I The Storyc story premise. Following standard 3-act structure, the premise was:

Animation Concept:

I began with the basic story premise. Following standard 3-act structure, the premise was:

1. A bee is going about its business trying to pollinate flowers
2. An aggressive, selfish bee keeps preventing the bee from pollinating
3. The Aggressive bee is eaten by a Venus flytrap in its over-zealous, non-neighborly behavior

I wanted a simple story, a simple animation style, and characters that fit the scale of the story. With a one minute animation, the goal was to create a proportionate story - something clear, complete and easily understood.

I started with a simple storyboard, to flesh out the key animations and set pieces. I then followed with some quick research. I wanted to answer the following:

• What is the basic structure of a bee?
• What makes a bee look good versus bad?
• What essential body parts identify a bee from other insects

As with any animation, I created some quick sketches of possible character design. From experience I’ve noticed that big facial features and light color imply safety, innocence, and other general good attributes. As such, I decide to emphasize the protagonist’s cartoonish eyes and nose. Since the protagonist was going to the more expressive character I needed the eyes to do the work for me.

For the antagonist I relied on visual archetype. I emphasized the brow, used more black color, and sharpened its body features. I kept the character simple and less expressive to emphasize to encourage the viewer to feel detached. I wanted all empathy poured toward the protagonists.

Modeling

I modeled each of the primary characters first. Since this was my first time animating with Anim8or I wanted to use an iterative approach to creating the animation. I started the protagonist in a basic 3 object figure; creating a basic flying cycle, and rendering a moving scene.

Once I had basic experienced with Anim8or I created each of the primary characters: protagonist’s bee, antagonist bee and the Venus fly trap. Since two characters are of the same species I reused geometry wherever possible. The bone structures for these two characters were also fairly similar.

The most interesting challenge was modeling the wings. I realized that a more realistic bee is intrinsically less friendly looking. As such I modeled somewhat realistic wings for the antagonist bee. The wings were modeled by extruding a path. I then created a few brushstrokes in PhotoShop and set the alpha, diffuse, et al for the wings. I need to play a bit with the UV to get the veins of a bee’s wing to seem more realistic.

In retrospect I’ve learned that the realistic models may be more labor intensive, but they offer the benefit of providing a reference. Modeling wings, for example, was much easier when I could view samples. Modeling an imaginary flower that fits in an imaginary world requires a peculiar managed creativity.

I did not model the plants and related flora until I had tested and animated the key scenes. I created most of these elements by deforming basic geometric shapes.

I experimented with many different textures. I created everything by hand. Since these textures need to be cartoonish, there wasn’t much of a resource for me to use on the web. Most textures, like animated sequences, were derived from trial and error.

Animation

I tried to animate with only 3 or 4 base animation sequences. In the end I used 8 animated sequences: 2 sequences for protagonist flight, 2 sequence for protagonist searching, 2 sequences for antagonist flight, 1 sequence for antagonist trapped, 1 sequence for the Venus fly trap.

I spend significant time designing camera angles that highlighted the character’s interaction. As with writing, making characters interact in an animated world creates problems that grow exponentially for each character added. I’m glad I only had 3 characters to manage.

Problems and Pitfalls

Fairly far into the 3 week cycle I realized that Anim8or treated any black texture as an alpha texture. After I had rendered my initial scenes I found invisible and opaque bees buzzing about my scene. In a crunch for time, I simply used Anm8or materials instead of textures.

A few other problems occurred:

In some scenes that limits on certain bones would not be enforced. As a result some scenes had a bee flying forward wit the bee’s head orbiting the body in something analogous to insect Exorcist gymnastics. I fixed this by animating the scenes in portions, and editing out the bad frames.

The Venus flytrap needed more bones than originally expected. To prevent the Flytrap from folding over itself when it closed I added a few non-articulated bones to change the axis on which the mouth closed.
Editing and Sound

I edited freely available sounds from the web to match the moments in the animation. I mostly changed volume and times the sound to the animation. I also used an existing audio loop for the opening screen.

I spend some significant time choosing typefaces and audio that matched the mood of the animation. In the end I did not use all of the assets that I created. There was for example, a sound I created for the trap closing. It reverse, clipped, and re-organized an audio clip of an umbrella opening.

I create each of the sequences by using multiple computers. I used a Laptop (P4 512Mb RAM) and a desktop (AMD 512MB Ram) to render specific scenes at the same time. I edited the sequences on a third computer while the other two rendered.

In the end, I’m fairly content with the final product. I’d like to do it again, with a realistic situation that allows me to play more with lighting and drama.

Questions from Class:

Its quite clear from your animation that you created several different scenes in doing your work. Was the way you would split up your animation already defined in your storyboard, or you just decided while creating the animation itself at what points you needed to start a new scene?

Alessandro Febretti

Answer: I used the rough storyboard to guide scene selection, but in the end I sued scene complexity as the deciding factor. If a scene was more complex, or if it required a different set, I rendered the invidiaul scene.