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

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

Introducing the "Falmouth University Ident Project"

A week or two ago we were given the task of producing an 'Ident' for Falmouth University. This project is being supervised by Adam Aiken, who has worked in the advertising side of animation for years and will be able to be very helpful in terms of feedback for the project.

The brief for this project is pretty loose, something I really like about it :D

Idents tend to be ways of advertising, usually a television show. These are really commonly seen between ad breaks or after shows, particularly on channels like E4 (Estings) and on childrens channels such as Nickelodeon. These tend to be around 5 - 10 seconds long and serve as a fun way of reminding viewers what channel they are on :3 Most idents will have a short lead up and then display the logo for the channel. We have been asked to do the same, but with the Falmouth University logo c: (It's recently undergone a change, becoming Falmouth University rather than University College Falmouth and therefore the branding and logo's for it have changed, so we'll all be using the brand new logo in our idents)

I wanted to practice my character animation in this, particularly in terms of expressions. I also wanted to push myself, whilst sticking to things I know (due to the deadline time constraints leaving little time for experimentation) I have chosen to animate this project in Flash, as it is the program I currently feel most comfortable with and animate two characters, the first being my dragon character Saffie and the other one being a simplified human character of myself, similar to the one I used on my lifting animation, back at the start of my motion studies unit.

My animatic for this project can be seen below. 

 

Our brief for this project has to include some kind of reference to our experimental animation, my way of including this will be through the blue 'paint' which will actually be parts of my blue plastercine from my experimental animation, since making this animatic, I have spoken to my lecturers who think it'd be a good idea to have the character catch the paint brush and then swipe it across the screen, to make the movement more dynamic. I will keep this in mind when producing my final piece.

I'll post more as I do it :3

Until Next Time -
~ Char

Achievement unlocked: Semester 1 Complete!

Once again, hello everyone! :D

It's not been long since I last blogged, but today was the final deadline date for a lot of our work that we've been doing since October :3 So yes, just a little bit of stress and I haven't slept properly in about 3 days, but everything is done now! Which is great :3 Relief, all of the relief!

For the sake of my blog labels and organization, I'll probably make this post a 'summing up' post and then go into more detail on my 3D work and sketchbook work at as later date.

Two of the things that were due today were my dreaded, cheesy, Ranger Rick storyboard animatic and a show reel, including all my 2D and 3D animation practice, as well as things I had done in my free time.

Below is my finished showreel, this includes pretty much almost all of my animation done in the last 4 months of University (or at least the ones I had to put in/the ones I'm happy with xD)



I will at some point explain more technical details in terms of the 3D stuff not yet on my blog (The lipsync, pushing, lifting and the walking animations and my personal ones that I haven't spoken about before)

Another thing that was set for hand in today was the Ranger Rick Animatic, that I had posted (cheesy) clips of, in an earlier blog post. Here is the completed animatic, I tried to make it a little more serious than before, toning down the music and such....I'd like to think it's a type of lovable cheesy now, rather than a facepalm, embarrassing cheesyness.



I was planning to add a few more inbetween frames to this animatic, but ended up running out of time in the end, I think it does pretty well at serving it's purpose, shot type wise though :3

But yeah, this is what I have been up to lately! You'll be seeing more Digital 2D work from me at some point or another as I have challenged one of my friends in second year to a 10 second animation battle next month xDD So I'll be putting a lot of effort into making something cool, frame by frame in paint tool SAI. I also have another MAP, to the song Iris, to complete, so yes, exciting things!

I shall see you in ze next blog post! Which will include some of the sketchbook work I have done for as recent project we were set, based on the work of Heindrich Kley :3
See you then!