Practical Skills
In this section, I'm going to be detailing and reflecting on all the animation work I'm doing for Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development (which is the name of my Final Major Project), that way you'll be able to read about my rather unique exploits and even get a little bit of insight as to how I handle this kind of thing and as an added bonus, I'll be proving the academic validity of video games for the final time in the process. So without further ado, let's get this section underway, starting with...
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 1: The Party Begins
Well folks, I'll admit that today wasn't the most productive start I could have had, especially when compared to last year's "The Grand Lamppost Heist", as I needed to go ahead and get everything I would need together in order to actually start, which in fairness didn't take too long since all I needed were three characters (Kyoto, Super Sheep and Ruff Bup), one prop (the name tag), a few timelines (one to serve as the main timeline and three more inside said timeline for each character in order to make animating them easier), a few text displayers (mainly so that I could do the title) some keyframes, the music and even the camera tool, but it was what I did afterwards where things started to drag a little bit, but first here are a few things I learned today. One: When a timeline is inside another timeline (which I'm just going to call "sub-timelines" for simplicity's sake), make sure the tempo doesn't change partway through, as it'll cause the sub-timeline to go between it's original speed and the new speed every frame, which creates a very weird effect which if handled properly could be a unique way of expressing some kind of mental fracture in the characters. Two: setting the density of every sculpture that makes up a character's body to 0 and zooming into the timeline can actually help with making the animation a bit more choppy looking. And three: allowing a one frame gap between two mouth keyframes can prevent an issue where said mouth briefly changes to the wrong pose for a single frame.
​
Now that we've established that, let's get down to business. Today, I mainly just set up shop in a new remix I made of the first location and started to animate the scene where Kyoto Kasuma wakes up and finds Super Sheep and Ruff Bup on the other side of a hill. First I decided to get all the characters into their starting pose from frame one so that when they eventually come onto the screen I don't have to worry about people seeing them in their default poses (or as most other animators would call them, "T-poses" or "A-poses", the naming usually depends on whether the characters arms are positioned to form a T or A shape), in the case of Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, they won't be on the screen for a good long while, so I can just leave them frozen in their first pose since animating them would be a wasted effort until just before the audience are able to see them. (this particular trick is used all the time in video games and animated works)
​
Despite doing a few small experiments to get myself into the swing of animating characters in a more choppy fashion than normal, animating Kyoto (from what little I've done thus far) is already proving to be a fairly different experience from what I've done previously, as unlike with a character like Super Sheep or Ruff Bup where I can have a bit of tweening between each of their poses, I can't really have smooth tweening between the poses because then it wouldn't be authentic to the style of anime as a whole, where the characters are usually a bit choppier than their western counterparts, so I actually have to animate the inbetween poses by hand, which I've never had to do before. With this in mind, she'll likely prove to be the most difficult character I've ever had the pleasure of animating so far, especially in this short where she'll be interacting with characters who carry smoother movements than her.
​
Because the characters heads are so rounded (especially in the case of Super Sheep and Ruff Bup), it can cause a part of their head to get shrouded in shadow, and unfortunately that can make the mouth (which is one of the most expressive parts of a characters face besides the eyes) quite difficult to see at times, but since Ruff Bup and Super Sheep are facing Kyoto, I can't simply move the sun until all their mouths become easier to see, so I've actually decided to go ahead and bust out a little bit of additional lighting just so that you can see the characters mouths clearly. (especially when they're talking) sure, it might not be coming from the same direction as the global lighting, but I always like to sacrifice realism if it makes for a better story anyway so it'll be worth it (I.E: A cartoon sheep getting sucked into a tornado, a space-rubbish cleaner and even an ant dog creature having to get a lamppost back)
​
Hopefully I can start to pick up the pace later on in the animation process, which I anticipate I'll really be able to do once college starts up again since then I can pretty much animate all day which come to think of it, may have been why The Grand Lamppost Heist may have had such a productive start in the first place.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 2: Slowly Making Progress
Much like yesterday, things progressed quite slowly, as all I managed to get done today was the entire second shot, in part because I only spent less than an hour actually working on the project today rather than the two hours I spent yesterday.
​
With this in mind, you wouldn't think there would be much to note today, and you'd be right because of how little I got done, but there was at least one trick I decided to pull in order to have Kyoto rub her head in a continuous loop. (which spoiler warning, will come up later on during this phase) Basically what I did was create yet another timeline, copy the keyframe that's tied to Kyoto sitting up into said timeline and then I copied that keyframe and altered the position of the arms and hands twice and then I copied and reversed the order of all those keyframes so that I could have a looping animation which I can place into Kyoto's sub-timeline and control how many times the cycled animation loops before stopping. The original approach I took with this before making The Grand Lamppost Heist involved the animation cycles being stored inside the character's microchip and being switched on and off by a separate keyframe on the main timeline (or the character's sub-timeline if we're talking about projects after Captain Cartridge And Friends In Operation Compact Disc), which ended up being slightly more cumbersome, as not only was transitioning in and out of the cycles a little bit harder due to not being able to see what the last frame would be as readily, but it also added to the gameplay thermometer as well because remember, wires and animation are their own category, and keyframes generate invisible wires that connect to the object(s)/character(s) being affected. With this in mind, I'm quite glad I made the switch when making The Grand Lamppost Heist, as not only am I able to tell when the cycle will end, but I also don't need to worry about having a separate keyframe turning the cycled animation, but it also makes transitioning in and out of said cycles much easier. Speaking of cycles, I'd say Kyoto may end up proving to be one of the easiest characters to make cycles for, since each keyframe of the animation lasts around three or four frames in order to mimic that slightly choppy effect most anime tends to have as a result of being animated on threes and fours rather than ones and twos, and since there's not tweening going on, the final frame is guaranteed to be easy to transition out of unlike other characters who may have a slightly difficult time doing this because there's a chance the final frame may be during a tween rather than a keypose.
​
Other than that, not much really happened.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 3: Getting Farther
Ok, now that I'm able to animate a little bit more throughout the day, I'm starting to make more and more progress with each stream.
​
Today, I was able to make it all the way to the part where Kyoto decides to go ahead and investigate the hill (since this stream lasted two hours and forty minutes before I decided to stop and go play Lego Star Wars again) and a few notable things actually happened this time.
​
Yesterday, when I was animating Kyoto, I'd noticed that part of her foot was phasing through her shoe, in any other software such as Blender or Maya, this would be a little bit more difficult to fix, as you'd have to go into the model, fix it up and then you'd have to re-animate everything you did all over again but this time remember to use the new version of the model. Luckily for me, I'm not using Blender or Maya yet, I'm using Dreams for the PS4/5, so fixing this issue was just a matter of going into the original asset, fixing the issue, and updating the model using "update mode" and boom, no re-animation process needed since all keyframe data and changes are still retained. Although there is still an issue where her shoe doesn't cover enough of her foot when she's walking. Hey, speaking of Kyoto walking, doing her walk cycle proved to be quite an interesting task to say the least, as since I didn't want any tweening to happen during the animation (with the exception of the position, since if I did that it would make her movements reminiscent of old Game and Watch consoles which, while that might be a cool effect for me to try out at some point, I'm not really aiming for this time around), I actually had to think a little bit more carefully about where the foot will end up in each keyframe, since if I made the movements too extreme it would look a bit too janky but if I made the movements too subtle then the choppy effect I'm going for won't be as apparent and the movements will be too smooth.
​
One of the harder things I had to do today was figure out how to have Kyoto smoothly climb the mountain, as I had to be careful when changing her angle to be perpendicular to the hill without the animation looking weird (I.E: having Kyoto briefly float towards the incline), plus I also had to make sure the changes in position were fast enough to match her walking speed since the effect would be ruined if she went too fast or too slow (since if she goes too fast it'll break the pacing of the shot but if she's too slow not only will it look really weird when her legs imply that she's going faster than she is, but it also drags the shot out way too long), so I had to make sure everything played out correctly while also having Kyoto's walk out last Super Sheep scolding Ruff Bup for not paying attention.
​
Oh hey, speaking of Super Sheep scolding Ruff Bup for not paying attention, while I was doing the animation, I also felt it was prudent to start plopping the voice clips into the mix. I decided it would be best for me to place each voice clip in as and when it's needed since I find this method to be the easiest personally. Originally I wanted to have Kyoto perk her ears as soon as Ruff Bup started talking, but later on I decided to shift the timing so that she perks her ears slightly after Ruff Bup started talking in order to avoid the timing of the dialogue and animation clashing with the storyboards too much. I know there were moments where I went off board in the past and it worked out alright, and it'll probably happen at some point during this project, but I think something like this where dialogue timing is at stake might be a bit much.
​
Tomorrow, I'll finally be able to unfreeze Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, since now I'm almost at the point where they'll start appearing on screen. I can't wait to finally tackle the challenge of having a choppy anime style character interacting with a couple of western cartoon characters, as the contrast between both sides will be the crux of the conflict between Super Sheep and Kyoto Kasuma.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 4: Getting Way Over My Head
Yup, it's been a whole 4 days and I'm still only on the first sequence of the cartoon, officially making this the longest time I've spent on an opening scene since Captain Cartridge and Friends in Operation Compact Disc. (probably because I've been doing this over half term rather than in my college time, so hopefully things should pick up once college starts) With this in mind, today didn't go as smoothly as I would have hoped, as a good chunk of it was spent making small optimisations so that the paintings that make up the characters eyes and mouth won't randomly disappear due to there being too many paintings on screen at once and so that I could have more room in the gameplay thermometer to actually do the animation. (such optimisations included deleting portions of the ground and even getting rid of unneeded features on some of the models such as the ability to change Super Sheep's wool colour and so on) Even with those optimisations however, I'm still using up a good thirty percent on the animation part of the gameplay thermometer, and I can tell that much of it is spent on Kyoto herself since her movements need to look choppy in order for the contrast between east and west to be apparent, (not to mention, it's the entire reason she and Super Sheep even get into a fight in the first place) and on top of that I can already tell that the lip syncing process for Super Sheep and Ruff Bup is also going to take a hefty toll on the gameplay thermometer as well if I don't think of a way to optimise it.
​
Luckily for me, I actually was able to come up with a potential solution after choosing to end things after I started the lip sync process, as I ended up thinking to myself "hold on, instead of taking my normal approach to lip sync, what if I took the same approach that a lot of anime does and just have the characters flap their lips along to the words, thus not only allowing me to save on precious thermometer space but also to be more authentic to actual anime as a whole." This decision will give my short more of an "English dub" type of situation since I don't speak Japanese), of course I never actually built these characters with that kind of thing in mind since the thought never cropped up until now so tomorrow I'll have to find a good way to make it work with what I currently have.
​
As for what little actual animation I actually got done today, there wasn't too much to note here, just that I've now made it to the part where Super Sheep and Ruff Bup are on screen, although I did have to change Ruff Bup's initial pose due to the timing of one of Super Sheep's lines ending slightly later than anticipated.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 5: Three Is Four Now?
Ok, it seems in all my worrying over getting the project done on time, I ended up thinking I'd already done a third stream when naming the real third stream of the day. (hence why the order goes one, two and four rather than one, two and three like it's supposed to)
​
All that aside, I was able to actually make some fairly steady progress today, as this time I mainly worked on doing the animation work for both Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, which I found significantly more comfortable to do since I could just use the normal methods I always use where I work on all the key poses and then let the tweening take care of many of the in-betweens. The only thing that's really changed with how I animate these characters at this point is that I decided to go ahead and implement that Japanese lip syncing method I briefly mentioned yesterday, and let me tell you. The amount of keyframes this could save is astronomical, as I only need a whole two or three keyframes per additional timeline. At one point, I did accidentally make Ruff Bup's lips move to one of Super Sheep's lines but it was a relatively quick fix.
​
One thing I will say before I leave for today is that I actually do have a contingency in place for if things were to go belly up for this project. The gist of it is that if things go wrong, I'll simply have to go ahead and cut the project short by having it end on a cliff hanger instead, then after all is said and done, I can use the summer break in order to take care of the second half of the story and then put the two together at the end, thus leading to this project effectively becoming like Sonic The Hedgehog 3: And Knuckles. (which fun fact, was also meant to be one game but then got split into two due to time constraints) Of course, this'll come at the cost of Super Sheep in Hollyweird Hijinks getting put on the backburner, although hopefully things should go smoothly for the rest of production and I don't end up having to resort to splitting the whole thing into two.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Spiffing Project Management Update
Well folks, it looks like the half term period is about to end, as Tuesday is the day we officially come back into College. (except me, I still have the rest of my FMP to make and the college still don't have PlayStation consoles for me to use sadly) As for the project itself, I'd say I'm currently on track but due to all the time I spent animating the first sequence, I'm beginning to realise I'm skating on thin ice at the moment. Luckily for me I can pick up the page from Tuesday and onwards, as now I'll officially be back on the college time table
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program: Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 6: We Did It, The Beginning Is Complete!
Well folks, after six days of varying intensities of difficulty and worrying whether or not I'd even pull this off, I've finally managed to complete the first major sequence in my FMP, and with one day left until college actually starts back up again, so hopefully it means each scene won't end up taking almost an entire week to animate. (although I did end up taking a bit of a shortcut near the end as I decided to go off board)
​
I did not expect the animation process for this sequence to be as long as it was, but given the fact I was animating this during the second week of half term, I probably should have foresaw that it wouldn't anywhere near as fast as the animation process for The Grand Lamppost Heist put together. Not to mention the toll it ended up taking on the "animation and wires" section of the gameplay thermometer (what with the over 50% chunk I ended up using to animate the characters), so I may need to find ways to optimise the animation process so that the keyframes associated with Kyoto in particular don't end up causing each scene to risk reaching the full 100% limit.
​
As for the animation process itself, things sailed along quite nicely actually, as I ended up deciding how I would handle the hand shake with Ruff Bup and Kyoto. What I did with them is that I stuck two sets of keyframes into a timeline (one for Ruff Bup and one for Kyoto herself) and then I made it so that Ruff Bup's arm briefly adopts Kyoto's choppy animation style upon both characters making contact since it would look weird if Ruff Bup kept his smoother animation style, but at the same time I didn't want to briefly give Kyoto a smoother animation style since I feel that would wreck the whole point of this short's existence (I assume most anime characters wouldn't randomly adopt a smooth animation style upon contact with a character that's animated smoothly), after I took care of that, things more or less went back to normal, albeit with me keeping more of an eye on the thermometer as it slowly climbed up with each keyframe I added (luckily, I still ended up having a decent amount of leg room for the potential clean up phase later on, but I'm attributing that to the intentionally bad lip sync saving the day with it's cyclical nature)
​
Another factor that allowed me to finish the scene was that during the last shot, instead of having Ruff Bup and Kyoto walk into the portal like in the storyboards, I instead just had the camera dolly towards the portal and have a fade to blue (since I feel it'll make the transition to the Scripture Zone more smooth and seamless) in order to avoid having to animate the two characters walking. Of course, there'll still be quite a bit of walking going on in the next sequence, so don't worry about that one.
​
While I was doing that however, I also had to modify the "Awkward Introductions" music in order to make it better fit with the visuals and dialogue on screen, I.E: when Ruff Bup and Super Sheep introduce themselves, I wanted to have it so that the music would switch between each character's leitmotif respectively (meaning when Ruff Bup introduces himself, his theme would play where as when it's Super Sheep's turn to introduce himself, his theme would come on instead), much like what I predicted with the music making part of the asset production phase. (in fact, I decided to compose the music with that idea in mind this time around) Luckily, since this is Dreams PS4/5, I was able to make the modifications with great ease.
​
Tomorrow, I'll finally get to move on to making the second sequence, which is where the actual fight between Super Sheep and Kyoto Kasuma begins, thus fulfilling the promise I made in the title, and since I'll officially be on my college time table, it means I should hopefully be able to pick up the pace and make up for lost ground from during the Easter break.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 7: It's Been A Week Already
Wow, today really has been quite productive. It's almost as if being back on college time means I can get on with the animation process without being interrupted as much, and not to mention I'm also technically obligated to animate all day now anyway, so it works out quite well for me in the end.
​
Today, I managed to get one of the best starts I've had in a while, as over the course of the day I was actually able to animate a large chunk of the second sequence and the memory usage in terms of the "Wires and Keyframes" part of the gameplay thermometer is currently not a major issue (although it is still slowly creeping upwards, as I've been keeping at least one eye on it the whole time), although a part of the reason for this is because much of the animation was done via cycles, I.E: the walking, Ruff Bup's Sonic inspired foot tapping animation (because I usually like to sprinkle in Sonic references whenever I think I can get away with it), although overall it felt a whole lot easier due to the fact I was mainly working with one or two characters (since again, Ruff Bup's spending most of this sequence off screen) and I could animate one of them using my usual more western inspired animation style (which I've become moderately ok at over the past three years), although the animation process for Kyoto is starting to get just a little bit easier for me, although I'm not sure whether to attribute this to me actually improving or the fact she just doesn't move as much as she does in the opening sequence since here, she goes into a moving hold for quite a long time (A "moving hold" for those of you that don't know or may need a refresher is where a character stops moving entirely, they usually last for a few frames at a time and is most commonly seen in a lot of 2D works such as The Lion King and The Simpsons)
​
The reason there ended up being three streams instead of the usual two is because six minutes into part two, the entire stream ended up cutting off (all these years later and things are still going wrong on the technical side of things), although it was still a nice excuse to make yet another Sonic 3 And Knuckles reference in the title (does it really count as "another reference" if it's just the same one repeated over and over again?), luckily my PlayStation was kind enough to let me know this, so not a whole lot of evidence ended up being lost in the process.
​
While we're on the topic of issues, I ended up encountering something really strange when doing the positioning for some of the characters (mainly Ruff Bup since he's the one that had this issue first), as when I put another position keyframe within the same row on the same sub-timeline, it would cause said characters to randomly speed up and slow down during the original walk. I was quite baffled at this since most of the time these additional keyframes were quite far away from the initial walking animation but my theory is that this likely has something to do with how I initially had one or two keyframes handle all the characters' positions at once and then I split them off after the fact, although luckily the fix for this was quite simple since all I had to do was move the new keyframes away from that same row. (or even the same sub-timeline)
​
Overall, I'm quite happy with the progress I've made today, as tomorrow I can get started on the part where Kyoto and Super Sheep begin fighting each other, which I anticipate will be one of the more difficult sequences to do because I haven't got much experience with this kind of scene. (I tried doing it once as an experiment but then gave up because I figured it would take too long, although I'm not giving up this time) As for whether we'll have to worry about this being split up Sonic 3 And Knuckles style? Well not to jinx myself with over confidence, I think it's safe to say that'll most likely not need to happen since now that I'm back on the college timetable I can make significantly more progress in a single day than I could overwise. (but given the nature of these kinds of projects, take what I say here with a grain of salt)
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 8: Attack Of The Words That Sound Like The Number Eight
I figured since I'd managed to reach day eight of the animation phase, I decided to try and fill the title of the stream with other words that sound similar to the number eight, I.E: mate, fate, great and date (the last of which I didn't include because I forgot), now that that's been cleared up let's get down to what I actually did today.
​
Things were relatively breezy all things considered, as today I mainly worked on animating Super Sheep and Kyoto's pre fight interactions those being Super Sheep telling her he's ready to throw down while she aggressively signals for him to come at her. A bulk of the work done here was actually on Kyoto herself, since like I've been repeating throughout the process like a broken record, Kyoto's choppier animation style naturally requires that I use more keyframes whenever I need her to move around, and when animating the shots where both characters end up smashing their fists into their hands, I think I may have accidentally given myself an easy reference point to compare how I handle the animation for both characters, as when I animated Kyoto Kasuma smashing her fist into her hand, I had to go and do all the poses manually because of the lack of tweening between each pose (counting the pose she starts off in during that shot, I ended up using four keyframes one after another for that particular gesture alone), where as when I animated Super Sheep doing that very same gesture, it only took me three keyframes (counting the initial pose he starts at before doing the gesture) to pull the whole thing off because I was able to have a bit of tweening between each keyframe in order to create smoother looking movements.
​
While I was doing that, I also had to make sure the soundtrack itself matched the visuals by making modifications as and when they would be needed. Again, this was easy because Dreams just lets me change the music in the scene like that without affecting the original asset.
​
Hey, speaking of modifying stuff, I decided to change Kyoto's zoom out into a zoom in because I felt she took up too little of the screen with that full body shot I originally wanted, plus I decided to change her knuckle cracking animation into simply her smashing her fist into her hand and then gesturing Super Sheep as if to say "bring it, shrimp!" since I felt the bone cracking sound I wanted to use didn't feel like a "knuckle cracking" noise, although I did use it when Super Sheep rammed his fist into his hand as a means to imply the bony nature of Super Sheep's arms and legs, so that sound effect still ended up getting used in the end, just not where I wanted it originally.
​
Normally, this is where things would end, but since I actually got the pre fight interactions done faster than I thought I would, I thought to myself "perhaps now's a good time to go improve Kyoto's character model". (which I've actually been thinking about doing for a while to be honest but I figured now was as good a time as any) If I were doing this under a different bit of software such as Blender, Maya, Source Filmmaker or what have you, this would be a bit more of a difficult task since I'd then have to go into the model file, touch it up and then go through each individual scene replacing the old version with the new one (and thus I'd have to re-do all the animations I'd done up until that point), luckily for me however, this is is Dreams PS4/5, so doing this was easy peasy, as once I finished with the original model, I just had to go into the scenes where the old version appeared and use update mode to apply the new changes, and since all the changes were related to textures and stuff in the tweak menu, there was no need to re-do all the animations from scratch, as the keyframe data would still be retained once I hit that update button. (although I did still check back for glitches that may need fixing) As for the actual changes, I just decided to muddy up her yellow vest top using the spray paint tool in sculpt mode and making sure that all the sculpts that make up the model were non collidable and had 0% on their density sliders so that I wouldn't have to go through that hassle in the future. I also decided it would be a good idea to make her clothes less shiny in order to put a little bit of realism into the character design since last time I checked, most fabrics don't tend to shimmer and shine.
​
Tomorrow I'll be working on the actual fight scene itself, which may very well take several days to finish since fight scenes are quite difficult to animate. (unless it involves a fight cloud like what I did with The Grand Lamppost Heist)
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 9: Finishing The First Part Of The Fight Scene And Making Bad Puns
I definitely had the right idea in deciding to stop animating before doing the fight scene yesterday, as I was able to get the whole thing to play out today and I even to do a tiny amount of work on the part where Kyoto and Super Sheep are on top of the giant keyboard characters in the sky (which as you can tell, I've decided to overhaul the beginning in order to take advantage of that speed effect I made.
​
Yseterday, I found a video giving animation tips in Dreams PS4/5 that mentioned how putting cameras into a separate timeline can help with a problem where they block my view while I'm animating due to said cameras being quite big in size (the video itself was quite nifty), the only other way I'd been dealing with this was by briefly turning electronics off in the "show/hide" menu:
In putting all those cameras into a separate timeline, I found that while it did help with the cameras blocking my view when I actually opened and closed the timeline, it did end up throwing off all the camera placements I did, so I had to spend a bit of time fixing said cameras by either putting them as close as I could to where they originally were or by placing them somewhere I felt would be better than the original, although because I keyframed a few of the cameras before hand, I was able to restore their placements quite easily.
​
As for the first portion of the fight scene, that proved to be relatively difficult, not because of the physical contact or anything but because I had to make sure to time everything correctly (I.E: I had to make sure that the camera was placed so that the action wasn't confusing, animate the characters and I had to make sure the music and the visuals matched as closely as I could get them to (sometimes by altering the music itself), all of which proved to be quite the juggling act in deed.
​
There were a few moments where I actually decided to go off board (which for those of you that don't know, going "off board" just means I decided to change something from how it was depicted in the storyboards, either to make things easier or to try and improve upon what I did), mainly with the part where Super Sheep slams into a pile of words, as I felt that temporarily turning on physics for a pile of words would prove too unpredictable for my liking since the letters could literally end up anywhere on the set each time I played it back, so I changed it into Super Sheep bumping into a few stray letters that would remain static, that way the scene would play out the same way each and every time.
​
Near the end, when Ruff Bup sails off on one of the letters, I decided to add in a few sound effects from Sonic 3 and Knuckles for the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis, thus meaning there's now a little piece of Captain Cartridge in this short too (since the sound design in his cartoon revolved around Mega Drive instruments and sound effects, especially of the Sonic variety)
​
After I finished the first part of the fight scene by some miracle, I decided to get to work on the second part of the fight scene before the day was done, and once again I've decided to go a little bit off board, as now instead of jumping over the individual letters at a normal speed, she's going to be doing it while the background is a big blurry mess, thus making the animation on that part easier for me since not only does she appear faster by doing it but it also means the character only has to move on one plane while appearing to move towards the camera.
​
That was pretty much everything of note today, but before I go I just want to say a few things. First off, I won't really be streaming at as high of a resolution as I used to starting tomorrow, as apparently my streaming ate up all the bandwidth and my Dad still works from home (meaning my streaming directly affected his ability to get his work done), so I'm going to try and stream at a lower resolution at 30 frames per second instead to prevent myself from having to go back to recording videos directly on my PlayStation, but if that doesn't work I'm afraid I don't have much of a choice in the matter which is a darned shame since streaming allows me to have the video already on my YouTube channel ready to go into this website, where as if I recorded a video before hand, I'd have to transfer the video to my computer and upload the video manually. (which given the length of some of these steams, it's safe to say that may take a while)
​
Another thing I quickly want to go over is in regards to the music I composed for the end, as when I made it I wanted to have a bit of a orchestral/tribal sound fade in from the digitized synths in order to imply that Kyoto's journey through development is finished and she's ready to become real. After going on a strange path of videos that involved a parody of the "you might know everything I'm going to do" scene from the Sonic The Hedgehog OVA featuring Garfield, I'm thinking about changing the second genre entirely:
Basically, I was watching this Garfield parody and enjoying it quite a bit as it not only looks exactly like it could have been an episode of Garfield and Friends but the music really captured the "house" genre that the Sonic OVA utilised for the song "Look-A-Like", with that being said however, it was only recently when YouTube randomly recommended a song called "Getting High" from an album called "Keep Cool, Cat" did I end up discovering the truth behind the music in the video (which the Garfield OVA does link in the description, so I don't know how I managed to miss this until now), as not only was "Getting High" an actual house song from the mid-90s, but guess which media franchise the entire CD was related to:
That's right, it was Garfield all along, not to mention the song itself is actually quite amazing if I do say so myself. With this in mind, I'm thinking about changing the genre the ending theme switches to from an orchestral/tribal mix to a more 90s house sound as a way to remember this very strange turn of events (and no, I won't be putting this song in there since I don't own the rights to it and even if I wanted to use it, I couldn't really be bothered with the hassle of importing it to Dreams since it wouldn't comply with the 30 second recording limit anyway)
​
With that in mind, tomorrow will most likely be a mix of both getting some work done on the second part of the fight scene and me modifying the ending music to have a 90s house sound. (I say "most likely" since I can just go ahead and change the music when I get to the ending scene regardless)
​
Speaking of tomorrow, I may have to lump all the work I do tomorrow and the next day into one update, as tomorrow I'm likely to go to my nans for a sleepover, so don't be surprised if tomorrow goes unaccounted for on the actual day.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Days 10 And 11: The Skirmish Continues
Ok, so far things are looking fine at the moment but I'll really need to ramp things up and try to finish the second part of the fight scene tomorrow so that I can use the next week to work on the final part of the project (which is where Kyoto breaks Super Sheep's back and then is declared worthy)
​
Yesterday I mainly worked on the shot where Kyoto jumps from one set of keyboard characters to another, yes I took a whole stream just to do one single shot because animation is a really time consuming process (you can tell because I'm on day 11 and I'm only now getting to a point where two thirds of the whole thing actually plays out), the reason this shot ended up taking a long time to pull off is actually because I needed to make sure everything was timed correctly and that it all happened at a reasonable speed while making sure that the established screen direction, which in my case means the action naturally moves towards the right, isn't lost due to the rule of 180 being broken to smitherines. (since if I didn't, then the shot would naturally rotate so that the characters would move screen left rather than screen right if I wanted to keep both characters on the screen)
​
While that was happening, I also needed to add in the effects for both Super Sheep's laser beams and the resulting explosion for when he nearly hits Kyoto. Once again, this proved to be quite a juggling act, as there was a lot of elements to take into account but after a whole hour I was able to get that particular part finished, so I decided to call it a day because I wanted to come back the next day refreshed and ready to animate the part where Super Sheep prepares to charge up his ultra-omega laser beams. (that, and I also needed to go to my nans for a sleepover, hence why there was no reflection that day)
​
Speaking of coming back the next day, today I was actually able to make a lot more progress than I thought I would, as not only did I do the part where Super Sheep prepares to charge up his ultra-omega laser beams but I also did the part where Ruff Bup whips out his mirror, although I'm still yet to have him throw it, since then I'll need to go ahead and use the Head/Camera Tracker gadget in combination with the text displayer gadget in order to create a fake split screen shot. (because Dreams can't do split screens natively, even when both shots are in the same location)
​
This part was signifigantly easier to pull of because for the most part I was working on animating Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, since those characters don't have intentionally choppy animation to worry about (I'm noticing that the difficulty of certain parts this time around has to do with the parts where Kyoto Kasuma is on the screen since her animation style is supposed to be choppier than the others), plus it meant I was able to do things such as make the effects for when Super Sheep's charging his ultra omega beams while animating the character (since Dreams lets me use all of the modes and tools at once whether I'm editing a scene or an element, thus allowing me to make things on the fly) which was a lot of fun, and not to mention quite easy.
​
Tomorrow, I will hopefully be able to finish up the second third of this project but given how I just learned I'll be going to see "Postmodern Jukebox" tomorrow night, I can't entirely guarantee I'll be able to get it finished. oh, and it may also mean I'll need to lump in the work I do tomorrow and on Monday into one update again, so don't be surprised if I don't update this tomorrow. (hopefully this "two days of work in one update" thing doesn't occur again after this because I much prefer taking it one day at a time)
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 12: Two Thirds Of The Way Through
I know I said I wouldn't come back here until tomorrow but I've ended up with quite a bit of time to kill before the show starts at 8:00PM so I figured I might as well get started now.
​
Good news folks, I'm two thirds of the way through this project, as today I was able to finish up the second half of the second major sequence (which consists of most of the fight scene for those of you that don't know), but before I pressed on with any major animation work I decided it would be a good idea to make the split-shot as a separate asset so that I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally ruining the whole scene later on. What this separate asset consists of is a "Head/Camera Tracker" gadget with the mirror and a piece of the speed background assets attached to is to that whenever I'm in play mode, the background and mirror will automatically move with the screen, I also used a text displayer in order to add a line separating the two shots. Making this asset actually proved to be much easier than I thought thanks to a nifty feature of the head/camera tracker that allows me to snap the camera straight to where the gadget is looking, thus making it easy for me to gauge what the framing would look like without constantly having to go into play mode a million times. (although I didn't realise this feature existed until part way through) After I positioned everything where I liked it it was just a matter of animating the mirror spinning on one axis and I was good to go with the new asset.
​
As for the actual animation process, things went quite smoothly, as for the most part Super Sheep and Ruff Bup were the main characters being animated today, so I could mostly get away with having Kyoto stand still, although doing her movements wasn't too difficult this time around, especially during the times where I decided to go off board to make things just that little bit easier for myself (I.E: I decided to make it so she grabs the mirror with her whole hand instead of her middle and index fingers to make animating the part where she reflects Super Sheep's ultra omega laser beam back at him much easier to pull off), and since she wasn't even on the screen most of the time I could just snap her into the next position she'll appear in when she does come back on screen and start animating her from there. At first I thought having Ruff Bup walk backwards would be more of a challenge than having him walk forward, but all I had to do was make it so that the back foot goes forwards and everything went hunky dory.
​
Moving on to the subject of Super Sheep's ultra omega laser beam, I found that simply making the effects for it in the actual scene allowed me to better tailor the effects so that they would play out the way I needed them to than I ever could have done if I'd made the ultra omega laser beams separately like I did with the regular, and thus decidedly non-ultra omega, lasers because I was able to actively paint the laser in such a way where it comes towards Kyoto and then ricochet's back at Super Sheep himself, the only thing that was remotely difficult was timing the sound effects and camera shake for when the laser does show up since I made is so that the animation plays once and unlike the 3D elements, the paintings will actually stay on the last frame of animation they were on when you scrub on the timeline due to the animation features there being separate from the keyframed animation of everything else in the scene.
​
Once that was taken care of however, it was all smooth sailing from here, as doing the part where Kyoto jumps off the letter and into the portal was quite easy due to the fact I could simply place the portal at the end and then use keyframes to make it so that the portal only becomes visible at the last shot, that way I can have Kyoto's falling arch feel at least a little bit natural before placing the actual portal in, and once that doorway was placed at the end of the timeline, things were pretty much all set and I was able to get this part done.
​
Tomorrow, I'll move on to the final major sequence of the project, which I think I might actually end up powering through since I'll be doing it on days I would ordinarily be in college for and the scene itself doesn't involve too many complicated shenanigans. (just a bit of falling and the characters saying their goodbyes)
​
Oh, and as for that thing where I lowered the resolution of the stream to avoid eating up all the bandwidth? All I can say is that after lowering the resolution to 720P at 30 frames per second is that it seems to be a rousing success so far, as my dad hasn't hounded at me about eating up all the bandwidth while he's working yet so I think I'll be safe for now.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Grandiose Project Management Update
Alright, another week down and already I'm two thirds of the way through the project. If I keep going at this rate I should have the whole thing (including the Dinny Done sequence and the end credits) finished within this week, I just hope nothing abrupt starts coming along to interrupt my progress at this point since I'm so tantalisingly close to the end and I don't want to get off track at this stage.
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program: Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 13: Revenge Of The Early Lunch
Today, I mainly worked on beginning the final sequence of the project where our tritagonists end up in the Edi-Graphics Zone as Kyoto breaks Super Sheep's back and proves herself worthy to become a lead character in her own IP. (which itself will probably be eclipsed by Super Sheep anyway since I haven't done much with any of my other IP besides The Grand Lamppost Heist lately, so it might be a while before Kyoto appears as a lead character in another project) I decided it would be a good idea for me to split this particular scene into two separate scenes as a means to both save on thermometer memory and to make the whole thing easier to work on since I won't constantly have to switch between the sky and the ground. (and as an added bonus I could also modify the models in the second part so that they were covered in dust that is inexplicably two shades of grey)
​
Things went quite smoothly for me today, although I end up having to end the first part early because me and my parents were meeting my brother for lunch today (I didn't realise it would be an early lunch until it actually happened), this in and of itself was quite a nice experience because I had fish and chips but because I went from my house to Liverpool, I ended up getting back at around quarter past one in the afternoon, making me at least fifteen minutes late for my afternoon animation session. (needless to say I'm pretty sure my tutors are not going to be happy about this when I get back)
​
Luckily, I actually managed to finish the first half of the final sequence literally as I had to leave, so hopefully that'll count for something, and I predict I'll have the rest done either tomorrow or Wednesday (depending on if anything happens to interrupt the animation process or just how quickly I'm able to do it), meaning after I do this it's just the "Dinny Done Here Folks" sequence, the end credits, a little bit of cleaning up and then it's back to College to gather myself some feedback (which I will then need to go and implement before I release the final version and start the evaluation process)
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 14: The Bandwidth Strikes Back
Remember when I said that lowering the resolution and framerate I stream at might help in fixing the whole "eating up all the bandwidth" problem? Yeah, me neither, as I still ended up using too much bandwidth for my dad to be able to use the internet effectively, so I actually had to prematurely end the stream twice just so that he could use the internet for whatever he was doing that day. Luckily for me, my PlayStation actually does have a recording feature that lets me hit the record button and keep producing the evidence of my actual work, so I didn't have to worry about sitting around twiddling my thumbs while my dad was doing his thing, hence why there are three streams and two extra videos today.
​
But enough of the negative side of things, you want to know what the good news is? I'VE OFFICIALLY COMPLETED EVERY SEQUENCE IN MY PROJECT. The only thing I have to take care of now is the end credits sequence, since I also managed to do the "We're Dinny Done Here Folks" sequence today, which I did not think I would actually get to do but any amount of extra progress can only be a good thing.
​
As for what I actually did today, I mostly just worked on finishing the final sequence where Kyoto pats her goodbyes to Ruff Bup and ignores Super Sheep entirely, but there were a few times I went off board in order to make things easier for myself. My favourite example of this comes from the part where instead of having Ruff Bup walking off screen to get into position for when Kyoto pats him on the head, I decided it would be hilarious if he just got up and casually ascended off the screen to the bewilderment of Super Sheep. The reason I thought it would be rather funny is because of how unexpected and spontaneous it is, and I thought it would work in a similar vain to various gags that animators will sometimes do when making a film (or at least they used to):
Granted, the difference between these gags and the one I included is that usually these sponatious gags don't make it in the actual film itself (the best they can hope for is to be included on the DVD or even expanded upon as a blooper reel like the one above) and mine's totally making it into my project because to be honest, I just found the idea of Ruff Bup ascending casually too funny to just let it be an idea in the wind, and because of how easy Dreams is to use, I was able to just go ahead and pull this gag off without breaking a sweat.
​
At one point, I started to contemplate cutting a few lines between Super Sheep and The Man That Makes (who is me) because I felt that putting the entire interaction in would just drag down the pace because it would have been too long of a scene just to establish Super Sheep and The Man That Makes' rocky relationship when I could simply keep the part until Super Sheep sarcastically calls him a genius (plus it meant I was able to finish the whole thing faster)
​
As for the "Dinny Done here Folks" sequence, traditionally I always had a green sky with the words "We're Dinny Done Here Folks" scralled across the sky via a text displayer, but this time around I felt like changing it up so that instead of the sky being green, I'd have the actual sky be white (but then I decided to make it black later on to make the additional lighting play nice) while the back drop would be a blue text box instead of a green one in order to make it fit better with the "Slamination Studios" branding I've got going on (what with all the blue and orange everywhere), plus I decided to go ahead and make it more of a still image instead of an animated sequence to make things easier for myself.
​
Tomorrow, I'll continue working on the credits, as I was actually able to do a little bit of work on that today due to getting everything else done relatively quickly (go team me), and if I manage to get that done I can "edit" the video together, go back to college on Thursday and gather some feedback for when I do the clean up phase, which I may need to condense into the rest of this week to avoid having to take yet more time off college, in part because throughout all this I found myself missing my friends quite a lot, and I want to come back as soon as possible without sacrificing the quality of my work.
Kyoto Kasuma Animation Day 15: Well Boys, We Did It
Well folks, as you've no doubt seen from the title of this section, I'm finally done working on the main bulk of production, thus meaning I'm ready to come back tomorrow and gather as much feedback as I possibly can before I go off and use the rest of the week to do a light bit of cleaning in order to get ready for the project's release date, which I'm thinking about making next Tuesday since that's the day I return to college next week due to a bank holiday I totally forgot about until a friend of mine brought it up. (not to mention it'll give me a whole four days to do the entire clean up phase)
​
As for what I did today, it was all relatively easy stuff, as all I was doing was working on the credits sequence which basically consists of me placing in all the models and visual effects used into a dark void and having the camera cut between each object/character (although sometimes I'll have multiple things in the same shot to save time) while having text displayers tell you the name of the assets as well as who made them, that way people will know who made what and what said things happen to look like. I came up with this style of credits during the production of Super Sheep in Convention F-3 because I figured it would be a good way to show what stuff I used rather than simply having a bunch of names scrolling up the screen like most other creative works would do. As for how I handle things like music and sound effects, I basically just point the camera away from all the props and characters and let a lot of the sounds do all the talking while text displayers tell you who imported or created what as well as the copyright owners of the original sounds themselves in cases where I didn't create the sound in question, meanwhile I'd have the music play and let the text displayers tell you the name of the track and who made the instruments I used to make said track. Needless to say, this was a relatively simple process for me to pull off, although getting all the assets together did require that I lower the detail of certain assets in order to prevent the graphics thermometer from having a massive aneurism about there being too much graphical detail in the scene.
​
One thing I will say is that I've definitely made the right call in also deciding to include the hands I used and I wish I just put them in from the start because it feels really good to finally get a little bit of closure on that front.
​
When I was recording the whole thing to put into Share-Factory, when I checked to see how long it'd been recording for at the end scene I couldn't help but notice that it was around four or five minutes into the production. At first I thought this meant I'd accidentally made a much shorter production than I was initially going for, but then once I checked again at the credits and saw it was eight minutes, I thought to myself "oh, ok that makes sense now" (meaning as usual, my short ended up being slightly longer than anticipated)
​
As for what happened afterwards, I took part in what I would describe as the lightest editing phase I've ever partaken in, as this time all I had to do was chop a little bit off the end and add a black screen in the beginning since thanks to the PS5's solid state drive (or SSD for short), the loading times didn't end up being anywhere near as long as something like Captain Cartridge or Super Sheep in Convention F-3, honestly I'm not even sure it was worth the stream because of how short it ended up being.
Gathering Feedback
So far, everyone I've shown this project to really seem to like what I've done with the story and visuals, as has been the case with all my projects in the past. What makes this particular round of feedback interesting however is that this time around, more people brought up their own valid criticisms than I could come up with myself, which I find to be quite refreshing as this means I was more likely to receive suggestions to fix things I wouldn't have thought of as needing fixing on my own. (even with me trying to be as critical to my own work as possible, as my friends brought up things such as how I could zoom in on Kyoto's name tag to make it easy to see and even how I could add a sound effect for Ruff Bup throwing his mirror to give it more impact) For example, when I showed it to a friend of mine and one of my tutors, they both commented on how the voices were a bit too quiet when compared to the background noises and music, so I'll need to go ahead and sort that out once I get home, another particularly interesting piece of feedback actually related to the lip syncing on both Super Sheep and Ruff Bup and how the anime style of lip syncing didn't seem to gel well with them since they're both more western characters, unlike Kyoto who's inspired by Japanese anime. With this in mind, the usual lip syncing process from my other cartoons can be quite time consuming, so I'll try and fix it if I have time after getting everything else cleaned up to the best of my ability.
​
I'll be putting the full document here and updating it if I get more feedback while I'm doing the cleaning process:
Now that I've gathered a good amount of feedback on my project, it's time for me to start the clean up phase, where I go back and see what I can fix up before re-doing the "editing" phase and releasing my project on YouTube for the world, that way my project can be the best possible version of itself, so without further ado, let's get cleaning
Kyoto Kasuma Feedback Implementation And Clean Up Day 1: Audio Mixing And Fixing A Few Small Issues
Ok, things are actually starting off quite easy thus far, as the first (and main) thing I decided to take care of today was the audio mixing issues because it was the thing most people mentioned when I was gathering feedback earlier today, thus making it my number one priority to fix before I release my project next Tuesday. Doing this was quite easy, as all I had to do was plop down an extra keyframe in order to animate the volume decreasing whenever the characters talked, I would then clone this keyframe as many times as I needed while also making sure each clone was the same length as the respective voice lines that way the music turning down would hopefully make the dialogue much easier to hear, especially since it plays more of a role in the story telling than it does in most of my other works.
​
While I was doing that, I also decided to go ahead and take care of a few other smaller bits of feedback by adding a sound effect for Ruff Bup throwing the mirror (which I repurposed from a stock cartoon slap sound effect), making it so that Ruff Bup's movements when he states he's going to rescue Kyoto significantly faster by messing with the timing of the keyframes in that area of his sub-timeline, incorporating at least one more still movement for Kyoto when she's falling by replacing an animation cycle with a singular frame and I even went ahead and made the credits slightly shorter by removing a few sounds and moving everything afterwards backwards slightly so that they filled the resulting empty space. Doing all this was quite easy for me since much of it was mostly small stuff I was taking care of rather than massive sweeping changes to the entire story, and I anticipate that tomorrow will be much of the same since again I'll mostly be taking care of smaller issues people have mentioned here and there.
Once I have all the smaller scale stuff taken care of, it'll be time to take on the more time consuming challenge of re-doing the lip-sync for both Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, in which case I'll actually go ahead and make re-mixes of each scene where the characters speak in case I don't end up finishing everything by next Tuesday, since then if I don't get it done I don't have to worry over having to revert the whole thing back at the last moment to remain consistent with parts that don't have the new lip sync implemented by then. (since technically the new lip sync would be done in a separate version of the same scene)
Kyoto Kasuma Feedback Implementation And Clean Up Day 2: Fixing The Rest Of The Minor Issues And Getting Started On Re-Syncing The Lips
Today, I ended up taking care of a few more smaller bits of feedback (I.E: The camera zooming in on Kyoto's name tag to make it easier to see, removing the shadows and even fixing the truck's animation) in order to further clean up and improve the project in relatively minor ways. The hardest task of this lot (beside starting the lip sync, which I'll come back to later) was definitely trying to fix up the movement on the truck, since with the way Dreams works, if I disable smoothing on one keyframe in an animation, it'll get rid of the smoothness on all keyframes that were part of that animation at once, but only if said keyframes happen to blend into each other. Luckily, after I learned that through trial and error, I was able to get it to a mostly acceptable state for the time being although I'll come back to it later on to try making it better. As for the other tasks, adding the zoom in on Kyoto's name tag was just a matter of adding a few extra keyframes that move the camera from one position to another, although with someone like Kyoto I did have to be a bit careful with how I went about it because of where I'd placed the name tag itself, because otherwise it would look like we were getting a pervy zoom in on her chest for no reason (luckily the name tag itself sticks out like a sore thumb), not to mention that because the shot itself is quite short, I had to make sure that the zoom in lasted a reasonable amount of time so that people could actually see the name tag before Ruff Bup mentions how she "ain't much of a talker", at first I thought this would mean re-jigging the timing ever so slightly but luckily I was able to make it work by zooming in half way through the duration of the shot.
​
Once those minor tasks were taken care of, I had pretty much done everything that it was possible for me to do since I'm not sure I'll be able to find a way to fix the hair issue without re-jigging the Kyoto asset so that the hair is done via sculptures instead of paintings, since then I won't have to worry about it taking a frame or two to get into position, I decided to go ahead and get started on what will undoubtedly be the most time consuming part of all this, that being re-doing the lip sync on both Super Sheep and Ruff Bup so that their mouths actually move to the words they're saying. As such, I've decided to remix the opening scene, that way if I don't end up completing the entire lip syncing process by the time Monday night rolls around, I can always switch back to the Japanese lip sync without losing any of the other changes I've made, which is why did everything else first, not to mention that if I do complete this part, I'll end up with two versions of this project I can potentially release into the world. (plus I get to turn this into an excuse to test drive that thing I said about doing the Japanese lip sync first as a temporary thing before doing the proper lip sync during Super Sheep in Hollyweird Hijinks to see if it's something I could feasibly do at this phase of production)
​
The reason for this is because lip syncing is one of the toughest things to get right when it comes to animation, since you have to make sure that the characters mouths sync up to what they're saying or else the audience will assume the characters are having inner monologues like Garfield in "Garfield and Friends". Luckily for me, I actually have a little bit of experience with doing this back in "Captain Cartridge and Friends in Operation Compact Disc" and some of the small experiments I did with other characters' voice lines last year, plus all my characters are actually built with this kind of lip sync in mind so I'll have all the frames I need when they're talking.
​
As for the actual process of how I handled the lip sync, I decided to take the looping timelines I originally made for the Japanese lip sync and repurpose them into non-looping timelines that last as long as a respective character's voice lines, that way I could zoom those timelines in so that they displayed in frames rather than seconds (much like I handled much of Kyoto's animation in general) so that I could leave one frame gaps between all the mouth poses. (since that seemed to fix the issue of incorrect mouth poses appearing for a single frame) At first, things were a little bit difficult, but as I continued on and decided to start using a quirk of the sound engine to my advantage (this quirk being that while a sound effect that's in the same timeline as the keyframe you're editing will stay quiet, the sound effects in other timelines would just play until it reaches the point in which the keyframe is at in the initial timeline, which is why I constantly had to turn the sound effects off at points), things got way easier to sync up, as I managed to make my way through most of the first scene before stopping for lunch and not really coming back (mainly to prevent burn out), which I wasn't expecting to be able to do, so who knows, maybe this won't take as long as I initially thought (although with that being said, some of the other scenes do have more dialogue in them, so they might end up taking a bit longer to pull off)
Kyoto Kasuma Feedback Implementation And Clean Up Day 3: Deciding The Lip Syncing Process Isn't Worth It After All
Today, I ended up finishing up the entire lip re-syncing process for the first sequence, but after taking a look at the second sequence and evaluating whether or not I'd even have time to complete the process on or before Monday night, I decided it would probably be best if I focused my attention on finding other areas to polish up instead, since at the rate I'm going, I'm not going to have time to fix any of it if I keep up with the lip sync process. Despite this, the lip re-syncing process for the first scene wasn't a total bust, as now it's sparked the idea that I could add in separate timelines for when the characters are talking, that way I can be a lot more precise with it. (and thus make it more accurate in Super Sheep in Holly-Weird Hijinks)
​
With that in mind, I decided to instead focus my efforts on finding areas where I could improve upon what I'd made by either polishing the animation, adding extra sound effects or even adding new movements wherever applicable. One of the main things I was hesitant about doing was adding in the Super Peel Out sound from the 1993 game "Sonic CD", since on one hand, the situation the sound effect was ultimately used in here felt appropriate, on the other hand though, I figured that having Super Sheep use this sound effect when charging up his run could be just a little bit too on the nose. (especially for Sonic fans like myself) After much deliberation, I decided I may as well go for it, since I already used a couple sound effects from the 1994 games "Sonic The Hedgehog 3" and "Sonic And Knuckles" (Which are just the separate parts that make up "Sonic The Hedgehog 3: And Knuckles", Also known as just "Sonic 3 And Knuckles"), so it's not like I'd have to add in the copyright credits for SEGA since that was already taken care of, so I decided "eh, why not" and stuck it in.
​
Things were actually going quite smoothly, but I had to cut this session short because my brother and father wanted to watch today's Liverpool match, and I know that when it comes to the football (or even my father and brother just wanting the TV in general), there's no chance of me fighting this, hence why I had to end this abruptly.
​
Tomorrow I'll probably try and finish the clean up stage as best as I can so that I can get the project ready for release on Monday. The reason for this shift in the release date is because it gives me all of next Tuesday and onwards to do the evaluation section.
Kyoto Kasuma Feedback Implementation And Clean Up Day 4: A Little Miscellaneous Cleaning And A Bit Of So-Called "Editing"
As a direct result of me effectively giving up on re-doing the lip sync, today was just me combing through the project one last time in order to make any final adjustments, which mostly turned out to just be me attempting to make the truck's movements better, adding a few additional camera shakes and sound effects to add a little bit of impact when Kyoto smashes into Super Sheep's back and even replacing the random Sonic 3 and Knuckles sound effect with the more recognisable Sonic CD Super Peel Out sound (not because CD is more popular than 3 And Knuckles, but because the Super Peel Out is a move the player can use in Sonic CD and Mania, meaning players like me are more likely to recognise the sound effect associated with charging the move), doing all this was quite simple since I was just combing through looking for stuff to fix up and/or change.
​
After I finished with that, I moved on to round 2 of the editing phase where I mainly took the re-recorded footage, trimmed it down slightly and even added a black screen to the beginning. This was all I did, and once again I question whether or not it was even worth doing the stream for it because of how little was done in a short stretch of time.
​
Now that I've pretty much done everything, I've decided to just go ahead and release the whole thing now, so by the time this update goes out the video will be live. With this, I'm pretty much able to spend the rest of my time evaluating and reflecting on not just the project, but my time in college as a whole. But first, I should ask the big question, that being...
How Was Actually Animating This Project?
Well, I will say that while I thought animating this project would be at least a little more difficult due to animating Kyoto in a different style than what I used in the past (and even use for the other two characters in this project), what I didn't expect was for the difficulty of something to be inexplicably tied to what character I'm animating. For example, whenever I'd be animating a character like Super Sheep or Ruff Bup, it would be quite easy for me since I could use my usual smoother style of animation with all the tweening inbetween the key poses, meanwhile with Kyoto, because of the choppier animation style I chose to employ, it was a little bit harder because I haven't done that kind of thing before and it proved to be a lot more time consuming due to the fact that I needed to make sure she had the right amount of frames in each animation as well as the fact I also had to do the in-betweens manually. (although to off set this, I did only have to change the pose every three or four frames most of the time)
​
What I didn't expect however was that Kyoto's animation style would cause the thermometer usage in certain scenes (mainly the beginning where she wakes up and meets Super Sheep and Ruff Bup) to increase drastically, but because of the higher volume of keyframes she uses it was going to be a given that there'd be at least a small increase, but I wasn't expecting it to be around 56-60% for the "animation and wires" part of the gameplay thermometer, although given how high it ended up being in certain scenes before even starting the animation process, I think it might be a sign that some of what I may want to do in the future might just be too much for Dreams PS4/5 to handle at the moment.
​
That wasn't to say I didn't enjoy animating the whole thing, because I did, I liked tackling a the various challenges that came up over the course of production (I.E: how to have Kyoto and the other characters interact with each other, getting the fight scene to work, ext), although one problem I ended up with which had nothing to do with animation process itself was that I found myself missing my friends quite a bit, more so than usual in fact, since I was animating the whole thing on my own in my house rather than at college because college don't have any PlayStations for me to use. (this will probably be the last time I ever get to say this) I think the reason I ended up missing my friends more than ever despite my circumstances being the same as they were back in 2020 might have something to do with the fact that back in Unit 12, I actually had guidance from my friends to help me navigate the world of anime, since they're more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than me, and I had a lot of fun discussing this sort of stuff with them and learning about the existence of things like Mappa Studio and Dorohedoro. With this in mind, it ended up being a scenario where I effectively got ripped away from a collaborative environment and got thrust back into my usual, rather lonely environment. When I came back and showed my friends and they all enjoyed the action packed shenanigans of Kyoto, Super Sheep and Ruff Bup, it all proved to be worth it in the end, plus the positive reaction ended up reminding me as to why I want to become an animator in the first place.
​
As such, I'd say that overall, while there were a few bumps on the road, and I did end up worrying about whether or not I'd even get this finished on time because the first sequence ended up taking about a week to animate, I'd say the animation process for this cartoon was overall a relative success because while Kyoto's movements weren't as choppy as I wanted them to be due to the fact that Dreams still seemed to make things noticeably smoother when in play mode, the fact I animated her on threes instead of ones did end up helping differentiate her movements from that of both Super Sheep's and Ruff Bup's.
​
With this, it's time for me to move on to the evaluation process, where I'll be looking back on everything I did with a retrospective lens.
Extension Time
Ok, since by some miracle I managed to get my project done well ahead of schedule, my tutor has actually set me a bit of an extension task where I get to make a poster design and/or DVD cover for this final major project, so I'll just be putting that below the buttons so that you know that this is being done after everything else was already finished, but before we get started...
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Yet Another Project Management Update From The Future
The first thing I should note is that due to recent issues with the internet at college, the project itself has been extended by a week (so now instead of being due on the 20th of May, it's due on the 27th of May instead), this change probably won't affect things for me since my project's already done and dusted.
​
The next thing I should note is that because this is an extension task, I'll be taking it a little bit slower than usual, and I also had an idea of my own while I was mucking about in Dreams PS4/5 yesterday where I could put together a video compilation of all my best work for the FMP exhibition with little bits inbetween to introduce each of the cartoons in said compilation.
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program: The Poster Design/DVD Cover
Ok, so the first thing I should figure out is the typical dimensions for a poster and/or DVD cover in pixels so that I'll know what resolution I need the image to be in once I get to Pixlr:
Next, I'm going to get a few assets I already made so that I can put them into the poster itself (I'll still be drawing new stills of the characters though because I feel it would be best if I did that for the sake of giving them more dynamic poses for the poster itself):
The reason I'm putting the logo in here is mainly for branding purposes (since I want the Slamination Studios name to take off so that by the time I get around to making feature length films for the big screen, the logo will already be recognisable, thus making it more likely for people to actually want to see the films)
Next, I'm typing in all the additional text (in this case, the word "presents" and the title of the project itself) so that I can go ahead and frame the visual elements around said text (thus guaranteeing that the characters don't cover the text, or vice versa)
Now that everything's been set up, I can begin drawing up the characters, I'm starting off with Kyoto herself since she's the main character of the entire project. For this poster I'm trying to emphasise the clash between her and Super Sheep, as that part ends up taking up most of the story. (although I'm more or less making the design up as I go along)
​
Usually I like to start off by drawing a character's head first, that way I can draw the character's facial features (things such as eyes, ears, mouths, noses, ext) around it, thus making things easier.
Here, I've decided to have one of Kyoto's legs remain intentionally unfinished in order to communicate the fact that she's the one that's going through the development dimension to prove herself worthy of becoming the lead character in her own IP (intellectual property), however I can't just randomly leave her leg unfinished, so I'll have to add in a pencil drawing her leg so that it doesn't look too weird
I've decided that it's for the best if I draw the pencil on the same layer as Kyoto, that way I can move both elements at once should I ever need to during this production, I'm drawing the pencil in pieces so that I'll have an easier time getting it done quickly
Now I'm adding Super Sheep into the mix, and I can use Kyoto Kasuma herself as a scale of reference in order to make sure that Super Sheep is shorter than her if you were to ever put them both side by side
Now that Super Sheep and Kyoto are all drawn up, it's time to start colouring everything in with the fill tool.
When I initially did Kyoto, I decided to zoom out, only to realise that she would appear quite small on the poster itself, so after talking to a friend of mine about this, I decided to finish up her and Super Sheep and afterwards I would make both pictures bigger (after I saved the separate character images first of course)
And boom, one poster for my FMP.
So How Was Doing The Poster
I found doing this poster to be quite easy because I did this in Pixlr, where I have a whole lot of experience drawing the characters (since this is also where I create a lot of the characters themselves), I decided not to include Ruff Bup on this poster because I figured that putting him in there would clutter up the whole point of the poster, which is to communicate the plot of the project itself, and besides the beginning and the part where he saves Kyoto with a mirror, Ruff Bup is really just the tertiary character in this situation.
​
As for the text (specifically everything that isn't the Slamination Studios Logo), I decided to use a font called "Antreas" because it was the closest thing I could find to the font I used for the title logo in Dreams (since both pieces of software both use different sets of fonts to display text, hence why I can't fully re-create the Slamination Studios logo as it is on a computer):
The part I found to be the most difficult was actually drawing the hands because normally I don't tend to draw hands when the palm is facing up or down, so the results do end up looking a bit weird, but with a bit more practice I think I should be able to improve upon this over time.