Now for some Sketchbook Work!

I haven't really put much up in terms of my sketchbook work, I mean, almost all that you've seen from me sketchbook wise is character design, so here we go! Some of my work
from an actual sketchbook brief :3

 So yus, our brief was to create three final pieces based on the work of Heindrich Kley, this artists work often involved pen drawings of figures out of scale with their environment, either very little people or much bigger people. We were allowed to use any medium for this, but it was 'mainly a drawing project' so we were advised not to use paint very much.

I began by drawing some things that gave me inspiration, I really liked the idea of using mushrooms in my piece due to, close up, them being very interesting to draw. I also drew from life in the Geography labs at the university, as they have a large selection of skulls.

I really loved the idea of using animals in my piece, working with scale, like Kley did, but using creatures you'd expect to be large, in tiny environments and vice versa.
I am really interested by bugs, so I used them as my starting point, figure wise. I drew some up close pictures of ants, woodlice, snails and caterpillars.

My first final piece was done in Pen, Pencil and Watercolour and featured a giant millipede (usually tiny) wrapping itself around a lamp post (something you'd considered to be quite big). I was quite pleased with the outcome of this piece, except I wasn't quite sure what to do with the background in it (Kley often just leaves his backgrounds white) so it ended up little sloppy in the bottom of the background. Are Millipedes not the coolest things ever though? xD

My second and third pieces are below, An Elephant (an animal usually considered big) in contrast with a birds skull (very small) and surrounded by foliage. I am quite pleased with the outcome of this one also, but once again, I am not so keen on the background of the piece.  This was done in biro, pencil and coloured pencil.

 

and finally, my last piece! A bengal tiger contrasted against a mushroom. This was done in ink pen and pencil. I am actually happy with the background of this one, but I think I would've liked to do the tiger in a different medium, so it stands out more.

But yes! This blog is getting awfully informal again xD I'll see you in another post, where I'll hopefully be explaining more of my 3D work! Yay c:
 -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!

Yet another test xD

It's surprising how motivating everything else is when you have an essay deadline looming over your head... but in all seriousness xD Here's a test I did of my Minecraft character, walking :3 There's a few things I still have to sort out. For example, the render doesn't come out very well (some textures don't show up) so I've had to playblast until I can find out the problem and there's a few little jumps in the animation that I'm only just noticing now. I'll fix these at some point too... but yes, just some practice work because you can never have too much practice c:
 
and again, more cheesy music, because that's just how I roll xD I've heard that you can import Minecraft worlds into Maya, which would be pretty cool to do, if I can ever figure it out c:

 I was also animating a quad dragon rig for a little while, but this was a couple of months ago, when I had even less of an idea what I was doing xD So I shelved that one until I'd figured Maya out a little more, tempted to try this again sometime though, we'll see after the deadline period is over I guess.

I swear I'll put up some University related CG stuff soon! I've got a few more things I need to add to some of them, then I shall put them up too :3 and I'm just noticing how bad my smiley usage is getting on here, again...

and hey, look, it's Steve! Ohai Steve!

Cinematography

We've had ongoing cinematography lectures for a little while, teaching us different camera techniques and for part of this project, we had to go out and film a variety of different shots to show what we had learned. At some point this will be going towards the goal of actually making a short film, as far as I know.

My group consisted of myself and 4 others and we just filmed random shots that could be used in a mockumentary type thing, making sure we used a variety, to show off what we had learned.

I was given the task of editing this footage together but wasn't so sure what the others wanted.....so this kind of happened....


so I had to re-do it xD but yeah, here's the serious version....I did have fun with the other one though xDD They both turned out pretty cheesy, being fair

:

 Infact, it seems most things I edit come out at least a little bit cheesy, here's an extract of my first take (it's been changed since, so it's fine now) of my Animatic..



Yup...all of the cheesy, over dramatic music....I should probably take this more seriously considering the time I have left to get all of this done, but I'm pretty certain I'm on track now, or at least I hope I am.

But yes, don't give me footage to edit without telling me exactly how.....bad things happen apparently xD I enjoyed it at least :3
I'll be seeing you soon, in another blog post, I have so much to put up, so yush, until next time ~ 

It's been a while

It's been about a month since I spammed you all with those 6 posts in a day, so I figured you'd had enough of a break and I should come back and tell you what I've been up to! Deadlines are upon me, so I'm sure you'll probably be getting just as many blog posts for January as well!

To start off with, an update on one of my personal projects :D If you've been following my blog, you may have noticed that in December, I made a post called 'personal projects', didn't really explain until later what any of them were. Well, the storyboard I featured there was part of a Multi Animator Project I joined for Christmas.

One of the things that sparked my interest in animation was a community of people on youtube who were animating the Warrior Cats book series by Erin Hunter, about 5 or 6 years ago. These people also went on to animate their own original characters (or OC's) and I got into animating on Paint and Windows Movie Maker by animating a purple and orange fennec fox character I had made. (I have 10 OC characters in total that I used to write little storys about when I was a bit younger)

A good friend of mine, someone who used to animate the Warrior Cats series was holding a Multi Animator Project based on the 12 days of Christmas song by Relient K. The aim of this project was that 32 different animators would each animate about 7 seconds of this song and it'd all be put together at the end to make a music video, featuring many different OC's, to this song.

I applied to join and got accepted and given Part 22, the 10th day of christmas with the lyric parts "On the 10th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, 10 lords re leaping, 9 ladies dancing, eight maids are milking, seven swans are swimming, six geese are laying" which I had to animate to.

If you're interested in seeing the storyboard I did for this, it is in my previous blog post here.
My part is below.

I animated this in Adobe Flash CS3 and it incorperates all 10 of my characters. I was really glad I joined this project in the end as it gave me more experience in Flash, something I have not used very much. The only real difficulty I came across was that I had to go back home for christmas, half was through animating it, meaning I had to leave my Rig at home and work on the rest with a 5 year old laptop...which had it's fair share of arguements with flash, wouldn't play back animations to me and took about a minute to create a new keyframe. As you can probably imagine, he last few days of this project were kind of painful and I think the animation quality suffered a little because of this (the beginning until the blue dragon jumps in were animated on campus, the rest animated at home).

Overall though, I'm quite happy with the outcome and have joined another MAP, to the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, which is scheduled for Feburary 2013 :3

Below is the final MAP, with everyones part in (two people unfortunately failed to meet the deadline, so there's text in two parts, but other than that, I think everyone did amazing and it came out really well!)

As far as University projects go, I'm plodding along xD Getting there with everything now, I have some more 3D work to put up at some point along with some of my cinematography stuff :3 Deadline pressure is taking it's toll on my sleep, but heck is it gonna be worth it in the end (I hope xD)
So yush, keep your eyes peeled for some cinematography, 3D, my showreel, sketchbook work and finally my next MAP :D

Until next time :3

Ranger Rick's Adventures - Completed Storyboard

I finished my Ranger Rick storyboard, so I'll be moving onto my animatic soon, finding voices for the characters and such. I've actually had a ton of fun with this storyboard, I enjoyed finding different camera angles to work with an although I found it difficult at times to get things looking right first time, I'm quite pleased with the final outcome of this.

 

Regrettably I had to use colour for some parts of it, as I found it was difficult to tell the location of the character in space, without the glow from the horizon.

 

I will now start work on my animatic, finding voices and music that fits the Ranger Rick Adventures theme.

 

Mighty Morphing...Morpheus

Here we are again, with more 3D work! I'm slowly coming to grips with the software now, which is awesome, considering it was one of the only types of animation I hadn't touched before coming here. I'm very interested in 3D Character animation, particularly for Games, so I guess it's probably good I'm starting to enjoy this :3

 

Our task was to put the Morpheus rig into several expessive poses, below are the ones I chose.

 

Fear/Repulsion

 

Happy/Agreeable

 

Annoyed

 



 

Down/Sad

 

Angry/Threatening

More Life Drawing!

Life drawing has rolled around once again, this time with my 4th week c: We had a younger female model for this session, which I found much more difficult to draw (mostly due to the lack of creases and wrinkles in her skin)

Session 4 

 

This first piece was a 1 minute drawing, so it turned out very sketchy and I made mistakes with it, for one the feet are facing different ways, the hand is bent awkwardly and the arm down her back is...I don't even know, but yeah, not good, not proud of this one :P

My second life drawing was very similar in teqnique to the life drawings I had done in previous sessions. We drew the model in 4 different poses in 2 minute intervals, all on the same piece of paper so that they overlapped. I think I did a much better job with these than on my first one, so I'm not so dissapointed with this.

Our third life drawing was more of an experimental technique. The model moved around whilst we were drawing her and the aim was to get as much movement into the drawing as possible. I did find this technique difficult at first but was quite pleased with the final outcome.

 

The Fourth drawing was yet another experimental piece and was more of a collaborative piece.We were given 5 minutes to work on a piece, then we had to more clockwise onto the easle next to us and work on another persons piece. We were allowed to cange their anatomical decisions or add more detail and shade. I started the above piece and three other people added detail to it.

Finally, the last life drawing was a 10 minute piece, I chose to work on black paper, much like the last piece of the previous session. I dew in only where the light was shining, however, this didn't come out as well as I expected, with her stomach area coming out very weird and distorted. I do think that her left arm and the legs came out close to real though, so I'm quite pleased with those two.

Personal Projects

I thought I'd update you guys with a little bit of my non-uni work :3 Just 'cause everything you've seen up until now has been uni related and why not? :D

Okay, so below is my character Torik Glythwing, who I play as in Dungeons and Dragons (I'm part of a group being run by the Table Top Gaming society in Falmouth)
Torik is a Druid Gritaur meaning zi (gritaur's don't have a gender, so zi and zir are used as the pronouns) has a beast form, which of course is an actual griphon.
I found drawing these concepts for zir a good way to get into character during D&D sessions (and I won't bore you all further with backstory information and such :P) but yush, below are some character designs of Torik Glythwing in different stances.

Secondly, personal storyboarding :3 Below is a storyboard I devised for a 'Multi Animator Project' I have joined recently, I have to animate some of my own characters to, a 7 second clip of 'The 12 days of Christmas' song by 'Relient K'

This storyboard is very basic so far and I have began with animating the first part of it in Flash. I am thinking about moving around some of the frames when it comes to animating it finally, so that the character falling in frame 5, falls in the final frame instead.

This is what I have so far, I'm not so pleased with the line art and hope with a bit more practice in Flash that I can get a cleaner feel to my lines.

Storyboarding Deep

During the completion of our main storyboarding project, we were also set a small, week long storyboarding task based on a screenplay called DEEP. The script for this involved a lady dressed in riding gear having a conversation with a man who doesn't quite believe in vampires she'd discovered on a case. Their conversation ends in conflict and he flees. Unlike our main storyboarding project, we were given a room to work within and shown different angles of this room. I found this was very good when it came to showing where the characters were in relation to the room, as I didn't have to make up the surroundings myself and the room we were given had wuite a few area's that could be used for focusing on in the background, like fireplaces, doors ect.

This took me 21 frames in total to portray. My final storyboard is shown below.

 

 

When doing this storyboard, I think I could've put the frames further appart to allow more room for writing dialogue/actions and I have now done this on my Ranger Rick one, leaving 5 lines below each frame and having 6 frames to a page.