Illustration & Visual Narrative: Project #2 Decisive moment

28.09.2020 - 19.10.2020 (Week 6 - Week 8)

Seerat Tayyab Mukhtar Qureshi - 0345576 (BDCM)

Illustration & Visual Narrative

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1. Lectures

 

Miss Anis gave us an overview of perspectives and how they can make our compositions more interesting. This will be useful for us when we are doing our Project 2 & 3. 

Rhythm and movement are an important part of visual storytelling. For both project 2 and 3 we need to have a good understanding of how to create movement. For a quick exercise, Miss Anis told us to find a manga/comic panel which uses movement lines. 

I looked at the Tokyo Ghoul manga which has a lot of movement lines.

Fig 1.0: Examples of movement in Tokyo Ghoul

Fig 1.2: Looking into what creates movement in the panels

Movement in manga panels is usually created through repetitive lines that mimic the direction of the characters involved. Sometimes onomatopoeia is used as well to emphasises the movement factor. For example in Fig 1.2, the onomatopoeia is angled to point towards the character as to show that he's been thrown across. 

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Instructions:

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Decisive moment:

For my decisive moment I was looking at several narratives that I liked but I decided on doing the anime Attack on Titan. 

Fig 1.1: Attack in Titan 

SOURCE: https://ar.pinterest.com/pin/764837949211633468/

I also had a few moments in mind that I wanted to animate. They were:

1. Eren emerges from his titan form

2. Eren controls all the titans 

3. Appearance of the Colossal Titan

I decided to go with the second one because this moment was the one that I felt the most excitement and thrill. A brief overview of the moment, Eren the main protagonist is overcome with emotion when he sees the titan (the main antagonists) that killed his mother. He is trapped and and certainly about to die when he raises his fist and punches a titan, there is lightning and suddenly all titans move towards the titan who killed his mother and kill it. 

I started by gathering a few references of that moment and of Eren. 

Fig 1.2: My reference board

I started by sketching out the composition I had in mind. 

Fig 1.3: Sketch

However, I did not like the placement of the hand as I wanted the focus to be the lightening and emphasising how strong Eren truly is. So I removed the hand and tried another sketch with colour. 

Fig 1.4: Sketch progress

I preferred this more because now he was the main focus of the composition which was my original idea. I added colour to make the first frame of my GIF.

Fig 1.5: First frame of GIF

I added the rest of the frames and it turned out something like this

Fig 1.6: GIF, draft

I thought this was nice but I wasn't 100% happy with it so I tried another version to maybe try and add more movement.

Fig 1.7: GIF, draft

This one had more movement but I was thinking that maybe the stagnant clouds at the back looked a bit awkward so I decided to try one where the clouds are moving. 

Fig 1.8: GIF, draft

This one was the one I liked the most because I also updated the sky in the background to have more depth. The movement of the clouds was also how I wanted it to be. I decided to do one more try before deciding on a final one.

 Fig 1.9: GIF, draft

I decided to do one more try and this time I wanted to try and move Eren since he is supposed to the centre of attention in this scene. I found the scene on YouTube and screenshotted all the frames I wanted to animate.

Fig 2.0: Frames

Fig 2.1: Drawing frame by frame

I exported my file from Procreate into Photoshop and rendered it into a GIF.

Fig 2.2: Frames in Photoshop

I experimented with the speeds a little bit of each frame to get the desired result.

Fig 2.3: Progress

I made the title move a little because I didn't want it to be stagnant. I thought this was a bit too fast still so I tried again to change the speed. 

Fig 2.4: Final GIF

Feedback:

I asked Mr. Faizul for some feedback on my first few drafts and he said they were good but maybe I should add a little more fog so I tried moving the placements of the clouds. In the end, I decided to scrap that idea and do an entirely new one

Reflection:

This was a difficult exercise for me since it was my first time animating something like this. However, I did do many tries and I learnt a lot with each try. The final version took me quite literally the whole day to illustrate but I actually enjoyed it and I think I got to experience a little bit of how animations are done professionally in the real world. I look forward to more projects in this module as I always learn a lot with each.