Critical Review

I finished the animated comic strip and showed my client.

Animated Comic Strip

The animated comic strip came out very well in my opinion. The creation of the scenes was interesting and came out very well in my opinion. The good parts of the animated comic strip was the drawings, they captured all the action needed and the everything that was put in the script was presented in the images. The music that was given to me was good, it captured all the emotion and atmosphere needed in the animation and script, combining both the images I created and the music created an amazing aspect for all to enjoy. The only problem I had was that I think the script could have been a lot better then what it was, it was good but I think that it could have been improved, I think it would have been better changing the words used. I wanted a lot more time to be able to create a better design for all the background I am happy with what I got but I wanted it to be a lot better with more detail and this is only due to the fact of inexperience in the photoshop and with my Cintiq but if I had more time I could improve the drawings and backgrounds given. I showed the client himself and he said that he liked it but he wanted me to change a few things. He wanted me to change the credits and to fade out the music, which is easy to do, i was able to remake the credits in aftereffects and to fade the sound i had to bring it into the premiere, and using the pen tool on the audio to make it fade out at the end. Overall my client was happy and so was I. 

I have personally gained a lot of doing this project. I have improved my drawing and painting abilities I now know how to paint and how it make a good background with depth just using photoshop. I have learnt a lot more in Photoshop, I have learnt different techniques and different aspects of photoshop that I didn't know, I worked out how to create the right brushes that I needed and how to make it more like a air brush, I was also able to learn how blend the colours together and to make it look like it has depth and shadows. This project has given me and great insight to working with a client getting me ready for the real work, it was a good experience and I have been lucky enough to continue to work with this client for years to come. I really enjoyed creating a animated comic strip and I am happy I was able to experience creating one and I will use this technique in the future.

After Effects and Speech bubbles

Once all the images were done I then imported them all into the aftereffects to put together. The after effects process are the same as the animatic and lucky enough is was easier because I had done it before.

I had to continue the adding extra settings like changing opacity on each scene to fade in and out. To make the characters move into the scene I had to create a motion path to make the movement of the character to enter the scene and make they appear in the right place.

The main problem I had was getting the speech bubbles in the scene with no background so they could fade in and out. normally i would save them as a PNG for other software but a normal PNG wasnt working. I spoke to my tutor and he showed me a different way of making them a PNG and to make them work in After effects.

I had to save it in a different way.

I had to go to save for web and make sure that is a PNG 24, I dont know why but it worked, so I was able to import the speech bubbles and make sure the they can fade in and out at the right time that I needed. After being able to do that it was all easy from there.

Final designs in photoshop

When creating the final designs I just put a JPEG of the animatic scene and as a template on the page so I can draw on top of it.

I started with the final scene of the animated comic strip like I mentioned before I am going to start with the last scene first.

Using the brush window and the brushes that was mentioned on previous post, and with this I was able to create the painting of the background. I decided not to make it too realistic and more in between cartoon and comic to make it work with the characters.

I had problems from create the realistic effect of water, I looked into real life pictures to help me make it look right, and following the real life pictures I can see that the water reflects what is above it, so I decided that I would make the grass and stuff from above to with lighter colours to show it is a reflection.

This is what I came up with and it made it look more like water but not enough, and I need to add something to help. I decided that I would put in a rock in the water with a reflection to maybe help with it all looking like water.

I personally feel that it helped and made it look a lot more like water. I created all of this using the same brush, I am new to photoshop and it was the only thing I really knew but I personally feel it works.

I added to characters to finalise the scene and I like it I believe it works and now I know that I repeat this to create the other scenes, the dark green as the background and shadows, the green for grass. The clothing is all the same colour without, using the brushes I ended creating another scene like this.

I continued to use the same brushes to create all the other scenes.