look off to the left before he starts moving to the right. I did this with the use of motion tweens on both the eyes and the mouth. I think it works but I'm not sure it necessarily makes the animation any better so at this stage I'm not sure if I will keep it in.
To the left I have my final animation. As you can see I decided not to go with the turn at the start, but instead have the ghost move in from a far, giving the effect it is moving closer to the screen. I think this works a lot better as the motion just feels a lot less robotic.
I added a moving floor to simulate the movement to the right. This was easily done as I just used a motion tween to move the floor to the left rather than moving the whole ghost. I think this looks pretty good and does indeed give the look of motion within the ghost.
Finally I added the splat onto the wall at the end and the "ghost proof wall" text at the end. The ghost splat was actually really fun to animate because I got to mess around with squash and stretch on the body, some of the freeze frames on the tongue get pretty squished.
Above I have the final animation along with the sound effects given at the start, Overall I am pretty happy with how my animation has turned out, I think the character design is a pretty cool lil ghost boi and I think his movements are pretty clean. I find the final splat into the ghost proof wall pretty amusing and in a way it creates this concept that in this universe there is ghost proof and non-ghost proof walls, which look the same, which I find quite amusing. There is definitely some things I would change if I was to do this task again though. These include:
1. The timing. I think that overall the ghost moves quite slow, so I would probably speed him up a little bit. I think this is more to do with the speed of his bottom wave and arms etc rather than the speed of the floor. I think if you speed all his elements up it would help simulate his motion a lot more, right now he is quite slow. However I still think it works because most of the time ghosts are pretty slow.
2. I would add something more at the start. I think he sits a bit too long in that forward facing position. I just think some other kind of movement to break it up a bit would work better.
3. Adding to the point above, I think maybe adding more mouth movement in the front facing position might help with this. It would also add more effect to his scream and give off a more authentic look that he is actually the one doing the screaming.
4. Finally I wish I added a bit more detail to the ghost himself like I did in my initial sketches. I just think it would of made it look that wee bit better and added that extra element to the animation of the character.