Hey all,
It's been a rather long time since I updated you all, but I thought I'd just post some of the work I've done since January :)
As mentioned in my last blog post, I've been working on a production and research bible for an animated film in the style of Edward Gorey.
This project, ‘Pick and Mix’ revolved around us picking 4 cards at random out of a hat. One of these cards would act as the art style, one as the genre, one as the main character and one as the location. The cards that I received were: Edward Gorey for the art Style, Opera House for the location, ‘A doctor’ for the main character and Family Feature film as the Genre.
The first thing I began researching for this project was the subject of Genre. The card I picked for my film was ‘Family Feature’ and therefore I had to know what family feature films entailed before I began writing a synopsis or started thinking of story ideas for this project. ‘Family Feature’ as a genre is very broad topic. It can range from live action films such as Mrs Doubtfire, to animated films such as Bambi. The only real rules defining a family feature film is that it has to be a feature film and can be enjoyed by both adults and children alike. The majority of these films are between U and PG in rating, with a very rare few crossing into the 12 rating category. Some very popular examples of ‘Family Feature films’ are, the Harry Potter series, Dr Doolittle, The Lord of the Rings series, along with the majority of Dreamworks, Disney and Pixar’s feature films.
Considering that family feature films appear to be pretty broad in themes and plots, the only restriction I gave myself when coming up with a story, was “is it kid friendly?”. Meaning my film should be free of explicit themes and language, but enjoyable to both adults and children.
My next step was coming up with a compelling story, this was something that was incredibly tough for me, I re-worked it several times. Going from a toy-story esque film, involving a shelf of souvenirs in a doctors room coming to life, to coming up with a much more dramatic plot, involving mental health issues. In the end, I chose to go with the plot involving mental health issues, as it’s something that has been a pressing issue in my life lately, regarding people I care about, so I felt much more compelled towards that subject matter.
I have always really liked films that involve fighting against an evil source with hand on hand combat, similar to how it is done in many video games. Wreck it Ralph is a recent family feature film and the majority of animated feature films I looked at, had fight scenes in them somewhere. I used this to give me some perspective on how scary I could make the film, without pushing it out of the ‘family feature film’ category by making it unsuitable for kids. Brave was one of the films I looked at quite extensively, along with Rise of the Guardians, two recent Family feature films with quite dark themes behind them and some impressive combat scenes. These were the two films I used to gauge how far I could go with my film, This project, ‘Pick and Mix’ revolved around us picking 4 cards at random out of a hat. One of these cards would act as the art style, one as the genre, one as the main character and one as the location. The cards that I received were: Edward Gorey for the art Style, Opera House for the location, ‘A doctor’ for the main character and Family Feature film as the Genre. This research bible will serve as a storage place for my thoughts, concepts and any research done for this project and should prove very helpful when deciding on particular assets for this film and keeping inspirations in one place.
The first thing I began researching for this project was the subject of Genre. The card I picked for my film was ‘Family Feature’ and therefore I had to know what family feature films entailed before I began writing a synopsis or started thinking of story ideas for this project. ‘Family Feature’ as a genre is very broad topic. It can range from live action films such as Mrs Doubtfire, to animated films such as Bambi. The only real rules defining a family feature film is that it has to be a feature film and can be enjoyed by both adults and children alike. The majority of these films are between U and PG in rating, with a very rare few crossing into the 12 rating category. Some very popular examples of ‘Family Feature films’ are, the Harry Potter series, Dr Doolittle, The Lord of the Rings series, along with the majority of Dreamworks, Disney and Pixar’s feature films.
Considering that family feature films appear to be pretty broad in themes and plots, the only restriction I gave myself when coming up with a story, was “is it kid friendly?”. Meaning my film should be free of explicit themes and language, but enjoyable to both adults and children.
My next step was coming up with a compelling story, this was something that was incredibly tough for me, I re-worked it several times. Going from a toy-story esque film, involving a shelf of souvenirs in a doctors room coming to life, to coming up with a much more dramatic plot, involving mental health issues. In the end, I chose to go with the plot involving mental health issues, as it’s something that has been a pressing issue in my life lately, regarding people I care about, so I felt much more compelled towards that subject matter.
I have always really liked films that involve fighting against an evil source with hand on hand combat, similar to how it is done in many video games. Wreck it Ralph is a recent family feature film and the majority of animated feature films I looked at, had fight scenes in them somewhere. I used this to give me some perspective on how scary I could make the film, without pushing it out of the ‘family feature film’ category by making it unsuitable for kids. Brave was one of the films I looked at quite extensively, along with Rise of the Guardians, two recent Family feature films with quite dark themes behind them and some impressive combat scenes. These were the two films I used to gauge how far I could go with my film, they also gave me some tips to other aspects and themes commonly prevalent in family feature films.
I also looked at other family feature films that star a doctor as the main character, Dr Doolittle was one of these, a film with lots of comedic and light hearted aspects along with him trying to save the lives of his patients, bringing more serious undertones.
My final story idea revolves around a performance psychiatrist by the name of Dr Mathews. He is well known in the performance industry for having questionable techniques but amazing results and success when helping his patients. Most establishments will not hire him unless the matter is vital, because he is viewed as controversial by the performance industry.
Eugine, a new opera singer, who is set to open Canada’s newest opera house, in front of royalty in a week, has broken down during one of his rehearsals with an anxiety attack. Dr Mathews is called in to help him combat his ‘monsters’ by using a machine to transport himself artificially into the mind of Eugine, where he can fight them sword and shield. Dr Mathews is in for a surprise though, as Eugine has more monsters than he has ever seen before and he can’t combat them without Eugines co-operation. Eugine is very stuck up and self righteous, someone that can not be easily budged. The film follows serious undertones, whilst being somewhat light hearted when involving the interaction between Eugine and Dr Mathews, an interaction I think can be made quite comedic.
The first hurdle I faced, in regards to style, was that Edward Goreys character art lacks any kind of emotion to it. Characters all seem to have the same expression, regardless of situation, this being one of the things he was praised for, that any situation can go, with his art and it’ll just seem natural. From an animation standpoint however, this is one of the difficult things, especially with Monsters Within being such an emotionally charged film, dealing with fears and anxiety and phobias. I wanted to keep to Edward Goreys style as much as possible, but also be able to portray character emotion the way that was necessary for my storyline and also would keep the film fresh and interesting. This inspired me to begin trying to work in his style, sketching out what I thought some of the characters would look like in his style and then tweaking them a little bit, to portray more emotions.
The biggest thing I noticed about Goreys style, limitation wise, was that his characters features were very small, this probably being a contributing factor to the emotionless feel to his work.
When taking Edward Goreys style to animation, I decided it would be best to use his crosshatching style on either the backgrounds or the characters, but not both, as I felt it would be very distracting and difficult to understand what was going on. I played with two ideas to solve this. The first idea being, to have the backgrounds digitally painted in colour and then Edward Gorey style black and white cross hatched characters over the top. My second idea being to have a cross hatched, Edward Gorey style black and white background, with simplistic outlined Edward Gorey characters, in flat colour over the top.
In the end, I chose to go with the later idea, using a simplistic water colour style that Gorey has used in several of his pieces. I used Paint Tool SAI or all of the artwork, as the program was perfect for getting a nice, clean, pen-like line work for the background. Something I struggled with in Photoshop, Flash and other programs I tried. I made mood boards of some of the locations and mimicked them in Edward Goreys style, and also broke through from the style a little bit, sketching some dramatic digitally painted pieces of concept art, to get me started and really get a feel of the movie I wanted to create. I went through several iterations of character designs, from the original, toys coming to life idea, to a loose Edward Gorey style and then finally onto the accurate Edward Gorey style seen in the final product. I originally created the animatic in a loose Edward Gorey style, with normal cinematography, using varied camera angles and shot types. However, after having a feedback session with my lecturers, decided to stick more closely to Edward Goreys style, reducing the amount of camera shots and making the existing ones very front on and flat, similar to Edward Goreys work.
We were required to animate a few seconds of animation to ‘prove’ that animation could work in this style. I originally planned to do a cut-out animation of Eugine collapsing, but after a little more thought, I decided I’d quite like to animate it frame by frame. This decision was mostly based off the fact that I found Edward Goreys style limiting enough, emotion wise and I felt that animating in cut-out would make this and even bigger issue. It would also require me to learn Celaction in just a couple of weeks and I thought it would be beneficial to my work to stick with something I was confident with, instead of rushing to learn new software in just a couple of weeks.
I decided I wanted to animate the monsters, for my short snippet as I thought it would be fun to figure out how these creatures would move. I also needed to keep my work in the Edward Gorey, watercolour and cross hatching style. The program flash is a pretty limiting one, when it comes to colouring techniques, but I felt the timeline was absolutely necessary for me to get the movement of these creatures correct. I decided to work across several programs when animating, and really liked the idea of working with the flicker produced with cross hatching and watercolour in a frame by frame style animation (Similar to how The Snowman looks, produced with coloured pencil).
I ended up having a pipeline for creating a frame, I’d sketch it out in flash and use the timeline to ensure the movement was how I wanted it, I’d then export it as an AVI file and import it frame by frame in Photoshop, which I’d save as individual layers. I’d then save it as a .PSD and import it into Paint tool Sai, where I changed the opacity, drew other the top in smooth lines, added cross hatching and coloured in the watercolour style. This would then be saved as a .PNG and brought into Sony Vegas, where I chose the time it was to be displayed and pieced all my animation together.
I am very pleased with the final outcome of the animation, but I’m not sure how viable it’d be in a commercial space. The flicker works the way I intended it to and I think the animation works well for a dream-like sequence, especially with the watercolour and cross hatching making it look quite eerie. However, when considering export times and switching between programs, it was taking me upwards of an hour per frame and at 25 frames per second, I don’t think that would be so viable in a studio, unless a strict pipeline was adhered too.
Overall I really enjoyed this project! It pushed me out of my comfort zone a lot, when designing characters and working to someone elses style, something I feel was a good thing overall. I’m very happy with the final animation, however, for the amount of time it took to animate such a small shot, I think finding a better technique to animate in, would be best for time management and efficiency. If I was to do it again, I think I’d probably look for a compromise between Goreys style and simplicity for animation, hopefully by doing this it would allow me to animate more efficiently, whilst still keeping a relatively high standard of work.
I think this project has taught me a lot, in regards to character design and wat it means to work in another person’s style. I enjoyed thinking up stories for the project, ad a lot of fun sound editing for the animatic and really enjoyed seeing the Monster coming to life, after spending so long staring at each frame.
I think Edward Goreys style could be used for animation, but as much as I like it, I think it is a little too complex for your average feature film. The style would fit in quite well at art shows or film festivals however and may have some success in advertising.
Below is my final research bible, compiling my inspirations for the project
Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwCeP4T97JdFNldqaUFIdS1SUE0
and then my final production bible, detailing the film/character designs ect is below :D
Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwCeP4T97JdFeGJfSHlET2NEM1E/edit
Here's an animatic for one of the scenes
and here is a short animation, experimenting with the style :3
I'll blog again soon, to talk about my new projects :D I've got a couple of game projects along with a few other things that I'm working with ^^
Until next time
~Char out
Showing posts with label Digital Painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital Painting. Show all posts
Sunday, 16 February 2014
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
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.
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!
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.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! :)
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!"
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!
Sunday, 15 December 2013
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
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
Friday, 18 October 2013
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 ~
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 ~
Thursday, 4 July 2013
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:
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) -
5. Character thinking
7. Flour Sack jumping
8. Flour Sack falling
11. Character Laughing
12. Standing up from sitting
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:
Monday, 27 May 2013
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
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Experimental Animation
We've had a project for a few weeks based on experimental animation :3 We don't have much of a brief for this project other than, 1. we have to animate to one of six, 40 second sound clips and 2. We cannot use a computer other than for post production purposes oh and 3. It has to actually be animated of course c:
We've been told to conduct experiments into different types of animation before actually animating the 40 seconds, so this is what I've been doing the last few days c:
So anyways, what a cool project :D I've been having a whale of a time just experimenting with whatever I have lying around the place c: My digital camera is such a battery gobbler though >.< I've gone through like £6 worth of batteries and only done a few experiments so far ^-^; Should probably invest in some rechargeable ones or something 'cause I'm pretty sure the environment hates me right now...
BUT ANYWAYS ~
I started off in a small group, experimenting with a style of animation called Pixilation, this is, in basic terms, stop motion animation but using humans instead of puppets. Norman Mclaren's animation 'Neighbours' was a very popular example of this form of animation.
I worked with a few others in my animation group to practice with pixilation animation and we came out with the two animations below.
and
This was actually SO much fun to do xDD I really, really enjoyed it, especially the table race :3 I think they both came out really well ^-^ and small animations done with a group of friends? what isn't to love? :D
okay, then I went home and practiced with some stuff around the flat :3 I bought a mini octopus tripod so I could set up wherever I wanted and have a stable workspace. I started out using plactercine and just playing about with shapes and ripples and such with that. Plastercine was something I really enjoyed working with ^_^ But I think a few more frames for this animation could've benefited it a lot, especially at the beginning. That and I found it really difficult to get my camera to be consistent, sometimes it'd flash, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it was out of focus and other times the frames were crisp and clear. I think if I do choose to work in plastercine as my final Experimental medium, I'll need to work on my camera a bit >.< But for a first try, I guess it wasn't bad c:
My second, I used mostly myself and a ring I tend to wear. I experimented with pastel pens and giving the illusion that my ring was drawing :3 There's a slight jump in it unfortunately because my camera ran out of batteries half way though and I had to replace them, taking the camera off the tripod and changing the frame a bit D: I'm still pretty pleased with this though, and would love to work on a similar technique soon, when I have batteries xD
and finally, my latest one :D I bought a cheap whiteboard and messed around with morphing animation using it c: I actually really enjoyed this, but it ended up being quite painful on my wrist, seeing as the only way I could find to photograph it properly was when it was on a vertical surface :3 I think it'd be nice to use this as my final experimental animation, but I'd like to find a way to have it on a desk or something (similar to a line tester) if I was to animate 40 seconds worth of animation in this technique :3
But yes, that's pretty much all I had to say so far c: Ima continue experimenting with different techniques ^_^ One thing I'd quite like to try again would be animation using seeds and lentils, during A level art I had to do a project advertising a healthy fast food company and did it using lentils and such on a lightbox. Unfortunately though, this lightbox was A5 in size, so was difficult to work with and I had no idea what I was doing editing wise, so it isn't at a particular frame per second 'cause I imported everything at once an painstakingly resized every frame itself instead of importing frame selection >.< So yeah, a bit jumpy, but it was a pretty fun project c:
Interestingly, I'm still using the same camera for my current experimental stuff xD Hopefully the editing will be much better now I've learned how to do time saving stuffs though x__x
Oh and finally, just as a teeny update, even though it's not relevant to Experimental Animation c: I've been practicing with digital painting a bit more, and painted my cat this morning c:
I'm not such a fan of backgrounds yet though, so I did leave that a little plain >.< but yeshh, I worked from this picture
I'm quite pleased with it c: But I can see quite a few places where improvement can be made on it c: Especially on the front paws and the back :3 But ima leave it for now and get on with other things, like my group project and experimental ^_^
but yush, this is all for now :D I'll post some of my test shots for the Sea project at some point c: I'm currently working out the best ways to get them done in flash, because Flicker/Animation Boiling is driving me crazy right now :3 But I guess this is part of the learning process ^-^
Until next timeeee
We've been told to conduct experiments into different types of animation before actually animating the 40 seconds, so this is what I've been doing the last few days c:
So anyways, what a cool project :D I've been having a whale of a time just experimenting with whatever I have lying around the place c: My digital camera is such a battery gobbler though >.< I've gone through like £6 worth of batteries and only done a few experiments so far ^-^; Should probably invest in some rechargeable ones or something 'cause I'm pretty sure the environment hates me right now...
BUT ANYWAYS ~
I started off in a small group, experimenting with a style of animation called Pixilation, this is, in basic terms, stop motion animation but using humans instead of puppets. Norman Mclaren's animation 'Neighbours' was a very popular example of this form of animation.
I worked with a few others in my animation group to practice with pixilation animation and we came out with the two animations below.
and
This was actually SO much fun to do xDD I really, really enjoyed it, especially the table race :3 I think they both came out really well ^-^ and small animations done with a group of friends? what isn't to love? :D
okay, then I went home and practiced with some stuff around the flat :3 I bought a mini octopus tripod so I could set up wherever I wanted and have a stable workspace. I started out using plactercine and just playing about with shapes and ripples and such with that. Plastercine was something I really enjoyed working with ^_^ But I think a few more frames for this animation could've benefited it a lot, especially at the beginning. That and I found it really difficult to get my camera to be consistent, sometimes it'd flash, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it was out of focus and other times the frames were crisp and clear. I think if I do choose to work in plastercine as my final Experimental medium, I'll need to work on my camera a bit >.< But for a first try, I guess it wasn't bad c:
My second, I used mostly myself and a ring I tend to wear. I experimented with pastel pens and giving the illusion that my ring was drawing :3 There's a slight jump in it unfortunately because my camera ran out of batteries half way though and I had to replace them, taking the camera off the tripod and changing the frame a bit D: I'm still pretty pleased with this though, and would love to work on a similar technique soon, when I have batteries xD
and finally, my latest one :D I bought a cheap whiteboard and messed around with morphing animation using it c: I actually really enjoyed this, but it ended up being quite painful on my wrist, seeing as the only way I could find to photograph it properly was when it was on a vertical surface :3 I think it'd be nice to use this as my final experimental animation, but I'd like to find a way to have it on a desk or something (similar to a line tester) if I was to animate 40 seconds worth of animation in this technique :3
But yes, that's pretty much all I had to say so far c: Ima continue experimenting with different techniques ^_^ One thing I'd quite like to try again would be animation using seeds and lentils, during A level art I had to do a project advertising a healthy fast food company and did it using lentils and such on a lightbox. Unfortunately though, this lightbox was A5 in size, so was difficult to work with and I had no idea what I was doing editing wise, so it isn't at a particular frame per second 'cause I imported everything at once an painstakingly resized every frame itself instead of importing frame selection >.< So yeah, a bit jumpy, but it was a pretty fun project c:
Interestingly, I'm still using the same camera for my current experimental stuff xD Hopefully the editing will be much better now I've learned how to do time saving stuffs though x__x
Oh and finally, just as a teeny update, even though it's not relevant to Experimental Animation c: I've been practicing with digital painting a bit more, and painted my cat this morning c:
but yush, this is all for now :D I'll post some of my test shots for the Sea project at some point c: I'm currently working out the best ways to get them done in flash, because Flicker/Animation Boiling is driving me crazy right now :3 But I guess this is part of the learning process ^-^
Until next timeeee
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Personal Projects :3
I thought I'd update everyone on some of the personal projects I was working on and have been speaking about in previous blog posts but never actually put up xD
The Iris Multi Animator Project, which I talked about in my Moar Updatesssss post is done now, or at least the deadline was extended to March the 1st and there's still 3 parts missing, so the final animation isn't up yet unfortunately, but I'll make sure I post it here as soon it gets put up c:
My part is hereee
I decided to try and experiment with camera angles to make it more interesting and I really can't wait to see this whole thing done >w< I've seen some of the other parts people have posted and It's looking awesome :D I'd have liked to add some more shadows and stuff to it, seeing as the scene is back lit, long stretching shadows in front of her, onto the grass would've been nice. But with Uni deadlines and the MAP itself having a deadline, I couldn't really afford to put that time into it, when my degree matters a lot more. The back leg on the last frame is also bothering me xD but ima stop nitpicking this and leave it now. I actually really enjoyed experimenting with the camera angles as I think it makes the scene a lot more interesting and it's just nice to bring Saffie to life in this way, as she's something I've only really drawn on paper until recently.
I also decided to practice on some digital painting techniques. I got some feedback from some artists on Deviantart who told me that I need to work on my light sources and the expressions/emotion in my characters, as they felt my artwork was very bland. I took this advice and put it upon myself to do a picture every day for a week, to the lyrics of the song 'paper tigers' by Owl City. I wanted to work on both the feedback I had been given by them and also improve on my digital painting techniques. Trying to speed up the process, as it takes me hours upon hours currently to do one painting and I need to become more efficient when drawing and colouring for animation :3
With my first few drawings, I concentrated mainly on the lightsource. Giving all of these pieces quite a strong light source to work from :3 I used my character Saffie again for this (I should probably get practicing drawing humans again soon >.<)
I wanted to focus mainly on the emotion of this piece, so I left the background out of this. I also had a light source, in the form of a small candle.
My final two lyrics pictures were both done without a specific light source, I'm no so fond of these ones, mostly because it was difficult to find where to put shadows in a diffused light space.
Before finishing the last one, I put some of the pieces together with the song I was working on, maybe at some point I'll have drawn out all of the lyrics, hey, it'd be good practice c: but I don't have any plans to work on it again until the summer 'cause other commitments ^-^
But yushh owo Here is another update from me c: I have some more uni-related stuff to put up soon, but I thought I'd update with personal stuff first :3 I've been practicing drawing humans on a daily basis too, sketching daily to try and better learn human anatomy as it is something I struggle with >.< (quadrupeds y u so much easier to draw? xD)
But yess, until next timeeee ~
The Iris Multi Animator Project, which I talked about in my Moar Updatesssss post is done now, or at least the deadline was extended to March the 1st and there's still 3 parts missing, so the final animation isn't up yet unfortunately, but I'll make sure I post it here as soon it gets put up c:
My part is hereee
I decided to try and experiment with camera angles to make it more interesting and I really can't wait to see this whole thing done >w< I've seen some of the other parts people have posted and It's looking awesome :D I'd have liked to add some more shadows and stuff to it, seeing as the scene is back lit, long stretching shadows in front of her, onto the grass would've been nice. But with Uni deadlines and the MAP itself having a deadline, I couldn't really afford to put that time into it, when my degree matters a lot more. The back leg on the last frame is also bothering me xD but ima stop nitpicking this and leave it now. I actually really enjoyed experimenting with the camera angles as I think it makes the scene a lot more interesting and it's just nice to bring Saffie to life in this way, as she's something I've only really drawn on paper until recently.
I also decided to practice on some digital painting techniques. I got some feedback from some artists on Deviantart who told me that I need to work on my light sources and the expressions/emotion in my characters, as they felt my artwork was very bland. I took this advice and put it upon myself to do a picture every day for a week, to the lyrics of the song 'paper tigers' by Owl City. I wanted to work on both the feedback I had been given by them and also improve on my digital painting techniques. Trying to speed up the process, as it takes me hours upon hours currently to do one painting and I need to become more efficient when drawing and colouring for animation :3
With my first few drawings, I concentrated mainly on the lightsource. Giving all of these pieces quite a strong light source to work from :3 I used my character Saffie again for this (I should probably get practicing drawing humans again soon >.<)
In this one, the light source was the fire, so blended lots of yellows into it, I wanted the style of painting to be quite soft, so I drew my line art in brown instead of black so that it wasn't so harsh against the colouring. I chose to do the background without using lines, to keep with the soft feel of it. 
Once again, another strong light source, this one from above. I think maybe I should've put a bit more shading underneath Saffie, in relation to the light source from above. 
Before finishing the last one, I put some of the pieces together with the song I was working on, maybe at some point I'll have drawn out all of the lyrics, hey, it'd be good practice c: but I don't have any plans to work on it again until the summer 'cause other commitments ^-^
But yushh owo Here is another update from me c: I have some more uni-related stuff to put up soon, but I thought I'd update with personal stuff first :3 I've been practicing drawing humans on a daily basis too, sketching daily to try and better learn human anatomy as it is something I struggle with >.< (quadrupeds y u so much easier to draw? xD)
But yess, until next timeeee ~
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)