Synthesis.

For the brief for our Synthesis project we were asked to create a trailer/sting for our upcoming Animation event, AniMaidstone. The requirements were that it incorporated elements of Maidstone and the University and that it was to be between 6-8 seconds long.

I based my sting on the structure of a town…. (cont?)

 

The Individual Voice (Finally!)

Okay, so it’s taken a stupidly long time for me to get this one done, but I finally did it a couple of weeks ago and i’ve only just had the chance to update my blog with it. This is my fifteen second segment of our group project on which I collaborated with fellow animators Ross & Sophie.

I’m not entirely happy with the end product and I will definitely be re-doing it in order to improve my understanding of timing, keyframes and the concept of “in-betweens” in the near future.




 

Synthesis & A Visit From Lizzie Oxby.

We came back to animation yesterday after finishing our 5-week electives and we were introduced to our new project Synthesis. The brief stated that we were required to design a trailer/sting for the university’s upcoming animation festival AniMaidstone and it was to be approximately 6-8 seconds long. This was to be done using the wording ‘UCA Maidstone Animation Arts’ and we were to take into consideration how animation related to the college, the town or to the people and students living in and around it.

Today we were given a talk by animator and director Lizzie Oxby who showed us her work in relation to the project. The first film she showed us was Extn. 21 which loosely followed a narrative about a man who longed to be heard. I found that it was still quite abstract despite having a story to it, but I liked the visual style and the combined techniques of live action with stop-motion worked very well together.  The second film was The Seawatchers which was originally meant to be a music video commissioned by an Icelandic band. Tthe only requirements given to prompt a narrative idea were ‘broken teeth’ and ‘fog’, but the band split up before completion and the video was never aired. Oxby used the footage to make it into a short film about unrequited love across the sea instead and I thought it held the same visual appeal as her first film which drew me to her work.

Both of Oxby’s films display a good understanding of mise-en-scene and in my opinion the visual language used is excellent. I particularly enjoyed Extn. 21 because I thought the attention-to-detail of the sets and props added a certain amount of charm to the film. She also showed us a few examples of non-narrative films by various animators and filmmakers that she thought would help us when looking at the brief for our project, most of which we had already seen in Visual Theory lectures. I found the seminar interesting and I am keen to experiment with similar techniques within my own work in the future in order to test personal boundaries and put myself outside of my comfort zone.

Clips of both of the films mentioned can be found on Lizzie’s profile on Sherbet’s website (animation production company):

http://www.sherbet.co.uk/directors/lizzieOxby/

 

Supporting Studies: Last Of The Term!

To round off all of our drawing exercises for the term, we finished today with a few more exercises concerning form and emotion. Out of all of the sessions we have had so far, I personally felt that I successfully completed more drawings than in any of the others and I also saw an improvement in my existing drawing skills.

We started off drawing basic poses using the basic structure of the body as we had done in previous sessions, again taking note of the positioning of the angles and joints. Then we built on top of the skeletal stickmen-like figures with more lines and the curves of the rest of the body.

Next we were asked to draw figures in a series of exercises that brought us outside of our comfort zone a little bit. These exercises were: not taking our pencil off the paper (1), drawing whilst not looking at the paper (2), carefully studying the pose then closing our eyes and drawing it from memory (3), drawing with the opposite hand to our dominant one (4) and drawing the figure upside-down (5). Despite feeling a little frustrated with the drawings not turning out perfect, I found that I enjoyed doing these exercises as it was a challenge and it altered my thought process when studying figures.

( 1 of 5 – REMAINING IMAGES NEED SCANNING)

After this, we drew figures walking in a circle whilst portraying a certain emotion in their gait and the way they held themselves when walking. The effect of this was similar to drawing a walk cycle except we explored the figure from a much broader range of angles and positions. I found staying within the physical curve of the circle difficult in this exercise and my figures look like they are floating in space or just standing around. We then drew a figure posed, lit only by a dim lamp so that we could pick out the darkest bits of shadow and represent the form from those lines alone.

The final two exercises were the ones I enjoyed most as we were asked to be quite expressive with our line and I felt I put a lot of character into the drawings. We were asked to draw a figure yet again, but this time using three different kinds of line with emotions in them, these being optimistic, aggressive and confused. Lastly, we chose one sketch from the three and created a storyboard from them – I chose aggressive as I felt it had the most character.

 

Space Within Frame.

Another lecture and this time we discussed how animation can use the best of space to create an atmosphere for characters and objects to react to and to better understand this idea, we were shown various examples of films that demonstrated it

‘Manipulation’ by Daniel Greaves was a very simple example in which he used a drawn character on plain white paper with the addition of a puddle of red paint and the physical hand of the ‘creator’ to give the sense of interaction e.g. poking him, pushing him, picking him up etc.

Another example we were shown was ‘Family Ties: Dreams And Desires’ by Joanna Quinn which used only drawn animation and line, but as opposed to using a fixed shot and making use of the space within that one shot it played with the character’s viewpoint using a hand held camera during the events of a wedding day – a good example of the use of a realistic camera shot would be where the character decides she wants to use tracking and a wedding guest in a wheelchair is used as a device for creating this shot (as shown in the clip from the animation below).

 

Studio AKA.

Grant Orchard of London-based animation house Studio AKA (http://www.studioaka.co.uk/) visited our class and gave us a very interesting talk about their company. He played us a showreel which consisted of a handful of their work such as adverts for Lloyds TSB and an various idents created for a number of companies.  He paused it at certain points to explain which processes went into the films and how an animation company works differently to how an independent animator would which I found very helpful as it gave us an insight into the industry.

My favourite film from the showreel we were shown was an advert they made for the National Lottery which Grant referred to as The Big Win. I had seen the studio’s Lloyd’s TSB adverts on television before Grant came in for a talk and I remember thinking that the visual style was quite unique, so it wasn’t a surprise to see the same visual identity in this advert.

I found Grant’s talk very enlightening and it was a joy to have seen such a large variety of amazing work. Check out this mini showreel on YouTube for just a bitesize chunk of what their portfolio consists of.

 

Character Design & Development.

I’ve never been particularly great at maintaining blogs or diaries so it’s not a surprise that I haven’t posted an entry in quite a while. Oops! :X

So I’ve been discovering so far that most of the work we do is still quite experimental and really does indicate that I’m still finding my feet. I’ve always been a little bit of a perfectionist and I find it quite difficult to feel positive about pieces I don’t like so much, but I’m slowly learning that it’s part of improving my skills. We have four days that we attend class and each day consists of a different area of the course – Fridays have been quite a challenge as they’re made up of drawing exercises, some of which had to be done under pressure and within the space of only one minute, but one of these exercises that I enjoyed the most was designing our own character. We drew up initial ideas for our characters then we drew up a character sheet along with giving them a back story. We then gave it to another person so they could draw their own version with improvements and finally, we had to draw a new version of our character taking on board the changes that had been made. During another session in the studio, Phillip Warner came in to teach us a little bit about character design and using expression. We were asked to draw our character with various facial expressions and emotions. As well as experimenting with emotion, I also decided to alter my character design slightly as I felt like he was missing something and I was much happier with the end result.

Below are the drawings I produced from both of these exercises. The top 3 are my initial character design, the alternative version drawn by my classmate Steve, then my final improved version. The bottom 3 are examples of facial expressions I drew for my character Pixel.