Bing Bang Bong Animation Shot

   This is the animation shot, I'm pleased with it! I think the jumpy movements go with the whole "dada theme" and the fact that the bus is moving etc. I animated the bus driver which I thought was going to be such a challenge seeing as I am no stop motion expert, and I was right - it was a challenge indeed. But I had the support of the other two group members and we worked great as a team and gave each other a boost, especially near the end after nearly 7 hours of filming. If 5 seconds of film took 7 hours, I can't imagine how long a feature length film would be! I loved doing stop motion again, hopefully I get the opportunity to do it again at some point.

Bing Bang Bong

 Above: This is a concept piece that I did digitally, showing the structure and layout of the bus and also the textures of the walls and seats and showing where the characters could be. Below are some photos of us animating today, it took about 7 hours but it was so cool to be able to do some stop motion as lately I've just been doing a lot of 2D. I will upload the video of our animation shot in the next post. It was quite nice, we had the stop motion section to ourselves, we had a little trouble with the laptop crashing and sometimes the camera accidentally moved so it took some time to get it as close to how it was before as possible. it looks pretty good! we just need to figure out the green screen now.

Concept Art

This is a bit of concept art for my original pick n mix project. The original drawing is shown above with the edited version below. This is showing my main character Mr K. Beane as a child on his father's shoulders in a field. I haven't really done much concept art for this so I thought I should do at least a couple. It's very simple but that is what I was going for similar to the illustration above which is from the 1950s. For example, the sky, grass and clouds have no black outline and not different shades just block colours. Originally I was only going to use two colours for the whole thing like the illustration but I struggled to make it look good and interesting so I decided to just colour it but not in detail so it still has that "1950s illustrative" look.

Bus Modelling

    This is the bus so far. We used watercolours after experimenting with different colours and shades and modelled the bus with cardboard then stuck the sheets onto the cardboard. We also put the puppets in progress in to see how it looks. It's all really coming along!

Pick n Mix - Sophia's project

These are backgrounds for Sophia's pick n mix project. I tried to use different textures such as ripped wallpaper and tarnished metal and changed the opacity and also tried to give a watercolour effect to interpret purple and yellow tone colours. I quickly mapped out characters just to see how they would fit into the bus and just get a better feel of the idea, but of course the characters will look different as physical puppets.

Snowman Turnaround

   I definitely need more practice with turnarounds. I also forgot to do a side view (well done Cerys) I think there's something going on with my Wacom tablet, it's always so shaky so the lines aren't very smooth, perhaps I should do more drawings in the studio in stead of at home. I might include this in my production report.

11 second is done!!

This is my final 11 second animation. In the small space of time I had to do this I'm very pleased, although I wish I had maybe done more with the characters and include more movement but I struggled a lot to do so, I definitely need more practice with animating, I haven't done it properly in ages. The snow also goes to the side a bit which is quite annoying but it's not too noticeable I don't think? I did it in TVPaint which I'm glad about because I now have so much more experience with it and I am enjoying using it.

11 Second Club - idea change

   So, it's exactly two weeks today until the deadline, so of course I decided to change my idea....
I was struggling to animate the other one as I find animating people very difficult and with the amount of time I have, I need to just get it done. So it's nearly Christmas, why not animate a snowman?! here it is in progress, it's not the best and there's not really any movement but it'll do. It's a lot better than I thought it was going to be, it still needs colouring but it will look better when it's completely finished.

Life Drawing 16/11/16

Today was just a huge no from me, I wasn't feeling it at all :( Maybe it's because it was the last life drawing session of this semester, maybe it was because of the heavy work load I currently have, I don't know, but I just couldn't get into it. I certainly gave it my best shot though and one or two of them came out okay.

Okay so this one (above), was a challenge given that the model fell asleep and kept nodding their head up and down so I couldn't accurately draw his face. And don't even get me started on the feet - Worst. Things. To. Draw. Ever. (except for hands)

quick walk cycle

I thought I'd have a read of The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams and get a bit of practice as I haven't actually animated anything in so long, all I've really done is design and pre production work, so I've started this walk cycle in TVPaint, using the same character as Williams. He says to start with the two contact positions and then a passing position. This is my starting point, just a rough, not cleaned up version but I'm going to try and improve it and upload a proper copy, but yep, here it is, animation in progress! :)

Practice Practice Practice

Okay so this seems really weird but let me explain:

   Back in my 2010 days when I was about 13, my friends and I would go out - like a normal group of friends would - then when we got bored we used to just make these random films and honestly, it was so great, they were the best times. So I had this idea that eventually, I could probably animate one of them, or at least do some designing and concept art to make it feel like I'm going to animate it, I don't know. I drew a couple of frames for a storyboard (well admittedly, I rotoscoped most of it as originally I had no intention of putting it on my blog) and threw it all together in an animatic which actually looks pretty cool. I've written a script which needs a lot of tweaking and I might even do some sound and dialogue recording and get some practice in! the soundtrack I used was just from the original "film" we made, my editing at the time was on point (thanks Windows Movie Maker) and I literally just used a small camera to film so an animation of it would be so much better. Lets see where I go with this.

Penryn Project finally works!!!

    I finally sorted out my Penryn Project!! Apparently, the reason why it exported with no sound last year was because all of my sounds were different formats so I used media encoder this time to make all of the sounds the same format and it worked! I'm so happy and chuffed with it so I wanted to put up a proper copy on my blog. Watching this always gives me a boost and a bit of self determination and confidence.

Life Drawing 26/10/16

 
   The model didn't show up so we each took it in turns to be the model for ten minute poses. Today I just wasn't functioning, I just couldn't draw so I'm not overly happy about these drawings but hey ho. The top right drawing of Daniel was one that we had to do with our opposite hand and weirdly, I actually love it, it's got it's own style. Then we had to  draw the person opposite us (below) by this point I was so drained after that three hour session, but it's not too bad.

 

This is Jade's drawing of me and I just love it, I'm quite excited because no one has ever drawn me before ha!

Pre Production Pitch

   Sooo unfortunately my film wasn't one of the highest voted so it won't be taken on, but I decided to do some work on it anyway as I really like the story and I want to experiment with it. These are some character drawings I did, not great or cleaned up properly buy they're not final, just ideas for now but I will probably build on these and make changes here and there and develop them until I get a final character.
   Here, you have the main character, who is the kidney bean farmer on the left (I realise that kidney beans are a lot smaller but lets just pretend size doesn't matter for now) Next, the business man (or, business potato), carrot, broccoli and cauliflower, you can sort of get the gist of there personalities through these drawings and i'm still working on them so I won't go into too much detail, I don't even have names for them yet, but I wanted to put this up on my blog so you can all see the working progress! Hopefully amongst my other tasks, I will have time to continue with this project.

Walk Cycle Celaction and Pizza Face??

Okay, so I should probably explain this... My housemates and I were being very not studious and decided to play a load of games we used to play when we were kids (I swear, we're all adults) one of which was one of my favourites. It's the one where each person has a piece of paper and you start by drawing the head, then give your paper to the next person who draws the torso, then give the paper to the next person who draws the top part legs and so on, We played it several times and this pizza-faced, hairy-legged gal was one of the only "appropriate" finished drawings.

 I then had the idea that I could actually draw this digitally and then animate it (bit of extra practice eh?) So that's exactly what I've done. It isn't great partly because of how it is drawn (ie the feet the wrong way) and the animation in general just isn't strong but I'm actually so proud of it. I'm still not very experienced in Celaction just yet so it was good to get the practice in. I might do it again with one or two of the other characters or make them interact as this was so fun, I can't wait to show my housemates! So, here's the finished result:

Life Drawing 12/10/16

This week we focused on only the head. I was very nervous as soon as I heard we were only drawing from the shoulders up because my confidence in drawing heads and faces is 0%. But I gave it my best shot! This was my first drawing of the session where we were left to do our own thing with Georg only observing and not speaking to us about it. It's not actually too bad considering I have nearly no experience in drawing heads and faces, but I can definitely see that a lot of improvement is needed. For example, I need to look at drawing facial features more accurately and get the proportions and positions correct.

As we were doing several three minute drawings, Georg walked around the room and could see that I was struggling so he told me about using lines and draw 'what you see' (as in shading) He also gave out needles at the beginning of the session but I've never used them before and had no idea how to use them. Luckily, Georg told me how they can be used as a 'match up' guide to help with position and it actually helped a lot. Below are a few quick sketches, not so much portraits, just working out position and shapes.

Using all of the techniques we learnt in the session we did one last drawing. The eyes are too close together in this, it's not my usual style and I could've done a lot better but it's not too bad, I'm feeling quite positive about life drawing at the moment, I might look back at my drawings from first year and see if there's a difference, from what I can remember I think there is. Definitely looking forward to next weeks session.

11 Second Club: Storyboarding

The next two frames I used a blur to emphasise the focus in this particular shot which is the character, so I blurred the clothes and rail of the wardrobe and also the background behind the character. I think this looks much better than if I were to leave it all unblurred. It shows more depth as well which I really like.

11 Second Club Task

   These are some very quick drawings of backgrounds for my storyboard for the 11 second club task. The task is to animate to a piece of sound from the current competition on the 11 Second Club website. This is the transcript for this month's sound:

Voice 1: You can't go to the ball as Blade. He's a Vampire Hunter.

Voice 2: Yeah, but vampires love Wesley Snipes, so it's...

Voice 1: No it's inappropriate. Okay Vlad, the green jumpers or the black leather with the dragon belt?

   I was thinking of having two teenage characters maybe going to their school disco so for a background I decided to go with one of the character's bedroom as they're talking about what to wear and I had an idea for it, I only have about a month to complete the task so I didn't want to do anything too complicated so I thought that the two characters could just be in the room talking and focus on movement and different shots.

Cornish Seal Sanctuary

   I took a trip to the Cornish Seal sanctuary because number one - it was on my list of things to do whilst in Cornwall and number two - I thought I would take a sketchbook and do some drawing. It was really hard to draw as of course, most of the time the seals were moving and quite fast too, so I had to do very quick sketches, some of them are okay but others didn't turn out so good, maybe it's just me being under confident as usual but I really tried to observe and watch how they move , it was really interesting. Here are some drawings from that day:

Cards cards cards

Okay, so following our task to replicate an artist's work from the style we were given, we were then given three other cards with a type if show, character and setting. I had a farming show, kidney bean, and new towns (ie Milton Keynes) and our task is to make an animatic based on the cards we were given. So I started by researching farming shows and backgrounds. I need to consider all of the cards and remember to use the style of 1950s illustrations, but it's a start!

This is my attempt of a simple background - kind of in a 1950s illustration style.... kind of not. I feel like this doesn't really work I think i'll have to try something else but it's interesting to see what works and what doesn't work.

Character Design?