When choosing music for anything, whether it’s a film, and advert or animation piece, it should be adding and exemplifying your visual medium or atleast fulfilling its purpose as sound design. Whether it’s narration, music, background noises or no sound at all. I knew from my previous research into sound design at the beginning of this project that I wasn’t fan of narration for my animation in particular as it wouldn’t work with my overall theme and narrative. However I did know that I wanted music which will have a cultural connections to Japan as this is my setting of choice as well as background noises and a ‘gasp’ at the beginning of the scene.

Research sources List:
Youtube: How to animate a sunset compositing tutorial
Development
This week I’ve continued to develop my animatic, I’ve been focusing on my most dynamic scenes as I’m still unsure which part I want to animate. I do however also want to make sure I’m rendering the part of the animation with my best background ideas as well as this was a fundamental area I wanted to hone in on skill wise. I have also developed a few more test ideas when it comes to compositing and playing around on after effects with lighting and the ‘keyframe’ tool which was inspired by a video tutorial I found on youtube which demonstrates how to create an animated sunrise and sunset. The reason I wanted to play around with this idea was in my original storyboard I wanted to have the sun rising and perhaps my character sleeping in the background which I experimented with last week. It also is helping me build on my understanding of layering, compositing and background work by experimenting and creating my own pieces.
Strengths
I have been able to create backgrounds and concepts that I’ve never before experimented with or even attempted to create before, I’ve either done digital sketches, character design, and illustration but never fully thought about how powerful a background can be. Saying this, of course, I’m aware that Studio Ghibli’s backgrounds and beauty are iconic and make the films what they are, so that is why I wanted to go down the route of new processes that I can use in the future, especially next term when it comes to the collaboration and our own work.
Areas for Development
Next week I will make sure to add sound design and figure out how I’m going to incorporate different sounds within my animatic. For example when my character gasps I want that to be a clear sound as well as having background music and possibly background noises but I am still clear that I do not want a script or narration as this is more of an interpretive piece which I feel is very clear message-wise, but doesn’t need to be blindingly obvious.

Both of the dynamic pieces of movement I was working on before are now finished and outlined, I have also come to a decision to animate and colour the beginning of my animation from the start up until after the yawn scene as this gives me dynamic movement as well as a wide range of backgrounds to experiment and create which is what I wanted to fulfill during this project.

So the line drawing for the ‘cuddle scene’ isn’t completely finished and the timings are slightly off but overall I am happy with it and as it’s only going to be a part of my animatic I think it shows off what I was trying to achieve with the scene rather well.

So the ‘Yawn Scene’ is going to be a part of the animation that I have chosen to colour and fully render, I’m rather happy with how this turned out, I think it’s smooth and her facial expressions work well along with the hair and arm movements. Next steps with this piece will be colour and shading prior to compositing.