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2025.06.30 - 2025.07.21
Qistina Nuralya Maria Binti Azly / 0354180
Animation Fundamentals / Bachelors of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
FINAL PROJECT: PHYSICAL ACTION ANIMATION
Table of contents (Quicklinks)
1. MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET (MIB)
3.5 Editing Music & Sound Effects
1. MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET (MIB)
This is the Module Information Booklet for this module:
2. LECTURES
Week 10
We learned about the animation principle of Secondary Action and Exaggeration.
- Secondary action is an additional movement that supports the main action and adds more depth or emotion to the scene. For example, while a character walks, their arms swinging or their facial expression changing would be a secondary action. It should never distract from the main action, but instead enhance it.
- Exaggeration is used to push movement, expression, or action beyond realistic limits to make it more engaging and clear. It helps emphasize emotions or impacts, such as making a character’s eyes widen dramatically when surprised
Week 11-14
Feedback sessions for Projects.
Feedback:
- Make sure the lines are not too thick.
- Try adding slow-mo to the part before their swords clash.
- Make the clash be on scene 3 where it's the close-up for more on an impact
3. PROCESS
Task: Study jump animation that includes anticipation and follow through poses, timing with hold from the book of Animator’s Survival Kit. Using the same character that you did in Project 1 (Progression 1), animate the rough animation of that character’s jump animation. The animation should show the quality of being appealing, fluid and flexible which you have mastered in the previous exercises.
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3.1 Storyboard & Backgrounds
Storyboard
I drew up the storyboard in Procreate because I normally use Procreate for sketching. Previously I'd also done some storyboarding using Procreate during my Foundation year and 1st year of my degree hence why I felt more comfortable working on it.
The storyline:
"Mira faces her final opponent... Guy. On the rooftops of the building, they stand ready to fight each other to their possible deaths. They stand opposite of one another as they unsheathe their "swords" (Mira with her reliable cane; Guy with his sword). They stare each other down and finally lunge into the air to deal their blows. CLASH! Their swords clash and both are frustrated. But then, Mira decides to play smart and uses the most powerful weapon next to her sword and arms. Her leg. She slowly pushes back her leg in anticipation of the kick and... PLOW! She hits Guy's face with her heels and causes him to go out cold, loosening his grip on his sword. Mira dealt her first and effective blow in the blanket of moonlight."
Backgrounds
Similar to the storyboard, I drew the planned backgrounds of the project in Procreate as well. This was to make sure my coloring was good as I found it to be hard to color backgrounds in Animate.
I took reference from my Project 1B and used elements of it to the new background but making sure it made simple enough that it wouldn't take too much attention away from the characters in the scene. For this process, I had a lot of help with the Perspective tool in Procreate.
I also made three other backgrounds for different scenes and they were of somewhat similar process to this but of different angles.
3.2 Rough Animation
I started the rough animation with Shot 1 where Guy is in the foreground and Mira is in the background. To add a bit of interest to the animation, I added a smear frame to the sword when Guy is unsheathing it. Shot 1 and Shot 2 were by far the easiest to animate since they overall comprised of 3 frames repeated again and again.
Shot 3 was quite easy to animate than I expected. Since it had a big jump animation, I had Project 2B flashbacks and remembered how complicated it was. But because it was a wide shot, details for now weren't really important so I managed to just draw semi-stick figures for the overall action to be understandable.
Next, I drew a sketch of the faces that I would use in the cut outs that would slide into frame between Shot 2 and 3. I drew both in Animate.
I became a bit ambitious and wanted to add one more shot to the animation and that was a shot of the action after Mira's kick to Guy's face. But I made sure to keep it simple by making its background be the moon so that I could get away with making only their silhouette rather coloring them (๑>•̀๑)
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3.3 Tie Down & Colors
As said before, Shot 1 and 2 were easiest animate even for the Tie Down. So not much really changed but the addition of details to the characters in the background.
In Shot 3, I had to start separating the parts of animation into different layers so that I could easily and cleanly (as clean as I could) animate the action. I also added smear frames for the sword when Guy is swinging it around.
Based of Mr. Kamal's feedback, I added a few frames to Shot 4 so that there was a continuous build-up from Shot 3 that would make the impact shot of the sword and cane clashing for impactful.
Shot 4 was more complicated in a sense where I had to make sure every detail in the clothing and arm movement were believable to a sense with the impact, struggle and also the big kick. Here, I could also fully (with sunglasses) show the emotions of both Guy and Mira as they mostly grit their teeth during the clash.
I added smear frames for the big kick to make it more fast action. Notably, Shot 4's Tie Down had a whole lot more layers to it because I had separate folders for Mira and Guy.
An extra thing I did for both rough and tie down was compiling the clips so that I could shot each individual progress of my animation.
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3.3 Tie Down & Colors
Because Shot 1 and 2 were simple and basically clean enough already, I went and colored them right away. I had a separate layer for the color palette so that i could reference them as I went through each frame.
I then drew the Cut Outs in Procreate because I wanted to add a bit more detail to it to make it pop out more than the animation since it is supposed be a dramatic stare down between Guy and Mira. And since I wasn't all too familiar with Animate to confidently draw like I do in Procreate, I decided it was definitely best for me to do it this way to achieve my desired effect.
Because I had multiple layers starting from Shot 3, it was tedious to work with at first since I had to select specific layers for me to erase and all.
Then it went to coloring and to be honest it was a bit hard to work with for Shot 3 because everything was small and though there weren't many details, because it was so small, I had to work with a zoomed in camera and having to move here and there for each frame.
At this point, the erasing lines for clean-up sort of became routine to me but I did still found it annoying when I'd thought I was finished with cleaning up a frame until I played the whole animation and found bits of the lines still being where it shouldn't. But alas, I just powered through ಥ‿ಥ
I treated coloring Shot 4 like a coloring book since now I at least had bigger spaces to color in. This time though, I it felt more satisfying to see the whole animation with the colors.
Initially I wanted to make my job easier by just leaving the colors as it is but I thought adding depth and shadows would improve the quality of the whole animation by a long shot than just keeping it with its base color. I was getting a bit tired at this point so the shading job was a tad bit messy but I cleaned it up where I could ಥ‿ಥ
Lastly, I added simple shadow shapes on the floors on Shot 1,2 and 3. This helped with my goal of adding more depth into the characters and make it believable that they were in fact on the rooftop in the city setting I made.
3.4 Editing Music & Sound Effects
I went to Freesound.org and got my sound effects from there. In total, I got 5 sound effects for the:
- Kick
- Slash
- Whoosh
- Whoosh Jump
- Sword Clash
I looked for suitable background music for the animation and found a track from the Cowboy Bebop OST that I really liked and so I decided to use the last 10 seconds of it.
Finally, I edited all the music and SFX into the clips as well as add a bit of camera movement so that it wouldn't feel too static.
4. FINAL
View all my files of this project here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15LhG9-4roXyY8MuPSZ6WbCRiVsXNQY92?usp=drive_link
5. REFLECTION
I will not lie when I say that this took me longer to finish than expected. I was at first going to try and do the bare minimum of 5 seconds of animation but along the road my idea became a bit ambitious and led to me using the whole 10 second limit for the project (╥ ω ╥)... but alas, I'm pretty happy with my project! Is it perfect? Definitely not but for my own current skills I'd say it's quite nice. This project tested my patience many a times what with Animate occasionally crashing but thankfully nothing was lost with those crashes.
In terms of learning, I've learnt to space out my timing better; additionally I also now understand how much work animation takes with this 10 second animation forcing me to do all-nighters at times ｡°(°¯᷄◠¯᷅°) °｡ I always appreciated animators' works but now I appreciate them more since I was sort of put in their shoes for this project and can see how much dedication, hard work AND most importantly time they put into their projects.
Overall, I've definitely learnt so much across these projects and exercises and hope that whatever my brain has processed throughout these 14 weeks will be carried with me throughout my journey of becoming a professional animator ◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜I am also very grateful to have Mr. Kamal as the lecturer for this module !!
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