2013 a year in review :3

So, here it is, my last post of 2013 :D

It's been an interesting year, I've learned a lot, had a chance to further my animation skills at least a little. Passed my 1st year and already made it through half of second year, created some animations I am proud of and some, not so much. I also decided where I want to specialize, which is a massive leap for me :D

I came onto this course being completely in love with all animation styles and techniques and didn't really know whether I wanted to go into post production, pre production, production or other things.

It was only at the end of 1st year that I decided that the thing I'd most like to specialize with, is 3D Character animation. I really enjoy working in Maya and trying to bring characters to life, using this method sounds perfect for me :) Subtle eye and body language are things I always seem to pick up on in films, so it'd be nice to learn and get good at bringing characters to life myself.

We recently got set an 11 Second animation project, to the November audio clip from the 11 second club, you can see this below.



I spent a few whole days working on this animation, paying attention to as many little details as I could, even though the rigs I was using (Nico and Fox 1.0 from Creative Crash) didn't have as complex facial controls as a human rig would've. I enjoyed playing with the ears and tails especially, working on follow through and overlap motions.

I received some incredible critique from my 'mentor' that I posted about a while back, so I'll be improving this animation and working to his feedback very soon. He's given me a lot of tips and advice on how to improve the way the characters interact, along . Infact, I'll post it below, as it's really helpful advice may help others too, plus it'll make it clear what I'll be changing at some point.

"First off nice job so far! You've really improved since I saw your first animation! Also, an 11 second 2 character dialogue shot is NO small task! Don't sell yourself short with "only 11 second short one." Thats a lot of animation!!! Even professionals at Disney and Dreamworks average 4-5 seconds per week. It's pretty ambitious!

First things first, that camera angle! Flat on the side is the most boring camera angle you could choose! Switch it up, put a 45 degree angle on the center of the shot. Play with camera changes, over the shoulder type things to really keep the shot interesting!

It will also free you up from being stuck to forward/backward awkward movement. In terms of the acting, some of the choices work, some don't so much. At first for example she's coming on strong in her voice, but she backs off when she's saying it. It doesn't sound like shes intimidated by him or anything, so maybe try reversing that move and having her come forwards towards him when she says it.

Same thing when she curls up and sits down. She's taking a lower position than him on screen and psycologically, which makes her look weaker. Again, she's coming on pretty strong. Get her up and strong! She probably can't get above him height wise, but you could perhaps lower the male wolf a bit in order to make that happen!

That being said I like his body language when he says "I don't cry." It makes him seem proud the way he puts his head up, which he sounds like! But then you drop it down instantly! If he's really proud, he's not going to go into sad mode again! He might look away or look at his foot or kick the dirt or something, but lowering his head again makes his proud statement not so strong.

Those are just some general ideas to think about as far as the acting goes. The body says 1000% more than the voice does!
In terms of mechanics, I would take a lot of time focusing on those! Study how a dog should sit and really work on making it seem like she's sitting when she sits down in the middle! Make sure the feet aren't sliding around. You've got a fairly large pop around 2 seconds in when she sits down too.

I realllly like the mechanics you have going with the dog on the right. He's not moving too much (a common issue is wayyyyy too much movement, or what might be called "over animating") He's kinda backing away at the end which feels nice enough mechanics wise (Acting wise I might place that more towards the beginning because he's put his pride on the line after his statement) You wen't really simple with him, WHICH IS GREAT! It's such a smart decision and it really helps him feel nice!

The girl is what I would say is overanimated. She's walking back and forth for no real reason, she sits down and stands up for no real reason. You can do something like this easily with two poses. Maybe start with her sitting and then come up on him when she says "you know what'd be really nice?" (Not saying change your whole shot, just things to think about in the future!)
But again, super nice progress as far as where you came from! It's honestly not horrible, but it's got a long way to go at the same time! You're doing great! Keep it up!"

I'm definitely going to work on removing some animation from her, as well as posing. I really love the idea of her starting out from sitting, as I struggled to get her sitting animation to look authentic. I'm not sure whether I'll get all of this done for the deadline, as I still have an essay and 3 production reports, among other things due this month as well. But I'll be sure to try my best with it, and even if I don't complete it for the deadline, I'll rework it for my show reel anyway, so expect that on my blog soon! :)


Another thing I wanted to talk about was Kieth Lango's tutorials. Kieth Lango's blog was suggested to us in first year, because of his amazing article on Pose to Pose animation. What I didn't know, was that he used to do a series of VTS animation clinic tutorial videos every week, that could be subscribed to like a magazine. One of my friends at University recently noticed that he was selling 60 hours worth of these VTS tutorials in a bundle for £18. This was only for a couple of days, so I was really lucky to get in on it, but from what I've seen of them so far, they're incredibly, helpful and detailed tutorials, ranging from timing and poses to character animation itself. I can't wait until after deadlines, so I can really get stuck into them! For anyone interested, he's still selling these 60 hours of tutorials for £60 on his website here, I'd definitely recommend them! It's an incredible price for so much knowledge.

Just before I end this post, I thought I'd put up some Digital Paintings I've done recently, the first 3, practicing Lighting and the Final 3 practicing colour :) The first 3 were some pre-vis concepts for my Production Bible, which have since been scrapped, for a different style. The second 3, being random warm-up doodles whilst I was home for Christmas c:

and finally, the end of year showreel!



I'm slowly trying to phase out most of my 2D animation, replacing it with newer 3D work. Mostly because the majority of my 2D work is very old or sloppy to the point that I am unhappy with it. But also because I want to have a more specialized and detailed 3D show reel that I can continue adding to :3
I still really enjoy 2D animation and will probably continue working on 2D animations at one point or another (I've already applied to be a tweener/clean up animator on a couple of the 3rd year 2D films as well as a character animator on the 3D project Lone Wolf, so I'm looking forward to 2014!)

I hope you've all had a wonderful year,
See you all in 2014!

General bulk update, Character Animation, Production bibles and Disneys Frozen

Heya everyone :)
It's been a while since I've done a proper update explaining what I've been doing lately, so here it is c:

Production Bibles - 

Currently I'm working on a project for our Pre-Production module which involved I picking four concepts out of a hat. A character, Location, Genre and Art influence. My cards were: A doctor, an opera house, Family Feature film and Edward Gorey.

I'll talk about this project a lot more when it comes to a conclusion and I've handed it in, so I can post the final pieces, however, it involves us producing an animatic, short animated film, a production bible and a research bible for our 'film'.

The synopsis I created for this film is below.

"Dr Mathews is a well known performance psychiatrist, working freelance at Canada’s biggest new opera house. With questionable methods which involve entering the patients mind by use of a machine and fighting off the monsters he finds there with hand to hand combat, it’s a shock when he is called in for an emergency case. Eugine, an up and coming singer, set to perform in front of Royalty in 4 days, has broken down due to an anxiety attack during his latest performance. If anything can help Eugine, it’s Dr Mathews. But Eugine has more monsters than he has ever seen before, fighting them off is difficult and for once, he cannot do it alone. Can Dr Mathews convince Eugine to join him in facing his fears? Or is Eugine’s date with Royalty destined for disaster?"

I'll post the full plot, when I come to put the actual production bible on this blog, as it's much to long for a blog post :)

For the production bible, I must create concept art for the characters, locations among other things in the film. A PDF including everything a production company would need in order to get a feel for my film, if I were to pitch it to them.
It's something I'm really enjoying putting together and I'm finding Edward Goreys style quite fun to work with, especially when giving my film a dark, edgy, Tim Burton style feel to it.

I thought I'd show the work I've done on the Animatic so far. Obviously the voices will all be re-hashed before the hand-in of this and it's just a very rough draft of the animatic, but hopefully it at least gives a little bit of a feel of the kind of film I am pitching.



I'm having a lot of fun with the character of Dr Mathews and how him and Eugine interact with each other. I think when I come to actually animating this scene, it'll be a very fun challenge for me :D

Character Animation -

I'm still trying to get a decent amount of character animation in on the sidelines to the other projects we're being set. We've recently been given the task of animating to the 11 second club, November audio clip, to focus on character animation, so hopefully I'll have that to show in January. We're in the planning stages of that now and I'm looking forward to being able to concentrate on just the animation, a lot :)

Below is another animation I've done recently that I wanted to show. It's still a little bit unfinished, I need to work on the overlap of the tail and ears and work out some skips when it loops around, among other things, but I'm still pretty pleased with it overall. I sent this to Yasmin, director of the 3rd year project, Lone Wolf and she accepted me onto her production team as a character animator, so I'll have that to work on in Feburary, which is exciting!



Disneys Frozen-

I don't usually talk about Animated movies I've been to see (although, maybe I should do that more? or is that too off topic? Maybe just once in a while as part of bulk updates :D As I do like to keep up with the animated feature film scene)

On Tuesday, I went to see Frozen with the remainder of my flatmates that haven't gone home for Christmas yet, Connor and Katie.

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much from it, the adverts I had seen of it just seemed to show Olaf a lot (wheras he was more for comedy relief and this gave me the impression that the film was aimed more at kids and was going to be quite childish...my first impressions were a little harsh, I'll admit)

A short film, in the style of classic Mickey Mouse Disney, was shown before the film, worked on by Eric Goldberg, named "Get a Horse" which combined traditional animation with 3D animation, having the characters seemingly burst through a screen to become 3D. It was fun to watch and really nicely done too! Really nice to see another traditionally animated Disney short :3

In regards to Frozen my opinion had changed after the first couple of minutes of the film, it had such a beautiful and energetic opening and was so beautifully done. The film was so much more than I expected it to be and surprised me in so many ways. The character animation is stunning and the visual effects are masterfully done. If you have the time, search some of their behind the scenes videos on youtube in regards to snow simulation, it's really cool, some of the techniques they've created for this movie.

They managed to put so much emotion and feeling into the characters, I genuinely felt for them and ended up teary eyed at least twice throughout the film. 

I'll just leave this sequence from it, here :3 Beautifully demonstrating this.



I'll admit, this film has become a big inspiration to me these past few days, I've had a lot more drive to work on my character animation among other things, since seeing the film. I'd really recommend it for any of you animation types pondering whether to go or not :D Even if you're not into the Disney princess scene, it's worth it for the animation alone!

Usually when I've got a day of drawing ahead (for my production bible) I'll do an unrelated warm-up sketch to start off the day and get the creative juices flowing. This was from a couple of days ago c:
I'm still kind of sloppy when it comes to human anatomy, but I've been more pleased with this sketch than many of my previous, so maybe I'm improving a little bit :)

That's all for now c:

Until next time
~Char

Life Drawing Catch up (Two sessions)

  I've had a few problems with my camera and didn't end up posting last sessions life drawing, so I thought I'd do another small batch post of my last life drawings of 2013 :) The first set (with a female model) from the 20th November and the second set (with the male model) being from today, the 4th December. 

Session #1 - 20/11/13

1 Minute warm-up poses

 

10 Minute poses

 

  20 Minute "Block in" pose (we were told to begin at the center of the body and colour outwards, not start with an outline)

 20 Minute 'Negative space' pose, we were asked to draw in, only the 'negative space, leaving the figure and any items in the room with her blank (we were then given 2 minutes at the end, to slightly fill in the figure)

 30 Minute Pose

Session #2 04/12/13

We tried a lot of interesting new techniques during this session, set by our life drawing tutor to help improve out confidence with figure drawing.

 5 Minute poses

 2 Minute Poses from memory

 2 Minute "line contour" poses, not removing the charcoal from the paper and not looking at the paper

 5 minute pose, not looking at the model and having the pose described to me by a life drawing partner

 10 Minute 'caricature' 

 10 Minute pose drawn as though you were sculpting it with polygons

 25 Minute pose

I've been enjoying life drawing a lot more lately, in first year it was something I really dreaded having to go to, but now it's actually something I look forward to every 2 weeks :D

This could be due to quite a few factors though, as many things have changed from last year, I now live with my course mates so I don't have to travel to the other campus alone, we're in a different life drawing room and I think I'm a lot more confident with my drawing ability overall, than I was in first year. But we'll see c: I hope it's something I continue to get better at, through the rest of my time on this course. I'll be attending optional sessions for sure now :D

Until next time 

~Char

Funny in 15

As promised, this post is about the 'Funny in 15' group project we were set at the beginning of the term c: What follows this is my written production report for the project, detailing the processes myself and my two team members went through whilst creating this animation.

This year started with us being handed our second ever group project, our task was to create a 15 second animation that makes people laugh. This task was set in order for us to work on timing and plots in animation. Unlike our previous group project, this project was to be done in pre-determined groups, not ones that we picked ourselves, like last time. I got placed in a group with my flatmate Bradley Spice and another member of my course, Rhys Harvey.

This project was very open ended. We were allowed to do anything we wanted, as long as #1. It was funny and #2. It was 15 seconds in length. This gave us a lot of scope to work with, so my team mates and I began by meeting up to discuss themes for this project. Our decision was to each go away that night and find short animations/films on the internet that we found funny. We created a facebook group for correspondence, that we posted these videos to. Some of the ones we looked at were ASDF Movie, Eddsworld, Purple and Brown, Bumming Crew and a bunch of 7 second videos known as ‘Vines’.

We determined by looking at these, that we wanted to play on the ‘unexpected’ side of comedy, similar to how things like ASDF movie handle things. We met up again to draft out some ideas that we thought could work, coming up with 3 or 4 ideas each. We narrowed all of these down to 3 main ideas that we thought would work decently.

These three ideas are as follows:

Idea number 1 involved two guys walking towards each other down a corridor. They end up stopping and stumbling over each other deciding which way to pass. They take a couple of steps and break into the dirty dancing dance move, the music cuts out half way through and the one of the guys stops, drops the other on the floor and walks on.

This idea played very much on the surprise aspect, along with being relatable to every day experiences. There aren’t many people who can say that they haven’t ended up in that situation in a corridor when both you and the other person are trying to go the same way, ending in that awkward, ‘which way are they going?’ dance. The dirty dancing move is also one that many people know, so it plays kind of on common interests too.

Idea number 2 begins with a pretty, tarty looking girl standing in an elevator. A scruffy guy walks in beside her, causing an awkward pause, it is completely silent during this time and the two exchange weird looks with each other. We played with the idea of the guy doing something awkward like scratching his butt. Suddenly the lights flicker and go off for a few seconds. When they come back on the two have switched clothes and the guy, after admiring himself up and down, walks out with a gay prance, leaving the girl to just stare, to wonder what just went on.

Once again, this idea focuses on the unexpected and also on familiar situations. Travelling in lifts with strangers often leads to long awkward silences and being in close proximity to somebody who maybe doesn’t bathe as often as they should, so we felt this idea could be relatable to many people.

Idea number 3 was more taboo than the others, which played more on awkward situations. This idea was based around toilet humour and focussed on two people in toilet cubicles. Loud farting noises can be heard from these two cubicles and they seem to be in competition with each other. The cubical doors and lavatory floor shaking more and more each time. A guy walks in, planning to use the urinal and gets knocked out by the stench. The noises stop and one of the cubical users emerges, turning out to be a well-dressed woman.

This idea, along with being based on the shock factor (as the previous two were) was based a bit more on taboo and already identified bases for comedy. ‘Toilet Humor’ is something that has been around for centauries and is universally thought to be funny, if not a little immature. The other thing we played on was challenging preconceptions made by society. Society as a whole tends to have the view that women don’t fart/women are always pristine, pretty, well kept ect. This idea challenges that and I think it’s something a lot of people would find funny, with the extra gag of the urinal guy fainting from the smell, just in case.

The three of us each took one of these ideas to animatic stage, I chose to do the elevator scene, which was incredibly challenging to figure out, due to the complex timing needed to make a situation awkward, whilst still fitting in the rest of the gag and keeping it at 15 seconds in length. We couldn’t decide between these ideas, so we took them to our lecturer Derek, who suggested we carry through with idea number one, but push it further, making it more taboo. Derek didn’t think we needed the character to be thrown on the floor, saying it didn’t add much to the gag. He talked about us playing more on taboo, maybe adding a gay kiss scene to the mix, something we thought would work and decided to go with.

Our idea was now a business man running into an angry sumo in a corridor. The sumo charges at him, looking angry and viewers will expect him to try and attack the business man. Instead the business man picks him up, holding him in the air in a dirty dancing style, hebefore t two share a romantic kiss. The gag ends with a cut/disk scrape sound and the sumo falls on top of the business man, crushing and killing him.

This gag once again plays on the unexpected as well as playing on the taboo (which although more accepted nowadays, being gay is still classed as)

We were all very happy with this idea and Brad began by re-making the animatic and adding the kiss scene into it. We showed this at one of the bi-weekly production meetings to get feedback from Andy, who told us to work a little more on the timing, holding the kiss scene longer and shortening the part when the sumo runs up to the business man.

We did this and once both we and Andy were happy with it, began sketching out character designs. Rhys designed the business man and I designed the sumo. We decided for a very flash cartoon-like line art style, with simple cartoon faces. The background was to be in a more painterly style, so it didn’t clash with the animation. Rhys began drawing out the backgrounds for this project whilst Brad finalised the animation in the animatic, so we could work over the top of it when coming to do the final animation. This short relied a lot on the perspective of some of the shots, so this was really helpful when coming to produce the final thing.

Rhys and I decided to take a character each, in order to keep style similarities when animating. I chose to animate the sumo and he chose to animate the business man. Our team worked well together, exchanging flash files regularly and updating each other on progress. Brad compositing the final thing together and adding sound/music to the animation, exporting and uploading to the group regularly so we know what worked and what didn’t.

For the most part, we stuck closely to the rough animation Brad did for the animatic, this was in order to keep the perspective right but also because we felt it worked well. Rhys and I worked over the top of this, adding extra animation where necessary and giving life to the characters in terms of style and expressions. As a group we were able to complete the animation on time and I’m very happy with the result. I feel we’ve worked superbly well together, very good communication between all of us, no fallings out and all deadlines were met on time.

The biggest challenge this project gave me was working with a human character, although Flash is a program that I’m experienced with, human animation is still, is unfortunately, pretty alien to me. This is something I hope to improve and practice on in the future. When animating the sumo, I stuck more heavily to Brads animation guidelines than I’d have liked, because of this. Animating the run cycles and getting the movement of his body fat was another huge challenge for me, and something I don’t think I pulled off as well as I was hoping. Although I think the animation is enough to convey our gag, I think I could’ve worked into it a lot more, adding more squash and stretch and overlap to it, to make it feel more lifelike as I feel the animation I did for the sumo feels kind of lifeless and static. Something I wasn’t so happy with, in the end. If I had more time, I’d go back, add more key frames and work on better applying the basic principles of animation into the sumo animation.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project, I feel that it’s helped me better improve my communication skills, work to a deadline and I enjoyed the challenge of getting the comedy aspect to work. I think this project has helped me better understand the production process as well as helping me a lot when working with others and improving my time management skills. I enjoyed the freedom this group project gave us, as unlike the Sea group project, which had predetermined audio, this one was done completely from scratch, which was both fun and a challenge in itself. If I was to do this again, I think I’d try to better implement the 12 basic principles of animation, to prevent my work from looking too dry and lifeless. I think my team and I worked outstandingly well together and I’d happily work with either one of my team mates again! I’m quite happy with the final outcome of the film, I think it portrays the gags we wanted it to portray well and I’m glad we were able to meet all the set deadlines for production and complete it on time, even if it is not necessarily my favourite piece of animation I have done so far.

Our completed Funny in 15 animation is below :)

Under the Weather

Heyo everyone :D

I thought I'd post here again, with an update from a more, settled in Char :)

As I may or may not have mentioned previously, our course required us to choose a pathway for the start of this year. We had to choose between either Post Production or Pre Production. Post being visual effects and Pre being things such as storyboarding and animatics.

This was probably one of the hardest decisions of my life, unfortunately xD as I desperately wanted to do both. Finally I decided, after talking to a friend of mine (a character animator in industry) about which would be more helpful for me, from a 3D character animation perspective, I decided to go for preproduction. My reasoning behind this being that creating storyboards and animatics for animation would help improve my layout skills, which would be helpful for character animation due to them being required when setting up shots from scratch.

Our first task during Pre Production was to get into a group of no more than 4 and take two different pieces of paper out of a hat. One depicting 'genre' and one having a popular word or phrase written on it. We were told to go away for an hour and brainstorm ideas for our *insert genre here.

I teamed up with Beverly, James and Lokii for this project, which was great, considering we all live together now! (Along with Josh, Connor, Brad, a lovely first year film student named Gracey and a Chris and Grace who are ex members of this course, but still super passionate about animation :) It's nice to be living with like-minded people c: Everyone just bounces ideas back and forth, our flat is top for motivation and inspiration!) ...anyway, getting back to the point xD

 'Talent Show' was our genre and our phrase to work around was 'Under the Weather', something we had a lot of fun with :D We bounced many ideas back and forth throughout this project, before deciding to base our story in Purgatory and have it as a 'game show for the gods'. The basic premise for this was that, when a person enters purgatory good deeds have nothing to do with whether you get placed in heaven or hell. It is instead done through a game talent show where contestants are judged by 5 gods (Buddah, Ganesh, Zeus, Anubis and God) who are there to make their audition a challenge, by raining all kinds of extreme weather at the contestant. Our story followed a guy named Wade, through his audition and eventually to his ascension.

Our group worked incredibly well as a team, working together on the story idea and then each having our own part to fulfil, in the production pipeline.
James took the role of the character designer, who designed the main concepts for the characters in the film, he then passed these on to Beverly who drew out the storyboard, based on the story/script we'd made as a team. Katie then used these to make a rough animatic, before passing it to me, who did the sound design/clean up editing for it.

Below is our final animatic :3



When choosing music and sound for this project, I wanted to portray things as very eerie. This would've been a scary thing for Wade and I wanted that to come through, along with the change in mood that comes with him being allowed to ascend. I worked a lot with echoes and reverbs, in sound programs, as well as distortion for things like the laughing audience. I think the film does well to portray the eerie, fearfulness I was going for, as well as the elevation and happiness at the end.

I think everyone on the team was incredibly happy with the projects outcome and we got good feedback from our lecturers about it too, which was awesome!
We all worked well as a team and got the work done on time, all in all, a successful animatic project!

I'll post about my other project, Funny in Fifteen in my next blog post

Until next time,
~Char

Life Drawing - Year 2 - Session 1

I'm slowly getting back into the routine of university, even though things have been pretty unorganized on our course as of late, with lecturers leaving and such, Luckily Life Drawing was not one of the lecturers affected, so we traveled to woodlane campus for that as usual.
Below are some of the life drawings I did during the session.

This week, we were told to work with many techniques we'd not used before, along with many that we were familiar with, I'll be labeling the below pieces with the time-frame and the techniques used, if we were told to use a technique.

30 second short poses

1 minute short poses

2 minute poses using only shapes to convey figure

5 minute pose of what you think the figure looks like from the angle 90 degrees around from where you're currently sitting/ a basic 5 minute pose.

5 mins, without looking at the paper or removing your pencil 

10 minute pose

20 minute pose

Being my first life drawing session in quite a while, I'll admit to feeling slightly rusty at first, but after a while I got used to it all again :) We've moved rooms for life drawing, so where we are now feels a lot more arty, which is awesome :D So I'm looking forward to more sessions and improving my drawing more.

Back to work :3

So, I've been back at University for a few weeks now
Apologies for the lack of updates since coming back, there's been a lot going on lately, but hopefully I'll be back to blogging regularly now :3

I guess I'll begin by talking about the holidays as I kept myself quite busy during that.

I spent some time practicing 3D techniques, as mentioned in my previous blog post, but unfortunately didn't get quite as far with that as I wanted to. I didn't really feel very accomplished whilst at home in the holidays and without any feedback (I couldn't upload things, so couldn't ask for advice from friends or from lecturers) so it mostly consisted of me playing around with the software for a few hours a day, learning different rigs, but not really having amazing work to show for it.
I do feel it helped a lot, but I went in wanting to improve my showreel tons and I don't feel like that has happened (I only ended up being truly happy with a couple of things I animated)

I finished about half of the things on my list and then chose to do something I felt was more productive from a CV perspective and enrolled on a EU recognized adult learning course named ECDL, which I completed in a couple of months and received a qualification for :D So not a completely wasted summer, luckily ^_^

Here's one of the animation tests I did during the summer, that I was most happy with
I spent quite a lot of time focusing on the characters facial expression and subtle eye movements and I think it's probably the best animation I've done in CG to date, so I'll definitely be including it in my next show reel once it's all fleshed out :3

Other than that, my holiday consisted of doing art commissions (my style has changed a lot o-o) Editing game footage to music, to work on timing and spending time with my family/relaxing :)

Here's a few other things I worked on during the holidays

Art -

The above work is mostly commissioned pieces I worked on during the summer, along with a comic I made. My 6 year old bamboo tablet ended up on it's last legs, so I decided to buy the Cintiq 13HD I'd been saving up for last holiday (but didn't save up enough to get, before I came to uni) and bought it just before term started :3

It's an amazing little thing and I think it's making me pay a lot more attention to little details in my work as well as work faster and more efficiently, which can only be a good thing :D All I can say, is 3 months packing biscuits 9 hours a day, last holiday was totally worth it, even if it was hell at the time ;u; Hopefully it'll last me as long, if not much longer than my Bamboo did c: Little thing is still fighting onwards, even with the odd connection issue from time to time :'3

The three orange Charr drawings are post new tablet and as you can see, my work has become much more loose since getting it :3 


Editing -

I really wanted to practice my editing more, I find it really relaxing to just sit down and edit footage to music, so I edited a couple of GW2 video's, most that I recorded myself and one that I used the watercolour style cutscenes of Guild Wars 2 for. The cutscenes in this game are beautifully done and so was the ending theme of Guild Wars 2 'Fear not this night'. So I chose to combine the two, editing a lot of the cutscenes to the music, which I found lots of fun :3

Below are a few of these videos







I have a couple of animatics to post up and a few life drawings, so you'll be seeing more from me soon c: but for now, that's all from me :D

Until next time ~ 

Holiday Work Master Post

Hey everyone c: It's been a while since I last posted, so I figured I'd come change that :D

For a start, I passed first year with a 2:1, which is awesome :D Really happy, because I was having my doubts about some of the stuff passing (3D Modeling) so it was a huge relief to know I don't have to retake anything in the holidays ^_^

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I've been working on some basic animation tasks during the summer holidays c: Unfortunately I have an internet bandwidth here which is preventing me from uploading large files to the internet whilst at home (basically anything but pictures) >.< However, I'll make a checklist of all the things I'm working on, here and then post them all up at once when I'm back at uni with that shiny fast broadband, the ones I'm happy with will probably end up in a showreel of sorts :D

So I thought I'd make this the master post for all of my holiday work c: As not to clog up the blog with everything c: I'll probably elaborate on each video in another master post, when I'm back on campus ^_^ 

Here's the list I'm working from in 3D (Compiled a mixture of tasks from the 11 second club and Animator Island)  -

1. Ball bouncing in place (No Decay) 
2. Ball bouncing across the screen
3. Simple character head turn
4. Character head turn with Anticipation
5. Character thinking
6. Flour Sack waving (loop)
7. Flour Sack jumping
8. Flour Sack falling
9. Change in character emotion
10. Overlap/Follow through (tails/hair.ect)
11. Character Laughing
12. Standing up from sitting
13. Biped Run Cycle
14. Biped Walk Cycle
15. Quadruped Walk Cycle
16. Quadruped Run Cycle
17. Dragons/Birds (Wings) 
18. Scared character peering around corner
19. Startled Quadruped
20. Character jumping over gap


and to end this post, a drawing for you :D I worked on a few days ago for a friend c:

Task #2 - Bouncing Ball Across Screen

My second holiday task was to animate a ball bouncing from one end of the screen to another, I'm not as pleased with the outcome of this task compared to my previous one, but hopefully with a bit more work and practice, I'll be able to get this one on par with the other one :3 I've also recieved some really good feedback on the other one, which I'll talk about in a future blog post (when I have applied these changes to my work)

Below is my first attempt at this, It was suggested that I try animating almost entirely with the graph editor, which I did for this one. The graph editor has turned out to be a really, really useful tool, but something I think I need to work a lot more on, so I completely get the hang of it.  :3



 From observation, a few things I can see, need work on this are that the stretch and squash seems a little bit too visible for me. When I re-work this animation, I will make the stretch of the fall a lot more subtle, as I feel that especially when the ball changes direction, the stretch becomes distracting.
Another change I will probably be making is I feel the bounces are too close together, so spreading them out a little would be of benefit c: I'll be working on both these things along with whatever I get from the guy who agreed to help mentor me over the summer.

In addition to this, there are some feedback tutorials with my lecturers on the 13th, so I should have some information on what I was doing right, or wrong in regards to all of the work I submitted on either the 24th or the 31st of last month :D Which should be really awesome c:

We also get our grades on the 27th of this month, so just under two weeks time! So I'll be updating with any feedback I get from that and tell you if I have to re-take any of the modules in the summer (fingers crossed that I don't, but I'm not to confident in how my Damaged Detail and 2D to 3D Projects are going to hold up in the marking process)

But other than these things, I'm pretty much free to work on whatever I want now c: I'll be doing some observational drawing in my free time (another thing suggested), particularly over the coming week, when I'll be going home for a few days, to catch up with an old friend of mine (and won't have my computer or maya)

Other than this, I'll be updating when I have new work to show :D or new information on things :3
Expect another blog post in a week or so once I've had these tutorials and improved on the beginners tasks I've been working on :D

Until Next Time! c:

No rest for the wicked...Aka: Task #1 - Bouncing Ball (No Decay)

Hey Everyone :3 I'm back again o-o It's so soon but meh, I've had a nice rest over the weekend, Geocaching with my flatmates, so back to business! :D

Basically, on Saturday, I posted my showreel, seen in my last blog post, to an animation 'newbie' type forum space, asking for some critique. I got some really helpful feedback, especially on the movement of the dragons tail, it should be moving more from the base outwards and I was given this video of Haku from Spirited Away to pay attention to, the next time I animate them.

The general consensus was that I should be going back over all of the 12 basic principles to get them down first, instead of rushing into complicated things like I have been.

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, my main aspiration on this course is to eventually end up in the field of 3D character animation...Having a showreel composed of almost entirely 2D work, this is clearly something I need to work on a lot xD

On this forum, I was approached by a 3D Character animator, currently freelancing in the industry who gave me some amazing tips, advice and feedback and offered to act as a kind-of mentor to me, during the holidays. Which is a really great offer and one that I am extremely thankful for :3 He suggested a few animation exercises to do over the holidays, including the basic principles, which will hopefully help me to improve my timing, spacing and how I approach animation in general c:

Here is my first task c: A simple bouncing ball (using the squishy rig I used way back, in my 3rd ever blog post. This ball was animated on the spot, with no decay (bounced the same height each time)



I'll work on this one more, possibly, based on any feedback I get on it :D
I'll hopefully be posting these at intervals throughout the holidays until I've completed the majority of the basic principles tasks I've been given :3 I've added a 'Summer Tasks' tag to the side bar of my blog, so I don't clutter everything else on my blog, up with all of these posts xD I've also linked my showreel in the 'useful links' section, because It's going to get buried very quickly else xD

But yes :D Task 2 is a Ball Bouncing across the screen, which I'll be attempting tomorrow :D

See you very soon :3
~Char

Achievement Unlocked: Year 1 Complete!

Second blog post of the day is a new 'achievement' xD Today marked our final hand-in and therefore, the completion of the year :D
It's gone really, really quickly, but has been a very enjoyable one c: I've learned a lot, made a lot of friends and I can't wait to get stuck into next year and work on my own stuff in the summer c: (I have two small group projects planned, one 2D game project with my friend Danny and a CGI, cut-scene like, short with my friend Tristan, from Plymouth University, Watch this space c:)

Below is my showreel, showing some of my best motion studies work for this semester c: along with a little bit of life drawing :3



I'm very happy with what I have achieved this year, but think I've stayed in my comfort zone, a little more than I'd have liked to (particularly with the dragons and lack of human animation). My intention is to take Post production next year and work a lot on CGI, 3D animation, as it is something very out of my comfort zone a little bit, but still something I'm really interested in and enjoy doing c: I also intend to do a lot more life drawing, to try and improve on my human anatomy skills :3

But yes! I'll be updating this blog regularly still, over the summer, so you'll still be hearing from me ^_^

Then next year, I have the pleasure of living with 6 other animators and an English Literature student :D Should be great fun ^_^

Until next year!
~Char out!

The Group Project - A much needed update

Heya everyone :D It's been a few days of working solidly, since I last updated, so here's the rundown of what's been going on c:
Yesterday, as a group we had to present the group project we've been working on for the last two months, I think we presented pretty well and we were able to finish the film on time, which is always a massive plus! c:

For anyone interested, below is our final group film c: I was going to spend time blogging more about the production stages of the film, like I have been doing, but due to deadlines and being short on time, I haven't yet. I'll talk about my role in the film, later in this blog post and update you guys on our production logging, as a lot has changed since the last time I talked to you guys about it o:



I'm actually really pleased with the outcome of the final film and I think everyone in our group worked really hard to achieve it :D My main role in this project was as a 2D animator, working on the interview scenes c: As seen in my 'An insight into the group project' post, we had a production log. Since then, we have had many discussions and feedback sessions and a lot has changed. Our final production log is below.

With many of the original scenes deleted and a lot of re-organisation in terms of animators. Katie and Beverly switched with me, to work on the chibi style of the flashback scene together, whilst I was put to work, exclusively on the interview scene. Below is the work I produced for this project, that made it into the final cut. I really enjoyed this task as it was very far out of my comfort zone, working with human animation isn't something I'm used to doing, and I really enjoyed working on it :D



Our reasons for cutting so many scenes that were previously present in our animatic, was mostly due to feedback from our lecturers. We regularly had meetings with Kathy, so she got to know our project quite well, then occasionally we'd have the odd meeting with Ann to discuss where we were going with the project, theory wise and to work on our presentation skills. When the project was still in its animatic stages, we were able to get some helpful feedback off Derek, who really liked our animatic and gave us several pointers in ways to improve it. However, the final decision for changing our work was after a screening with Andy. He mentioned that our scenes seemed to be quite fast paced compared to the audio clip we were working from, which gave way to a much slower mood. He said it'd be good for us to cut out some of these more 'busy' shots and focus more on extending just a few of them, to better fit in time with the audio. We all agreed with this and decided to lengthen what was previously the 'surfers' scene and the 'wave claw' scene into a longer sequence, keeping it all as one shot. I felt this fit the audio much better than what we previously had and I'm glad we had that session with Andy and were able to make those adjustments.

We decided to go for a non-serious, slapstick-like approach to our project, taking inspiration from things like Charlie Chaplin, Chuck Jones’s animations, Ren and Stimpy, Felix the Cat and a variety of other places. This was quite a risky thing to have done, considering how serious our audio clip with, I spent quite a lot of time researching genre conventions of slapstick comedy and we all made sure that in the ‘flashback’ scenes, the animation was loose and the expressions were exaggerated, to achieve this effect. I was a little worried about how well we’d make this work, but overall, I think it worked really well, and coupled with Georgi’s music, giving it serious undertones, I think it makes quite an atmospheric, whilst still fun, scene.

Overall, I really, really enjoyed working on the group project, I think we all worked well as a team and it helped us get a better feel of what it'd be like, in industry, to have different roles and go from a starting idea to a finished product c:

The Background Project c:

Another project we were set a few days ago was a background project :3 

We were given the task to do create (either on paper or through a painting program), two animation backgrounds based on our storyboarding project (mine being Ranger Rick) 

Below are both my interior and exterior, final backgrounds c: 

My two main style influences for this project were Kekai Kotaki, Concept artist for Guild Wars 2 and Michel Gagne, one of my big animation inspirations :3

I loved the style of Kekai Kotaki's work, particularly how he used colours to portray depth in his art. Kekai's art was my main influence in both my final backgrounds. I really liked how this artist used brushes quite roughly, whilst still getting details into his paintings. I chose to use some of these brush techniques in my backgrounds and really liked how they turned out.

I looked at other Guild Wars 2 illustrators as well, that similarly used colours and depth in a beautiful way. The Guild Wars 2 concept art as a whole was one of my big inspirations during this project.

Gagne's work was another huge inspiration to me. I loved how his art was simple, yet had quite an atmosphere to them. I particularly liked how far close up parts in his work were made a lot darker than things in the distance. His art is very built up, layer wise, you can tell the depth of things however it looks quite graphicy which wasn't something I wanted from my backgrounds although I made sure to keep his work as an influence when representing things close up, lightening them as
they got further away. This technique really applied to my interior scene, where the colours of the further away trees changed to a lighter tone.

I think I was able to incorperate the style of both of them into my work alright, however, I think I could've worked a little harder on making Michel Gagne's style come out in the backgrounds, as it's hard to tell (particularly with the exterior background)

I really enjoyed the background project, it was enjoyable and got me doing something different, digital painting is quite rewarding and I'm pleased with the outcomes, particularly the interior shot :D