........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......

Dog Walk Cycle

Wow I haven't made a post in aaaaages! So to make up for it here's a fairly long one :)

I've just finished a walk cycle which is loosely based on my dog. So first of all I videoed my dog walking for reference:

I then tried to figure out the key poses and other useful things using my video as a guide as well as consulting Richard William's quadruped walk cycle. My findings are shown in the image of my sketchbook as I'm too lazy to type them out...

I sketched my dog for a bit as I wanted my design to be based on her and then I took a look at a dog's skeleton to give a better idea of how the bones are all connected. And as you can see from my diagram they have an extra joint in their legs compared to humans.

I then took a look at some dog designs that were roughly the same build as the dog I wanted to create (basically a more athletic looking version of my dog) to use as inspiration. I was also looking at how the dog's forms have been simplified, for example how a few tufts of fur are drawn rather than covering them in it, which still suggests to us that they are furry.

I mocked up a quick keyframes only cycle on Flash to make sure I'd got the basics of the walk down. The secondary action for the ears was easy enough to judge time wise but the tail took a few attempts to get right, as it follows the movement of the hindlegs but is just a little delayed.

I then set out drawing my final walk cycle. The fur on the stomach took a couple of attempts as I exaggerated it too much and it looked pretty weird, so I had to tone it down. Here's the pencil version before I cleaned it all up, I'm showing you it because in some ways I prefer it to my final version, as I think it has more of a flowing quality and looks looser, with the fur having a good swish motion going on.

So after all that here's my final version:

I'm really happy with this as I think you can see the weight moving through the body and I've got a nice squash effect going on when the paws hit the ground. 

Blood...............

I enjoyed making this scene...
Again, I don't like the vectors, but it is sufficiently gory to make up for this. If I'd have painted this out in watercolours frame by frame or something similar I'm sure it would've looked better, however time was not on my side, so corners had to be cut.

Colision!!!!

I'm not too happy with how vectorized my character looks, but that's the trouble with animating in Flash. I was pleased I managed to turn him round though.

Underwater Scene

 Look at all the shiny bubbles :)
This is the background I animated for our underwater scene, as well as the bubble to eye morph. I wanted to animate the sea rolling around violently and the bubbles spiralling around Elise but I didn't have enough time. It's nowhere near violent enough, but it'll do.