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?

Rush Job

   We were teamed up with some of the TV students and set a brief to make a minute long animatic for a Christmas advert for a website - benjamincook.com and we only had 3 days to do it. My role in the group was just to help out wherever I could and also to do some rough drawings of shots to put into the animatic. Above are three examples of the drawings I did. It went really well and considering we didn't have a lot of time, we did good.

Life Drawing 06/10/16

   

   I have to be honest, I was dreading life drawing again because I find it so difficult, but now that the new year has started I'm feeling motivated! (The question is, how long will this motivation last?) Below is a drawing that I started, and 35 other people finished. We each had a minute to work on every drawing and this was the result. It's quite interesting because even though we all worked on the same drawings, they all looked so different. (quite annoyed that someone drew a sheep on there though)

Below: I'm so happy with this! I feel like it's one of the best drawings I've done. There's not a lot of shading but I feel like I got the shapes really well. Maybe the back could've been drawn a bit better but apart from that, I'm so pleased. Today was a good day!

Below: This one i'm not too sure about. I do however think I did better than I thought I would. I found it quite hard drawing the human body with props as i'm used to drawing just the figures in different poses., so this one isn't that accurate but I tried.

   Below: Practicing hands. I. dreaded. this. Hands are the  most difficult thing to draw (in my opinion) When drawing, you can sort of get away with loose lines and shapes for the body and it still looks okay,  but hands - nope. they HAVE to be perfect, it's so hard! But I'm determined to practice and improve, I'm glad I was able to practice today.

And second year begins....

So, I'm back in Falmouth after 4 months off and I must say, it's good to be back. In our welcome back meeting, we were given an art style to research and our task was to find an artist with that style and replicate their work as close as possible. I was given '1950s illustrations'. At first, I had no idea what would come up when I typed it in to Google, but when I actually did I was pleasantly surprised.

   I noticed that a lot of art in the 1950's had a very illustrative style - which is right down my street. I found an illustration on Pinterest that consisted of very basic shapes and lines and only two colours and I found this really interesting. I tried to replicate it as much as possible but then I realised that there was no artist on the caption or linked to the photo at all. So I then found other work and was able to find out the artist's name - Leonard Baskin. His compositions are very simple but the object he focuses on is very detailed. For example, this illustration of a crow shown below by Baskin, the background is plain but the crow has lots going on. I really like this so I decided to replicate it using fine liner and wash as I love using this technique. I think it turned out pretty well.

   I feel like we'll probably be asked to animate in this style at some point which I guess would be fun - quite a challenge though. We shall see...