Log

So the start to my second term of my animation courses has been quite slow surprisingly as the main things I've had to attend are mainly just plain old workshops that tell me about equipment and how they work along with what to do with them and what not to. There very useful things as they then allow me to use the equipment but if you continuously have them over and over again with no work to do in between it does get tiresome.
I was hoping to get straight into work but being a few weeks in I'm limited to what I can do on my project. Yes I'm able to look up interesting facts about animation and read the book 'Animation survival kit' which I have been frequently reading and practicing with. But with lots terms work crashing down on me at the very end I was hoping to kick this term off. Sure I'm able to do a few things like drawing a skip cycle for my 2d class which I will go into later on. And I can also start on my drawing by doing some drawings of texture, shading and landscape to not only do work but to practice the techniques and to get a feel of what I can create using different materials. I found that using biro and pencil are my favourite style and I did give water colour a try but it seems the water colour likes to run away from me.
For the 3D it seemed to start straight away as we got a refresher on maya modelling along with the fact that we will be modelling a Old Western for our 3D. Which sounded great but with my lacking bad experience with Maya I knew that it wasn't going to be all sunshine's and rainbows.

For the Title sequence project I'm still stumped as I still don't know weather we choose our groups or there picked out for us so all I can do for the moment is skim the brief and find some things to do on it while I wait or find out what's going on in that area.

2D

Okay so back to my 2d. I was set the task of doing a character skipping so I started looking at skipping cycles in real life in animation. I eventually made this little guy. Who I'm quite proud of because I was actually able make him jump and he actually look like hes skipping. Though next time I'm going to make him smoother.

For the following week we where asked to do a front walk cycle and also four legged animal. The front walk was the hardest but I was happy with my results as it actually does look like a female walking towards you but it does need a lot of work. Its not smooth or nice to look at because I didn't wanna risk making it worse and I was content with the first outcome.

For the animal with four legs, I decided to do a lovely dog as I love dogs and I've always had a fascination with them which I believe made me more egger and confident in drawing the frames. Plus I was happy to watch lots of clips of cute dogs walking.

I really liked the out come of my dog as its quite fluent and the dog looks comfortable in his own fur. I didn't really wanna colour him in because I thought it would draw attention away from the outlining frames that created him. But I do plan to colour him in at a later date.

The following 2 weeks

We had to partner up and create an little animation together but I often had difficulty with that because I couldn't seem to keep in contact with my partner so I basically had to do the animation by myself which was not what I wanted or should have done but sadly it was a factor I could not control.

But anyway I drew out my part of the animation that we made together as partners and just did the few frames. I was then meant to hand it over but I couldn't so I had to in-between it myself. I think I did an alright job and even maybe made my animation a little too long. But I was content with my out come .Sure the animations abit ruff and one day I do plan to neaten it up but for now my main focus was the lip sync which I think turned out well though I still need to work on it and get a better idea on the vows and mouth shape because I don't think I used them all at the correct time.

For the following weeks

I started on planning out my final project 'Playground'

First I did a write out of what I did then I followed that up on some thumb nails. I then laid out the background that the characters would be moving on. Then came the drawing of the animatic which was annoying because the single outlines where confusing my head but when it then came to adding the real animation and adding the in-betweens it was a lot easier and I was very thankful for the help they gave.

With the outline of my main one down I enjoyed colouring it in and thought it gave my animation much more life. I used bright colours to got with the cuteness and childness of the playground environment. I then added sounds to the playground to give it an atmosphere and make the characters stand out from just the lines and colours of the animation.

Title sequence

Oh boy the groups where finally picked and so I can start work. The group and I came to gather to agree that we should do the Dada Title sequence and  that we should just focus on finding out about that topic and who will be featuring in or title sequence. Along with getting some ideas down on what we could do.

Next

This week we've put our foot down on the ideas and thoughts on what we could do for our project by each think and drawing out little storyboards on what we could do.

I personally had the idea of them running round a gallery which came from the idea of Bugs bunny and Daffy duck running round a Art gallery in 'Loony Toons Back in Action'. Where they did all these strange and bizarre things when going through each pictures which I though was kinda Dada style.

Next

We came together and took points out of each persons storyboard to make a single story board which was then made into an animatic.

Next few weeks

We started to do little animations that would go into the picture frames.

I found it really quiet fun to create them as they looked really cool as I began to make it.

It wasn't until the last two weeks did we do the real animation

I was subjected to doing the last section of the animation which I had to re-do a few times as I need to re-add wall papers and to change the style a little to give it more of an Dada taste

Sound

For the sound project I had to do that in a matte of weeks as so instantly I got together with a group of people and started to record sounds for the animation that we where given to add folio to. For the first week we got to book out the sound studio we didn't mange to get all the sounds so we had re-book the sound studio the following week so we could get the rest of our sound before we could watch singly edit the sound to our project.

I handed my work into be verified and as I didn't have time to finish it I instantly wrote up the text and got a song to go with the animation so it was all ready for the actual deadline.

 Self portrait (experimental)

I haven't really started my experimental yet as Ive only just had the talk on it in lessons so being a few weeks in it hinders me as it could have been something I could have started on if we had the talk abit sooner. But any way at the moment I'm just coming up with ideas. I thought I may just draw animating object that connect to me but I think that's a bit boring .So for now I'm gonna keep thinking and just doodle down ideas that I believe express myself.

Next

Iv'e started an idea but its not a strong one so I'm hoping to get a few ideas from the class I will be having in a few days time.

After lesson

there are many materials that I could use and I would like to use a different material so I thought why not use a material that I often use on myself; nail varnish. Your able to draw with it and it shows one my own hobbies. And if I use acetate I can use layers to build up the image and manipulate it. Now I just have to get an idea of the story.

Next 

I've figured out an idea that expresses myself and my inner-self  using object that connect to me. A bit like how the Victorian use to do in their self portraits.

Unlike the other pieces of work the experimental didn't have a weekly session where we had to hand in work which was fantastic as I was able to at my own rate and just do this work when I had the time in between the deadline session each week. The only time where you had to show progress in this work is when you had to go to as session every other week to show what we have done enabling us to go at our own pase but at the same time keeping us on track. It also allowed us to get feed back on the work we had done so far.

Drawing and 3D
I haven't been able to write much about this as there things Ive done at a slow rate and I mainly just did them at the end in the last two weeks . Sure I did a few bits through out the weeks but its hard to keep track of everything at the same time especially with so much going on.

During my free time I have been trying my best to watch things and analyses them but a lot of my time was take up with work so I was unable to look at lots of blogs unless it was connected to a topic . This term has been one big gob-stopper that sucked away me free time to look at many different things .This may be contradicting what I said earlier but then I was in a situation on where I wanted to take a step forward but I didn't have a path to follow.

But I did find Felix Sputnik to be very useful when looking for references and just generally looking at his work was very interesting.

http://www.felixsputnik.com/animation/