I've missed a few weeks of life drawing due to deadlines and other commitments, but I intend to continue going from this week ^-^ Below are a few drawings from yesterdays session.
My first piece, a 5 minute drawing. This session focussed a lot on portraying emotions through body language and so our model did a variety of short poses trying to express feeling throughout them. This was portraying sadness.
My second piece, another 5 minute piece portraying the happiness in the model.
My third drawing, this one showing anguish/sadness, this was a longer drawing at around 10 minutes.
My 4th drawing was of the model in an agitated/angry pose, we were asked to draw this using no curves, but only lines.
And finally, a 15 minute pose that I did in chalk on black paper, focussing on lighting once more c:
I make sure not to miss sessions from now on, because I really need to practice drawing humans and I'm kinda rusty from missing only 3 sessions.....but yes :D Keep tuned for more stuffs I guess c:
We've been advised to do around 30 minutes of Maya a day, in order to improve, I've been trying to squeeze as much time in for maya as possible, I found a few quadruped rigs and have done some posing with them for practice, I think I'll continue with the first rig (Nico) and practice animation with him a little bit :3 It's really interesting to see how different rigs work, the second rig (Pierre) worked very, very differently to Nico, so it took quite a while to warm to the controls on both of them c:
One of our units for this term is 'Motion Studies', we've only had two sessions of this, but as far as I can tell we're going to get small practice tasks for each session, to do with movement.
Our first task (for last week) was to do a rough animation of someone lifting a heavy object. This could be done in any medium we had learned so far and we were told to make a reference video to work from with this.
My reference video is below
and my rough animation is as follows
After showing this to my lecturer, he was curious to know why I didn't include the wobbles in the animation, I didn't because it was not something I meant to do when filming and I wanted to perfect it in the animation. But after talking to him, we both agreed it would've been beneficial to have left the wobble in.
Our class now has weekly motion studies lectures and we get set a variety of tasks every week or every two weeks in relation to performance and character animation. I'll make sure that I keep this blog updated on what I'm doing in relation to that c:
My main interest right now is 3D, but I also want to continue learning and improving my skills with 2D animation (especially in regard to the basic principles as Timing in particular is something I need work on a lot) So I think I will alternate my tasks between 2D and 3D mediums :3
Okay, so we started our new term, last week. Time is going so fast o-o 4 months left of first year D: What is going on? ...But anyway I've got lots of animation going on for this term. We're now on a group unit called Animation Practice along with an Experimental Animation unit, motion studies and possibly some other stuff that I'll talk about in a future post, once I find out more.
I'll start off with something I've been wanting to talk about for a while, something I'm quite excited about :3 Back in November, Michel Gagne, one of my animation and comic inspirations, started a kickstarter project aiming to turn his comic 'The Saga of Rex' into a short animated film. He planned to get started on this in Feburary and got successfully funded to produce both a 4 minute short film and a trailer with additional footage. I of course backed this project and have since gotten access to his "secret production blog" where he is logging every step of his animation process. He started on this blog at the begining of the month and has been blogging every week day with video's describing every process he goes through on the film. It's been really awesome to see what he's done so far and I'm really excited to follow the process of the film from start to finish :D
Below is the progress he had made on the project before making the kickstarter project. His work is done in Toon Boom Harmony and is animated mostly frame by frame.
Very inspiring stuff, but yes :D I am super excited about all of this >w< Thought I'd share that here c:
I'll be posting very soon about some of the work I've been doing in the past week, for this new term :D
Heyo again :3 I am back with more ramblings and work related things :3
First off, we had a flash tutorial at the beginning of last week where we learned the basics of 'symbols' and cutout animation. We were asked to do a lipsynch, during this lesson, using only symbols in it.
Below is both my first, 'symbol practice' video and my lipsynch. (With an axolotl in a tophat o-o)
I actually really enjoyed the lipsynch, the above video is both a 'camera test' and a lipsynch as I moved it around a little to simulate camera movements.
In other news, our last hand-in, the cinematography unit was on Thursday and after much hassle with the studio machines, we finally got it rendered and handed in :3
Below is the evaluation from the 5 of us, we were asked to say a little about our work to put at the end of the project.
and finally, my last real update to post is a bit of personal editing work I've done. On my hard drive, I have about 8 or so, different home videos which I don't really do anything with, then occasionally I'll find a song or something and edit them to music, but I've not done this in ages and previously was only using Windows Movie Maker, which is somewhat limited.
I was having kind of a, nostalgic "I miss people crom home" moment xD Which is stupid 'cause I live like 40 miles away from my old house, an hour train journey...but regardless, this weird mood got me productive, so not complaining. Below is about 12 years of old and more recent home video footage and photo's that I edited to 'Of Monsters and Men's song 'King and Lionheart' in Sony Vegas. I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome and how cheery it is :3
but yush, this is all from me o-o You'll probably get a post soonish, seeing as my MAP deadline is midnight tonight, so I'll be animating 7 seconds in flash for that :3 I have a few little side projects going on whilst we don't have deadlines :D
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
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!
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...
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 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
