Principles of Animation Arts – NHS Prostate Cancer Project

Pre-production
Materials

Ideas and mood board:

In the beginning, me and Erin starts off the project by doing researches, learning as much about prostate cancer as we could. Individually, two mood boards were created that was used to inspire our works for the pre-production materials such as the character designs and storyboard. In this page of the slide, Erin’s mood board is displayed on the left, while my one is on the right.

Logline for the animation:

Edited from the 1 hour-ish audio provided by the NHS client, both me and Erin produced the following logline that was chosen and edited after careful discussion and consideration.

“Cancer is a subject that puts people into shock, especially men. The most common thing we do when we’re shock, we pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s probably the worst thing to do because if you sit and you procrastinate, maybe you could have done something in the early stage that could have stopped the cancer from spreading. What I would say is that if anybody is suffering from any of the prostate cancer symptoms, please go and see your GP, get you PSA test as soon as possible. Because once you’ve had the test, you get the reassurance. The doctor puts together a health plan and you know where you are going, and you know what your objectives are, and your journey begins.”

Character designs:

While me and Erin worked individually on the design of the characters during the early stage of the project, our goals towards designing the protagonist is mutual: a senior black man with simple yet relatable appearance that could well re-present prostate cancer patient and could inspire to encourage and take good care of themselves. Several options with different style and design choices were created by Erin and myself. In the end, we took one of Erin’s design and used it during the animation for the outcome.

While my protagonist design wasn’t chosen for the final production, it was still used for the experimental animation. Other unused materials includes the medical crews shown, which was left out from the storyboard in the end and never made it in to production.

Storyboards:

Erin and I wanted to create a cartoonish yet inspirational animation that aimed to deliver a powerful message to encourage cancer patients in taking care and checking up themselves. During the early stage of the development, we established 2 different storyboards individually which are more like each other’s.

As demonstrated, Erin’s storyboard is on the left and my original storyboard is on the right.

There were two other versions of the storyboard that’s created by me, and they went a little different than the previous ones. The first is based on Erin’s original storyboard with more refined graphic, and the second is also similar but with several scenes replaced with a more experimental and abstract design that was inspired based on a discussion with the tutor. Although we decided to use Erin’s storyboard as the foundation to develop our outcome, I had still created a 26 seconds animation based on the experimental storyboard that’s used as tests and inspiration for our final production. The animatic and animation for this experimental version of the storyboard is demonstrated in the later slides of the presentation.

Animatics:

After the finalization of the storyboard, both Erin and I created two individual versions of the animatics. The one by Erin is more heavily based on the original storyboard, while the one I created was designed after my version of the experimental storyboard. Erin’s animatic was refined and re-adjusted for the final production after the client’s feedback regarding some of the scenes being too slow and dragging. Filler scenes to counter this issue was created while Erin was working on the animation.

Erin’s animatic showcase:

Link to Erin’s animatic: https://vimeo.com/794227608

Richard’s animatic showcase:

Link to Richard’s animatic: https://vimeo.com/794226625

Richard’s experimental animation

To reduce production difficulty, I chose a more familiar software over Toon Boom to animate the video. Most of the assets and individual scenes of the animation are created in Photoshop (with some recycled from the storyboard), and then imported in to Cyberlink Power Director for compiling sound and visual effects

Experimental animation production materials:

Experimental animation showcase:

Final production & outcome:

The outcome animation is primarily completed by Erin, while I compiled and edited the video into the final version. Some of the experience I had done compiling the experimental animation has been helpful while I was working on the editing for this outcome. The video was given a title by me, called “You’re not alone, stand up against prostate cancer!”. The idea came up while I was working on the editing, and it is to provide the video with a theme that would make the animation look more encouraging.

Link to the animation: https://vimeo.com/794236415

Credit to the background music: The Great North Sound Society (2020) Ellie’s Home Stretch. Available at: https://youtu.be/dJ661rdcF4o (Downloaded 26 January 2023).

Final Appraisal:

This project has been a rather difficult and challenging experience, because of multiple reasons such as communication issue with my group mate, critical physical illness and as well as personal mental difficulties. The beginning took off alright with the first and second presentation, despite of slower progression and a much lesser and simpler concept production, the planning of the storyboard and animatics was going in the way we had intended to be. As discussed originally, the assignment for the production was intending to be Erin primarily doing the animation while I would assist her in doing assets and working on compiling the video for the eventual outcome. However, things get harder during the holiday, as Erin took much longer to reply than I expected. We had little to no progression throughout that period, and I thought it was ok since everyone’s resting and spending time with their family. But this circumstance continued after the holiday, and that started to get me worrying. I hadn’t seen any production progression and it took a very long time to receive a response, even if I had been a little pushy towards her for the reply. I had requested multiple times to assist her in the animation works, but I didn’t have much response from those messages too. It was until almost the deadline of the submission, had she sent me all the required animation work for the editing, and I hadn’t had any opportunities to assist doing the assets as we had originally intended. Upon discussion with my tutor, it was eventually decided that producing additional animation work would help me in submitting enough materials to justify the amount of work I had done for this project. The entire situation has been frustrating and had made me really stressed out and was critically affecting my depression. Despite of my difficulties with demotivation that had declined my ability from creating good animation production, I had still been trying my best to do the most I could to keep up with the rest of the people, but the difficulties encountered throughout this project has made it even harder. Although I felt like there’s many parts where I didn’t do well regarding properly communicating with my group mate, including requesting her to keep constant contact with me from the beginning and finding alternative methods to stay in touch with each other’s, I still felt like things could have gone much better than the way it turned out. On the other hand, the cancer topic has also been a difficult factor for me to stay motivated due to the nature of its topic associated with sickness, negative condition, and has decreased my ability to create a better-quality production compared to my previous performance. Regardless, this is an issue I’m also working to improve, although it could take a longer time than intended to achieve due to the many other obstacles coming from my health issue, that I’m currently working hard to overcome.