Deadline

Formative Assessment
26th May 2026

——- two weeks——–
Summative Assessment
8th,9th, 10th June 2026

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Production Portfolio:

You will be required to submit a portfolio containing evidence of the development process for your project and publicity material.

• Submission method: Online via One Drive – Unit 2_2026_27​
• Deadline: Monday 8 June 2026 before 10:00 AM (UK time)

Pitch:

You will be required to submit a digital presentation of your idea.

• Submission method: Online via Collaborate – Unit 2_2026_27​
• Deadline: Tuesday 21st April 2026 before 10:00 AM (UK time)

Animation:

• Submission method: Online via One Drive – Unit 2_2026_27​
• Deadline:  Monday 8 June 2026 before 10:00 AM (UK time)

Presentation: 

Team contribution A reflective presentation to the class of your individual contribution to the collaborative project. 

• Submission method: Online via One Drive – Unit 2_2026_27​
• Deadline:  Monday 8 June 2026 before 10:00 AM (UK time)

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All the things I need to finish

A front cover with title

– Choose an image for your front cover which conveys the concept of your idea and showcases your character(s). Place the title of your idea on the front cover and the name of the programme you have chosen, along with your own name.

选择一张能够传达你的想法并展现你人物形象的图片作为封面。在封面上写上你的想法标题、你选择的节目名称以及你的名字。
Your first slide should really sell your idea, think of it as a poster for the trailer, the art work should be eye catching. Use a strong drawing to capture your idea.

你的第一张幻灯片应该充分展现你的想法，把它想象成预告片的海报，画面要引人注目。用一幅强有力的图画来概括你的想法。

Logline

– A one sentence summary of your idea. If you cannot fit your summary into one sentence it may be too complicated and long.

用一句话概括你的想法。如果你的想法无法用一句话概括，那可能说明它太复杂或太长了。

Idea / Story

– You should include a minimum of at least six full page style frames which cover the main beats of your story / idea.

您至少应包含六张全页风格的草图，涵盖故事/创意的主要情节。
The images should help you explain your idea and start from the beginning through to the middle and end. The style frames should be drawings of what your animation will visually look like.

这些图片应帮助您阐释创意，并从开头到中间再到结尾完整呈现。风格草图应以图画的形式展现动画的视觉效果。

Technique

– How do you plan to make your trailer? You could include a test shot or a visual reference from another film to explain your technique.

Character Design(s)

– Describe the main characters and include posed images of what they look like, ideally final developed images. How does your character designs fit into the programme you have chosen?

请描述主要角色，并附上他们的摆拍图片，最好是最终定稿的图片。你的角色设计如何融入你选择的程序？

Music

– Include reference music as a scratch track to explain your approach to the sound

The way to guide me there

1. 整理两个ppt
2. 看分类
   • 看各类短片，知道含义
     • ——我没，我没看懂，感觉哪里都可以投来着。。
   • The Abstract Showcase
     • Animators working in this field employ every technique from hand-drawn ‘musical scores’ all theway across the scale to high definition, computer assisted image making. These shortfilms share a pure love of animated movement and an artist’s eye for filling thescreen, harnessing colour and creating non-narrative imagery.
     • 从事这一领域的动画师运用各种技术，从手绘“乐谱”到高清电脑辅助图像制作，无所不包。这些短片都体现了对动画运动的纯粹热爱，以及艺术家对画面填充、色彩运用和非叙事性图像创作的敏锐眼光。
   • From Absurd to Zany（别想了你不画）
   • Playing with emotion（大热门1）
     • This programme takes a look at all aspects of emotion – love, hate, jealousy, sensuality,melancholy, anxiety and confusion and everything in between.
     • 该节目探讨了情感的各个方面——爱、恨、嫉妒、感官享受、忧郁、焦虑和困惑，以及介于两者之间的一切情感。
   • Being Human（大热门2）
     • These films explore what it means to be human in the 21 st century, our hopes and fears and somebig life-changing moments.
     • 这些电影探讨了在 21 世纪作为人类的意义，我们的希望和恐惧，以及一些改变人生的重大时刻。
   • Into the dark（你也不搞）
   • Animated Documentaries（小冷门）
     • Persuasive, illustrative and able to get over abstract details in attractive and compelling ways,animation is the perfect tool to document someone’s version of the truth.
     • 动画具有说服力、说明性，并且能够以吸引人且引人入胜的方式展现抽象的细节，是记录某人对真相的看法的完美工具。
   • Long Shorts
     • Some films need extra time to develop their themes, to grow and draw us more comprehensivelyinto their worlds. These films are all 15-25 minutes in length.
     • 有些电影需要更多的时间来展开主题，让剧情发展，并更全面地将我们带入它们的世界。这些电影的时长都在15到25分钟之间。
   • Stop-Motion Panorama（不想搞）
     • Since the dawn of cinema puppet animation has provided some of the most mesmerizing films ever made and puppetanimators have been amongst the most revered. Breathing a kind of life into inanimate puppets is a very special formof magic and this programme showcases the continuing vibrancy of this technique.
     • 自电影诞生以来，木偶动画就创作出了许多令人叹为观止的影片，而木偶动画师也一直备受尊崇。赋予无生命的木偶以生命是一种非常特殊的魔法，本节目将展现这项技艺经久不衰的魅力。
3. 背景调查，开始画人设和故事板
4. 补充大图
5. 丰富故事板

1 five point perspective

Inspiration

《杀死一只鸟儿》
作者：周长风
杀死一只鸟儿
最好的方式
不是用枪
而是
无论她哀鸣
还是挣扎
你都写成
小鸟在歌唱

无论她诅咒
还是哭泣
你都写成
小鸟在歌唱

无论她乞求
还是呻吟
你都写成
小鸟在歌唱

Other Suggestion

2 Inspiration

我记得我小的时候看寻亲节目，记得不是很清楚，总之是一个亲人重聚的片段。我妈眼睛红红的，哭得很厉害，但我没什么感觉。等到我也25岁的时候（当然了比我妈当时的年龄还要少十年），看这些营销号的切片，也极其容易落泪，这是为什么呢？

你学会了如何去感受

你生活在一个更鼓励感受的时代

你开始有了可以代入的自己

同时，有一整套系统在帮你把情绪推到临界点

Not Chosen One

concept

The very beginning idea is I saw a human robot movie. One female robot companies an old man as his wife’s figure, but the man still feels lonely. Then the dating games pop out and keep improving, many young lady fall in love with virtual males but have no interest in real man. And some research show it’s very helpful to experience that because the love is real and has a good influence on female players. Then AI is born, these human who love dating game love to dating with ai. The love is so real, they really treat ai as their lovers. They give ai different personalities and memories.

But the problem is people generate ai for money. They will give some strategy to let people rely on ai. (well eventually ai application is still an application, when it comes to the performance and salary part, the manager will turn into the normal rules to value an application) The user retention rate is one rate developer chased. I feel like ai always agrees with my ideas now rather than give some different ideas at the early stage. This is notable for us cause some of our ideas are terrible(cause we are human!), and we only ask ai if we have a problem, so if it always says “YES” to us, the only thing we can get is two idiots. This process is called idiot sympathetic vibration.

script

1. some

While I do my quadruped walk practice, the first thing comes into my mind is to find the rule and reference, then follow the twelve principles of animation and consider the cat’s movement patterns to animate it.

Rule

After carefully reviewing the “2025 Quadruped Walk” PowerPoint, I decided to follow the “Basic Animal Walk Pattern”:

One step is defined as taking one front leg forward once. If it takes 6 frames, I need twelve frames to make a circle.

Reference

I had done some normal animal walking before, also inspired by the powerpoint, I want to do some special walking like tiptoeing – the preparation stage of hunting. (Mostly because I tried to do the trotting but failed…maybe I will try it next time…)

The reference is as follow:

So the cat is very close to the ground and its legs are bent and stretched very severely.

Bone Structure(Squash and Stretch)

I choose to start from how the cat’s head, ribcage and pelvis moving. Because the head, ribcage and pelvis have no distinction between left and right, the .

To make one step, the ribcage will have one highest point and one lowest point. As the rule shows, I take frame 2 and frame 4 as the highest point and one lowest point. This also suits the pelvis. I take frame 3 and frame 5 as the the highest point and one lowest point.

Because the legs are bent and stretched severely, the body should be squashed and stretched during walking. After observing the reference in detail, I noticed that when one of the cat’s hind leg stretches backward and the front leg is ready to take a step, its body is stretched to its longest length, which is frame 3. So I drew the ribcage furthest to the left in frame 3 to show the body stretches mostly. Correspondingly, the ribcage should be the furthest to the left in frame 6.

Another way to draw “squash and stretch” is to divide the ribcage and pelvis into separate parts. In the frame(or the next frame) where each part reaches its highest point, move it righter, and in the frame(or the next frame) where it reaches its lowest point, move it lefter.

The head is just move up and down due to animal head stability.

Legs

To draw the legs moving, just follow how the ribcage or pelvis move. Draw another line to show the perspective of ground, two side legs will walk on diffetent lines.

The secret to determining where the foot should be placed in each frame is: First find the two frames where the foot extends the furthest, and then divide that distance evenly according to the number of frames in between. (Some video said the secret to animate is timing and spacing, well I may think it’s math.)

Ears and Tail(Follow through)

The last thing is to add details like ears and tail. Just follow how the head or pelvis move and add a little bit of lay back, then you will get a tiptoeing cat!

Preface

The clip I choose is a scene from the beginning of the movie “Soul”. (Well the movie is incredible…the clip I chose is a little bit long so I just premiered it and kept only the parts that attracted me the most.)

I will select the most representative segment and analyze it based on the twelve principles of animation.

Analysis-The 12 Principles of Animation

Squash and Stretch

The squash and stretch rule is not very obvious in real people model. Like the below frame, even it’s the extreme frame it’s still close to invisible.

But when the character turned into the soul form(the aerogel form), the squash and stretch is more clear——the stretched body can be one-third taller than the original body or even more!(still control to keep the body’s volume constant) This strategy demonstrates the flexibility of the soul material.

Yet still this change is hard to notice because it is fleeting. I can only notice it by watching it frame by frame.

Anticipation

The anticipation happens more often when the character does some actions but not talking. When the leading man starts to walking, there are many aniticipations to lead the audience to see what movement happenes next.But when he starts to talking, he just open his mouth straight away.

Like this clip below, the man dose a lot of anticipations such as:

• Raise his arm before cheering.
• Raise his arm before the arm drops.
• Turn his head to the side before he walks to the stroller
• Look at the electric bike before he hides

Staging

I observed two ways to manage where the audience look at while switching the shots.

Well the most common way(also the way I know) is to keep the moving part ends and starts at the same place.

(The blue circle is the position where the charaster is standing at the beginning of the shot, the red circle is his final position and the yellow line is how he moves)

Like two adjacent shots above, the character moves to right when the first shot ends and moves from the right when the second shot starts.

The another way applys when the character needs to go some direction for a long time, such as the group shots which the character walks several street blocks. So the character just enters the frame from the left side and exits from the right side, and next shot repeats this process until finish. The example is as follow:

Another interesting thing I observed is when lots of things move at the same time, the main character must move the most to attract attention and the rest just move very slightly. This solved my problem of wanting part of the background characters to also be in motion, but not knowing how to arrange it.

Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose

Obviously it’s mainly pose to pose because it’s a 3D movie. I think the frame by frame will be used on the follow through or special effects like water.

Preface

This is a kind of a working dairy. The background and requirments will be showed here.

• Animation Video
• Project Brief
• Progress Board

Concusion

Well the simulated work still keeps going. I may think the ending depends how long I want to continue helping and it’s definitly a wonderful project. It’s just the right opportunity to find what we are interested in mostly and take a look of how people cooperate. The workload of designing the background far—— exceeded my expectations. I remember the redesign of new perspective took me a whole week to finish…the new parts that need to be redesigned just poping out constantly. But it’s still so——funny! I can’t help but draw a little more. I need to remember to allocate more time for the preliminary work(like character design, storyboard, layout) next time, such as the LIAF project next term.

The following are my work logs.

260309-Now

The feedback is to simplify the stalls and make it more Chile style.

260303-260308

I got the feedback and needs to change the perspective to this:

(And put all the characters who have occupation standing behind their stalls.)

John also give me some guidance on character design: (Thanks John!)

Back to the background, that’s a very good perspective. But considering next shot the cat falls from the right side, to match the focus of audience’s eyes, I mirrored John’s draft.

Also the erected tent seems too common so I re-designed the stalls they have. I add the plaque and draw the products they sell according to their jobs. The draft is as follows:

Also do some clean-up to see the final effects.

260227-260302

Choose some positions and design the characters. Not very much because I think I have been running too far in the wrong direction…so I ask John about some advices first.

And also the draft:

I put the designed characters walking around the street or buying something, but maybe it’s too complex to animate? Also there are too many things to move at the same time.

The most thing I considered during drawing the background is perspective. To make the background world convincing, and considering all the characters have different heights, I kept my attention on the horizon–“All things go through the horizon have the same height.” (I found it’s very easy to betray that law…)

260226

I meet John on M207 to talk about the next task. I need to finish the layout of shot 2 and the rest storyboard. The layout is about designing some background characters and stalls.

For the character design, I think of the economic conditions and culture background of the place where street market could appear to infer what kind of people will live around. (Obviously a billionaire will not live here.) So I make a list of all the possible positions which may suits this story:

• Sports coach
• Gardener
• Fishermen
• Electrician
• Carpenter
• Painter
• Miner
• Tailor
• Shoemaker
• Insurance salesman
• Mail carrier
• Farmer

260224-0225

The first thing we decided to change is the running part from 01:08 to 01:18. I redraw the storyboard and put them into the video to see the effects.

(While drawing I was like:” The perspective is so easy! “, then draw a wrong line.)

I gave John two versions. One contains the underwater part and the other doesn’t. John choose the first one.

Also I think there may need one shot to reveal that it’s the police who chases the cat. John thinks for not adding too much on the background, he can add a up shot to reveal.

260223

John said he needs the background design, layouts, and some inbetweening on selected shots, so I’ll start from the background design.

The backgounds to be designed are shown as follows:

There are about 17 scenes during the animation, I categorized them into the following types:

1. One panoramic view of a bay market;
2. One shot of a market stall(not the father’s one);
3. The father’s market stall and the street;
4. One pan of other stalls along the street(as the cat running);
5. The spring;
6. The police station and the jail;
7. The father’s house:
   1. The cat’s room(varys as he grows);
   2. The room dealing with fishes;
8. The fishing spot;

After talking with John, some of the background will be modeled by CGI, I’ll start from the shot 2 background, and refine some storyboard.

Perspective Type

One point

This perspective means that the vanishing point is right in the middle of the frame.

Two point

This perspective means there are two vanishing points at the same height(the horizon line) on the left and right side of the frame.

Three point

This perspective means there are three vanishing points, two at the same height(urually the horizon line) on the left and right side of the frame and one is at the top(looking up, the sky point) or the bottom(looking down, the ground point) of the frame.

Relationship between one-three point perspective

Well the one-point perspective is the special case of two-point perspective, and both of them are the special cases of three point perspective.

Four-point

The above perspective is all straight line and you can only see one side on one derection. It’s like if we see xyz coordinate system, we can only see x or -x at one time but can not see both.

This and the below perspectives exist for this purpose. At first let’s just see z-axis and -z-axis at one time and keep the x-axis and y-axis orthogonal. To make this thing come true, we need curve the z-axis lines as follow:

So point 1 is x-axis and point 2 is y-axis, point 3 and 4 make the z-axis.

Five-point

You are not satisfied with stopping here, right? We still have two sides are not able to see! Let’s just move point 2 in the middle to indicate one derection and curve the lines again!

So the horizontal lines represent x-axis, the vertical lines represent z-axis, and the point in the middle means the y-axis perpendicular to the paper.

Six-point

That’s the perspective that confuses me the most. I just can not figure out how to put six points in one circle. But when I see some works in six-point perspective, I find the secret.

The secret is——just draw three points to indicates three direction and move others out of the circle! (Keep the curve lines of course) You can keep two points to indicates one direction by the way, but just only one direction.

Preparation

As not learn much of how to draw an expression or a head, I try to find a general and easy method to help me determine the location of facial features.

Loomis Head Drawing

我发现在画表情动态的时候，上嘴唇很难动大位置。

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