Style Update For 'Chasing Birds'

The birds animation, which now has the working title of 'Chasing Birds', required a style and so the tutors gave us the Art Deco style card, telling us to focus on 1920s Vogue covers. My group was really pleased with this as the fairly regal looking illustrations suit the Victorian England scenes extremely well. The Vogue style makes use of angular face shapes combined with flowing, curvaceous bodies, pouting lips, small delicate nose shapes and slitted eyes, all of which sexualises the women. The clothes are often quite detailed in contrast to the basic face shapes. A washed out watercolour style adds to the delicacy of the images, as do the soft grey outlines. Patterns are a common feature of Vogue covers, sometimes filling background space or being applied to clothes. 

Below are some images that I copied to get a feel for the Vogue style. 

I then set about implementing this style into my designs for the girl, named Eliza, who is the protagonist of the story. Eliza is meant to be about 10 and this posed a problem as all of the Vogue women have very angular faces with strong bone structure and obviously little girls have rounded softer faces... so the youngest I could get her to look while still retaining a Vogue feel was mid teens. Eliza is also meant to be this athletic tom boy and not sexualised in any way, so again it was tricky to get that Vogue influence in without altering the characteristics of the girl.  Below is my design development, ending with the final coloured version, incorporated into an action shot as we've been told our characters need to be shown doing what they will be doing in the animation, rather than just standing about which is the kind of 'go to' pose people (like me) do when designing characters.

I think I've got the body shape looking quite Vogue like although in the final version I did make the legs too skinny. The rips at the bottom of the T-shirt are too long and distracting, so would need to be reduced greatly in size. The background sky works well and retains the style nicely.

Eline then took my design and put her own twist on it:

So we all decided this worked better as she looks the right age of about 10 and has quite a boyish figure. It will also be easier to animate as the shapes are simpler than mine and the hair is far less complex, with only a few strands... since mine was fairly crazy looking and would literally be impossible to animate in the time frame we have... it would've looked good though...

Pick 'N' MIx

In Pre Production we were each given 4 random cards: a style, character, setting and genre card which we had to combine to create an idea for an animation. I got Falmouth illustration student, angel, palace kitchens and documentary. I researched past illustration students' blogs to find a style I liked and found Patrick Atkins. I replicated some of his work to get a feel for his style:

His shapes are very simple and his marks are violent and scratchy. There is a prominent use of black and this is strongly contrasted by whites and off whites, creating strong lighting in his images which heightens the drama within them. The illustrations are quite dark in mood but the basic shapes used to create the characters prevent the images from being too sinister as it gives them a quirky edge. I felt this dark but quirky style would compliment the plot I came up with well....

So. The plot. The opening scene would show a lion killing a zebra, with the audience's sympathies lying with the zebra. But the lion would then die somehow and his spirit would find its way to this kind of no man's land, purgatory type place, where loads of spirits of different animals and humans are. There are entrances to lots of different heavens, as every species has a different heaven. But there is a mix up and the lion ends up in the wrong heaven: the zebra heaven. The zebras hate the lion because his kind kill zebras, so they ostracize him and force him to work in the Palace Kitchens, an underground dungeon beneath the palace where the leaders of zebra heaven live. The lion finds that many other predators have ended up in zebra heaven too and they, like him, have been banished to the palace kitchens.

The lion spearheads a revolt against the zebras, rallying up his fellow predators. But things get more complicated for him when a young zebra finds its way into the palace kitchens and befriends him. She shows him that not all the zebras are bad and wish to condemn him and the other lost animals to an eternity of slavitude. The lion tries to stop the uprising of the animals but it is already in too full a swing and they no longer listen to him. A great battle between the animals and zebras ensues and the young zebra gets caught up in it. The lion manages to rescue her and since everyone is distracted by the war the two friends manage to sneak out into the no man's land between all the heavens. The zebra helps the lion find the lion heaven and then there is a bittersweet parting as the lion and zebra cannot be together as they both must go to their respective heavens.

Here are some character designs I started on:

Final Funny In 15 Film

So here is the final version of our Funny In 15, I animated the character with the newspaper and Zoe animated the masturbating guy. It was pretty easy to animate and I was able to loop some parts too.

Funny In 15 Update

Here's the animatic for the new idea for our Funny In 15. This is the idea we actually stuck with.

As you can see, we are going for crude humour here, it's very simple but pretty much everyone seems to find it funny, so it looks like it's working :) 

I set about designing the chavvy masturbating character and here's what I came up with:

I decided to make him look more of an oafish, simple kind of chav rather than an aggressive one, as my early drawings were of this vein and I felt it took away the humour if he looked somewhat violent. I used basic curvy shapes and a smooth black outline as I was trying to keep it all simple as I think a simple style is better suited to comedy in most cases, especially crude humour.

In the end though we decided to use Zoe's character designs as they worked better with Elf's background.

........Poke................

Since both me and Hannah (http://hgeach.blogspot.co.uk/) love stop motion we decided to have a play with the puppets owned by our course. We had a lot of fun making this short scene and i will definitely be taking the puppets out again as I really want to improve my skills in this area.



I animated the puppet on the left with the blonde hair and Hannah animated the one on the right. Hannah did the voice over too :)
This scene took many many hours to shoot including one hour of animating that we had to scrap as the box the characters were sitting on had gradually moved further and further away from the camera, as when we moved the puppets we were accidentally knocking the box. We learnt from this though and in our second attempt made the box more secure. The camera jolts about somewhat, mostly due to the fact it was on my flimsy tripod that refused to remain still.
The ending where my puppet jumps up onto the box was a bit tricky as it needed to be in positions where it couldn't balance on its own. So I had to prop it up with random objects from my pencil case which I then edited out in Photoshop.
I feel we both became a lot more confident with the puppets as the day went on and although the animation could be a lot smoother I think we did a good job.

So Very Very Many Birds............

This year I have chosen to do pre production rather than post, and the first thing we were set was to choose 3 cards. Each card had a person, a phrase and a genre on it. We then had to combine these 3 things to form the plot for a film... in only 1 hour! My group got 'Beryl Markham', 'spill the beans' and 'soap'. After researching our person we discovered she was born into the Victorian era in England, was the first woman to fly across the Antlantic solo and was a rebellious character who had affairs and was involved with drug deals. Her father moved the family to Kenya and Beryl spent her childhood playing and hunting with natives, until her mother moved them back to England as she disliked Africa. So after a mad brainstorming session my group (made up of me, Eline Lindaas, Vicky Keaveney and Hannah Geach) were ready to pitch our idea to the tutors and class.

Our idea was that a girl is born in Kenya to an English couple consisting of an adventurous explorer father and an over protective, controlling, conformist mother. She grows up to be a feral adventurous young girl who plays in the wilds of Africa and hunts with the natives. But her mother makes her move to Victorian England against her will.
She doesn't fit in at all with the strict English sensibilities and conformist attitudes, she is a complete fish out of water, just as her mother was in Kenya and so instead she longs to return to the wilds of Africa. The girl decides the only way to return to her homeland is to learn how to fly, so she sets off on a mission to discover the secret of flight from the birds, namely the fastest bird in England, the Gannet. She catches birds and forces them to tell her the way to the Gannet, but on reaching him he tells her it's impossible for her to learn to fly, as humans can't grow wings.
Just as the girl despairs, the Gannet takes pity on her and rallies the birds of England together. They use their combined strength to carry her back to Africa, where she can run and play with the natives once more.

We then created an animatic, all four of us pitched in here, drawing a section each. I then put it together on Premiere. Take a look:

                               

We are thinking of using African art styles to inspire the silhouetted fantasy sequence where she envisions having wings. The fantasy scenes could be quite abstract and experimental in style, with interesting, artsy transitions. The scenes of strict English life could be quite realistic in style to give more contrast of life styles.

The feedback we got from the tutors was very positive, they said that it could make a very good music video if we could find someone to compose a track for it and extended its runtime from its current 2 minutes to the standard song length of 3 and a half minutes.
We are all very pleased with what we've come up with and I would love if we took this further and created an animation from it.

Funny In 15 In 5

The first project of the 2nd year is Funny In 15 In 5. We were randomly put in groups of 3 and have 5 weeks to create an animation that lasts 15 seconds and makes the audience laugh. Let me tell you now, this is incredibly difficult!! I'm working with Zoe and Elf (their blogs can be found at http://zoewakefield.blogspot.co.uk and http://elliotforrest.blogspot.co.uk repectively.) One of the ideas my group threw around to start with was having some cute dogs and killing them off in humorous ways, going for comedy through gory cartoon violence. I had at a go at storyboarding this idea:

We decided it wouldn't work though as it would be longer than 15 seconds for one thing and it's not actually particularly funny for another. It would probably work better if the you literally had one short shot per dog death, so it was very fast paced.

We then developed another idea, shown in the animatic below. Zoe drew it up, I got the sound effects and Elf put it all together in Premiere.

The premise is a lumberjack cuts down a tree and it randomly falls on a cow, the humour coming from the randomness of it, in a kind of 'wtf?!' way. But yet again it's not that funny... 

Before we scrapped this idea I drew up some character designs for the cow and lumberjack. We were going for a very simplistic look as I think it's a simple idea and simple characters have more of a comedic nature. This style would also fit with Elf's background design:

Here are some images I used for inspiration. I wanted to take the simple curves and fluid shapes into my own designs.

I used the simple shading in this last image as the basis for my on character colourings. So anyways here's what I came up with.....

Life Drawing, Oh How I've Missed You.......

Below you will find some of the results of the first life drawing class of the year. It has a been fair while since I did any life drawing and so was a little rusty at the start of the session. We got to draw for the whole 3 hours rather than the 1 and a half hours of last year and it was sooooooo much better as we got longer poses, we even had a half hour pose! I think these two first drawings are the best life drawings I've done as they have a sense of weight as ell as being in proportion for the most part. The one on the right also has a good tonal range. 

I've started reading the book 'Force: Dynamic Drawing For Animators' by Mike Mattesi and am hoping to implement the things I'm learning into future life drawing sessions. My drawings lack the life and vitality of the examples in this book and this is something I hope to change. I need to work on getting a strong, single, confident line rather than my current multiple scratchy ones, as well as working out where the force is coming from and going to and darkening my line work accordingly.

ZOO!!!!!!!!!

During the summer holidays I went to Whipsnade Zoo and did a few sketches while I was there. I really liked drawing the rhinos because of their huge mass and odd shape, they were just so bulky and heavy! It was difficult to draw the animals when they were moving, so for the most part I stuck to sedentary poses. 

Random Sketchbook Stuff

Here are a few sketchbook drawings I did over the summer, it's taken me an age to upload them since I had no access to a scanner and my new house is having internet issues to put it lightly......