504 Documentary #3 Research; Carnotaurus Design and Visual Development

 After building up the pool of dinosaurs to draw from for the ecology, I moved on to modern inspirations for the look of the Carnotaurus itself.

The single Carnotaurus holotype is exceptionally well preserved, and included skin impressions showing it was either mostly or entirely covered in scales around 5mm in size with osteroderm armour. Some areas, however are theorised to be locations for feather (or proro-feather filament) coverage if it had any, including the back of the forearms, along the spine or tip of back, and the end of the tail. There is also a theory that the horns of the Carnotaurus were used for display rather than fighting (since the neck vertebrae suggest it didn't headbutt, it more likely would use them for shoving if it was for fighting), so I noted them being coloured a little more brightly.

The first place I started collecting ideas from were birds of prey. They have more muted, natural colours to assist in camouflage and areas of display tend to be either easily hidden (as with the Harpy eagle) or out of sight of prey (as with the Secretary bird).

I then moved to tropical birds and birds-of-paradise. They have much brighter colours used for display, bright reds and blues seem most prominent with greens and yellows appearing frequently. Some tropical birds will also have white and black markings on the face.

I also got a few images of Iguana and Crocodilian skin to show the distribution and patterns of osteroderms.

I also have 'The Paleoartist's Handbook' by Mark Witton, which has a section at the end crediting several artists in the field. Using that, I found four artists to use for visual development.

Dr Mark Witton, the author of the book, is a paleobiologist and paleoartist currently teaching in the University of Portsmouth. He has a very realistic style and likes to paint non-action scenes, especially avoiding fight scenes as he's noted that the idea of dinosaurs being big scary monsters is a massive misconception, they were simply animals, and animals conserve as much energy as they can.

Emily Willoughby is a biologist and paleoartist who usually focuses on microraptors and uses a realistic style with soft light and focus on feathered subjects.

Johan Egerkrans is a Swedish concept artist who has a much more cartoony and expressive style, which is more immediately useful to us as animation is obviously far easier with expression and simpler lining and colours.

Raven Amos is a paleoartist in Alaska who uses bold lineart and simple, block colours rather than intricate shading. She also imitates some cultural styles for her work, like the swimming Spinosaurus, inspired by ancient Japanese art styles.

504 Competition #5 - Third Scenes

 It didn't take me too long to finish up the sketched scene James had given me before he'd done the opening shot, since I was half done with them.

This lot of scenes were more difficult, however, as the colours had a gradient on the money and there wasn't any sketch of what should be on the computer screen, so I had to design it myself. I put down some simple rounded rectangles as phones on a website in different colours, but it looked pretty bland. To give it a bit more visual interest, I added some bubbly patterns in darker or lighter colours (depending on the shade of the base colour) at the bottom of the phones.

It was a bit more time consuming to animate the screen squashing to the side as the box rotates around.

504 Documentary #2 - Research; World-Building

 Since I know more about dinosaurs to begin with and understand where to look, I took on researching to create a pool of other dinosaurs from South America dated to the Late Cretaceous that the team can draw on later.

The first place I started was the La Colonia Formation, where the only Carnotaurus fossil was found. Not a great deal was there, but some fossil pieces had been identified as abelisaurid and hadrosaurid in nature. I moved on to looking through other rock formations in Argentina.

I was able to collect a number of identified species. 

Abelisaurus was a very close relative of Carnotaurus, but smaller, so I noted it down as possibly being a predator to a young Carno or a rival predator to a young adult or juvenile Carno.

Noasaurus was a close relative of Abelisaurids, but much smaller. Although very few fossils have been found, it's currently been reconstructed based on its other relatives, theorised to eat fish. It could possibly be a world-building species to help populate the environment.

Neuquenosaurus was a small sauropod, which I noted as a possible prey source for the Carno from a young age.

Saltasaurus was a type of Titanosaur known from fossilised osteoderms and nesting sites, showing it was heavily armoured. It's a little bigger than a full grown Carno, so it could be a dramatic fight between prey and predator or possibly to use in parallelism, a young Carno trying and failing to eat one but when he reaches full size he takes one down to establish he is at his peak strength.

Antarctosaurus is another type of Titanosaur, although a controversial type as so little has been found of it, it's debated as to whether it exists or the fossils were an already known species. Since it's size massively outshines any predators of the time period or place, only the young or dying would be likely prey, so if it is included, it will most likely be used to establish the scale of the world.

Secernosaurus was a hadrosaurid. At it's full size, it was slightly bigger than Carnotaurus, so younger specimens may serve as prey, but other than that can help populate the world.

I specifically started searching for pterosaurs, as I wanted something to populate the skies, however there isn't a great deal of fossil pterosaurs in Argentina. I was able to find two dated to the Late Cretaceous, Aerotitan and Argentinadraco, however both have so little fossil remains, constructing a whole, accurate model is pretty much impossible. Phylogeny could be used to help create a semi-accurate look that could at least stand up until more evidence is found. I expanded my search a bit further north, finding the Caiuajara, which has much better fossil evidence showing a more interesting skull structure. However, it did live further north and it's habitat is arid desert, so I noted it could possibly be used in a 'wandering' section of the narrative when the Carno is searching for viable territory.

Quilmesaurus was another relative of Carnotaurus, but much smaller than even Abelisaurus, so I noted that it could possibly be a predator to the Carno in it's infancy.

Unenlagia was possibly the same creature as Neuquenraptor, and Austroraptor were smaller than even a full grown human, so I noted they could be used early on to show the scale of Carnotaurus and build up an 'untouchable predator' visual, then later scavenge the dead Carno as the cycle of life and death in nature - no matter the size and strength of even the toughest predator, everything falls prey to something else in the end.

502 #4 Competition - Completion

 To colour the animation was very quick, as the range of motion was extremely limited and as I don't have much experience in painting backgrounds (although I tried), I opted to have no background or shading.

504 Competition #4 - Second Scenes

 James worked on the opening shot completely while I lined and coloured the phone-cash section. Once he added that to our collective Google Drive, I re-edited the animation, trying to help time everything properly so it keeps to the original animatic, as we don't have the v/o yet (which would need the animation re-editing anyway, but keeping it to the animation would make that easier later down the track).

504 Documentary #1 - Team and Concepts

 Since I'd already explained my topic of interest in the class, I asked on the class groupchat if anyone wanted to work with me on it. I actually got a bit of interest and got a team of four, myself, Ceylin, Kahenya, and Pippa.

We are doing a documentary on the Carnotaurus, a theropod dinosaur predator from the Late Cretaceous found in Argentina. Although it may not have been a great choice, since there is only one holotype specimen, so little is known about it, but it is a personal favourite of mine.

Since I'd suggested the idea (and dinosaurs are a special interest of mine) everyone was on board with me directing and Pippa took on producing.

We started hashing out some basic ideas. We want to do 2D animation with 3D backgrounds and possibly some 3D models for the dinosaurs to help with perspective. The documentary as well will follow a Planet Earth or Walking With Dinosaurs formula, with focus on one creature to create emotional engagement with the audience.

502 #4 - Marketing

 

PERSONAL:

My personal strengths I'd say were my creativity and imagination, something I like to brand 'smortness' as in not academically smart but full of general trivia that can be weirdly helpful in life, and my honesty, which I've been told is good for shopping trips as I won't lie if clothing doesn't suit my companion.

My personal weaknesses are mostly my impulsiveness, which can be dangerous sometimes (like stepping out onto the road instead of waiting), my time management, which leads to a lot of last minute rushing, my motivation, which can be present for ages then suddenly disappear for weeks, and my lack of concentration which makes lectures very difficult to get through.

The weakness are influenced by my only real personal threat, my ADHD, so I didn't see what kind of personal opportunities I had other than possible a psychiatrist with a relevant prescription.

INTERPERSONAL:

My interpersonal strengths I'd say were my generally flexible and relaxed attitude to life, which ends up with me becoming the Therapist Friend in most friendships.

My weaknesses are my struggles with understanding social rules and etiquette, which I find increasingly confusing and frustrating, my difficulty in talking to people outside of a work setting, which makes making non-work friends tricky, and my obsession with dinosaurs which can end up dominating a conversation and takes personal restraint to stop talking about.

My opportunities for making friendships are both uni and a series of animation projects I'm involved in online.

The threats I'd say were mostly myself and significant social change, like going from high school to college, college to uni, and inevitably, uni to job, and job to job.

TECHNICAL:

My technical strengths is my software adaptability, as I know the fundamental of most programs and can quickly learn within a day or so from online tutorials.

My weaknesses are most definitely my struggle with 3D rigging and tech art, which I find endlessly confusing.

My opportunities are my access to multiple programs I get with uni for free, like the Adobe suite, Maya, and the ones I get cheaper like TVPaint and Toon Boom, I also have some networking opportunities with visiting professionals.

I wouldn't say there are any 'threats' outside of the weaknesses.

ARTISTIC:

My strengths are definitely my understanding of animal anatomy that I can adapt for designing monsters or realistically proportioned mythical creatures, and my adaptability to other people's styles in animation.

My weaknesses are realism, which I keep meaning to take courses on but never seem to actually do, landscape artwork/backgrounds, which I do some single tutorials on specific scenes that I can reproduce later on, and my knowledge on human anatomy/perspective, which makes designing human characters difficult.

My opportunities are the 11 Second Club for short animation practices, the D&AD competition, which could help with money, and an online project to create fan episodes of The Owl House called Animation Coven that gives me ways to practice any aspect of production I want (so far I've done backgrounds and storyboards for the project).

The only threat is competitors for the competitions, but I use them for practice more anyway.

504 Competition #3 - First Scenes

 James sketched and lined the second 'scene', which I proceeded to colour basing it off the colour/design boards, also by James;

It wasn't timed completely the same as the animatic, but we were planning on re-timing it in editing anyway, so I put together an updated animatic with the sections we'd finished and left blank space where the animatic kept going to remind me what needed to be re-timed later.

502 #3 Competition - Lining

 This took the longest of the animation, as much of the line layer was new animation with the underlying sketch being a keyframe guide.

504 Competition #2 - Script and Animatic

 Since I have more experience writing scripts, I took to cleaning up the plot outline and putting it in a script format. I made some minor alterations to the original plot outline.

After we ran through some demo v/o work to test the script, we realised what we had would be much longer than 20 seconds, so I went back and altered the script again. You can see what parts were changed because of the slightly different font.

While I edited aspects of the script, Ly worked on creating a coloured animatic with music to give a visual.

502 #2 Competition - Sketching

 I wanted to use this competition to practice my lipsyncing skills, so whole body movement was limited to focus on that instead.

For the sketch layer, I added the body movement and some of the lipsyncing. To save time, the sketch had mostly only keyframes, as inbetweens could be added in the lineart instead, so the sketch isn't as smooth as it will be by its completion.

502 #3 Social Media

 After multiple lectures from both employability week and the course, I reviewed all my professional social media (I didn't touch any of my personal since all are kept private) and changed some parts of each.

I created a new profile picture and banner for all my socials to replace my old one, which was overly complicated for an online profile, so the new one has a simple coloured sketch of myself in my usual clothes with a background of a mountain scene I drew a while back.

I also edited together a new banner to include my favourite pieces of art that I felt showed my strongest areas in art, my space backgrounds and my dinosaur reconstructions.

Although I use Instagram more, among my professional accounts, I use Twitter more, so I altered that first. I uploaded the new profile and banner pictures, updated the age from 19 to 20 and added 'Writer | Creative' to the career line.

I've been using LinkedIn more and more recently, so I went to update that next. I only updated the profile picture and banner, however, as I was happy with the tagline and About section already.

Next on my list was my professional Instagram account, which I updated the profile picture and added 'Animation student at LAU'

The last of my professional social media pages is my ArtStation, which I updated the profile and banner pictures and changed the tagline to 'Animator, Writer, Creative, Dinosaur Nerd' to match my other social media tags.

504 Competition #1 - Early Ideas and Team

 I formed a team with Ly Major and James Kaye to complete the D&AD GiffGaff brief. 

Early on in our concept brainstorm, we decided to take inspiration from Golden Wolf Studio and have the advert be a single object morphing to follow a visual narrative (with v/o narration as well). We listed the key points in the brief and noted some narrative ideas

James created a moodboard to get an idea for style, colours, fonts, and logos.

James also created a plot outline so we had some ideas of narration and visuals

502 #1 Competition - Concepts

I decided fairly quickly which competition I wanted to partake in, as I've done projects similar for free on YouTube, I felt doing the February entry for the 11 Second Club would be best for me. 11 Second Club has a piece of audio, usually dialogue, and allows almost complete free reign for the animators in regards to what they can create.

The February audio was a simple exchange;

Voice 1: Do you think it's because I use the F-word every so often?

Voice 2: Could be. Who knows? Look, there's something wrong with her if she doesn't get what you're doing.

Since February is the shortest month, and I had other projects at the same time, I put together some very basic ideas quickly. I have more experience animating animals, and since cats are my favourite, I created some easy to animate cat designs on the fly. I blocked out a base storyboard in TVPaint to get the basic movements down.

502 #2 Finances

I did a basic calculation of what my annual living costs are during second year, although the total would obviously be much higher and change depending on where I live.

I spent around a half hour combing through my equipment and software costs to find how much I'd spend for everything I use outside of university, which I split into one time payments and annual payments.

The one payment section came to a total of around £4,090, although the costs of the computer equipment and TVPaint have already been made and I currently only pay for ZBrushCore on a monthly basis (which I would prefer to make the one time payment for the full ZBrush2021).

The monthly section came to a total of £290 per month, £3,480 annually. I get everything I listed for free with LAU, but I have previously paid for Adobe Photoshop.