Filipa Amaral

2D Animator

Live Project

Managing, Organizing & Researching

For the project it was decided, after visiting the RAF Museum, that the group would focus on gathering up information related to the interwar period by giving everyone different roles.
I decided to take a producer approach to make sure the team would stick together and kept having meetings to assure the team was up to date with the reoccurring ideas that kept flowing within the preproduction period.
To communicate with the team, a server on discord was created with separate room as well as chat rooms. Like this, we were able to guide and share each others work.

A shared drive folder was also formed to drop and organize the work as well as a WhatsApp group to keep others who were not online at times up to date.

fig.3 - WhatsApp Group

fig.1 Drive Folders

The bear shown on the left side ended up being the inspiration to our little project since the little mascot was all around the gift shop, therefore the team and I gathered up and figured that using it as a market strategy would be interesting to pproach. The thought of having a purpose and a target audience (refering to a younger audience) was an idea that interested the staff from the RAF Museum.

fig.2 - Discord server

For the first week, the team relied on time management, the only way to organize everyone was to build up a schedule to form the Pitch to present to the clients. So, I created one.

The team all decided to work on their research together with some focusing in the arts aspect, some the historical and fashion part of it and others just focusing on building up the script for the story. Everyone had free arbitrary to build up the information on their own and share it with the group. Everyone had to be at the end of the day meeting that would start every night of the week at 10PM.

fig.4 - Schedule Calendar

Did you know?

Our group consists of six members.

Filipa, Diogo, Gabe,

Ming, Sara and Sam.

fig.5 - Timeline Rough Sketch

Advertisement and Newspaper Research Visual Aesthethic

I personally looking into various aspects but specially visuals of the time. I wanted to try and understand the aesthethic but what was ingrained in the media and the challenge was to try and reach it through posters and ads inspiration

Film Pitch

fig.s. 7 - Adverts Interwar

It was a group agreement to have our character flying through the newspapers. A long look through newspapers of the time was part of the research period. There were hundreds of examples of newspapers from all over the world covering the same subject.

fig.s. 8 - Wall Street crash (1929) Newspapers exmples

Pitch for the Client

Animation Tests

These tests were made to solidify our ideas towards the style, the velocity of the plane as well as preparing ideas to put together background, camera movements and the bears interaction with the background and story. All were put together on Adobe After Effects 2021.

Animatic

9 - First Animatic (incomplete story)

First Feedback from Client:

For the presentation, the Pitch was presented by most members of the group. The reaction was very interesting as the Clients loved how we used the bear has a Marketing idea. The clients seemed quite intrigued by the projects idea and it seemed to be going on the right track.

Production

During the course of the next week after the first meeting with the clients, it became quite complicated to have everyone online on discord due to each others tough schedule and the fact that 90% of us had some sort of job. Therefore the 4 weeks that were given for the project felt even shorter.

Regardless we were still committed and the meetings kept happening at nigh time but at crazy hours in the night since that was the only way we could all gather up together to keep each other up to date with the work that was being produced. I had started to work with TVPaint since I realised not many people were going to be doing 2D animation and our project required lot of it.
The Jazz Era was one of the part of the project that I assigned the animation to Samuel so we could have it done quickly since I was already working on the start of the film, so I could start cleaning up his scene once it was done.

Around the second week, a list of events was formed and sent to the Clients. - The feedback to our initial list was that it needed more events, so the Team added some more that we could squeeze in the story.

1920- RAF Pageant (Hendon);

1920- First flight from London to South Africa (England);

1920s- Jazz in New York, Berlin, London, etc…;

1923 – The First mechanical traffic light (Paris);

1928 – First coloured TV (London);

1929- The stock market crash (US);

1929/1939 – The Great depression;

Women vote 1928 – UK 1920 – US 1931 – Spain;

1935 – Radar was invented (England);

1937 - Guernica Bombing (Spain);

1938- Guernica – Picasso (Paris);

1939- World War II;

With that done and sent, we went on to created another Animatic that would be shown to the clients has a Mid Project Type of Review with updated work within the animatic. The team made sure we had an ending to it for the presentation as well as a prototype for the 4 screens idea.

10 - Updated Animatic

11 - 4 screens example

Has it can be seen above, the screens are divided into four parts. The Story of the Bear through the interwar period, Did you know facts, Year Calendar and a Globe with flags - all of which will change in accords to the main animation at the top left of the screen.

Bear and the Plane

12 - Process of the bear to its final form

Sometimes things are not really as they seem, this is why the process at times is much more interesting in itself.
The first two planes were made by Ming and the plane animation was Samuels work. The last plane would be the final .gif that would be manipulated on Adobe After Effects.

South African Plane

Vickers Vinny was the plane used in 1920 for the trip from London to South Africa. Interestingly enough, the plane actually broke down mid trip but the trip was able to succeed with around 40 days of flying.