Holiday work

Not sure if we are supposed to be writing these over Christmas; I had promised myself I wasn’t but I am bored (yes I am that sad that writing a blog constitutes as a boredom busting activity). Will start off by apologising for the last two entries which were just a bit of a rant, was having a bit of a bad month or so, nothing to do with the course. Anyhoo, have got past that now.


I have finally got my arse into gear and started doing some more work on my character. Have started off by completely redesigning him, I am happy with his new look but it takes me about half an hour to draw him so I might need to simplify him a tad. I have also attempted to build a plastercene/modelling clay bust of the character, I was using plasterscene that was left over from a project I did last year so I had a pretty good range of colours and a decent amount of the stuff. Problem was that its over a year old and has been sat up in my loft which I don’t think it agreed with as it was extremely tough and when it finally started to get soft it just turned to goop. As a result my model is really just a glorified blob and I can only really use it as a drawing aid but I have done an animated turn-around of it, which I will try and remember to post at some point. I have also done a couple of walks for my character but I want to line test tem to see if they work before I take it any further.


The good ole chair is also being tweaked although I think that I am being a bit too ambitious with my design after my previous experiences with Maya but I’m hoping to get back to Falmouth early so I can spend a couple of days swearing at the computer.


Ooo, just remembered I put something in about the diving board animation in my last post. That is now done; well it was done two/three weeks ago. The bit I put all the work into did not really work at all and the bit I rushed because I was tired and wanted to go home worked fine, maybe I should put less consideration into my animation and just scrawl it down instead and hope it works, because most of the time those are the bits that work the best. Hopefully if I put some more in-betweens into it, it will smooth everything out a bit.

Moan, moan, moan

A bit happier today after yesterdays moan, still can not really remember anything about Maya, although I was farley pleased with my chair and enjoyed stretching it about, the one I have at the moment dose not bare any relation to my drawing so I think I am going to have to start again from scratch but at the rate I am going it might actually be quicker to build one.

Have also finished re-doing the animation in the diving board exercise, I have put a lot of effort into trying to get a good walk for the character since we are starting to do that in motion studies, although I think I have probably just ripped off one of the sequences from The Animator’s Survival Kit. I also think that I rushed the ending a bit but I shall see what it looks like when I line test it. The inking still needs to be done on it so that might not happen till after Christmas. Have not really got very fare in developing a walk for my character, in fact I have not got anywhere; suffering a bit of a burn-out from the last project and a bit disheartened by the marks from the character sheet, its just starting to sink in now that yesterday’s presentation is out of the way. I did not think that I had done amazingly but at the same time I did not think there where any huge mistakes. Haven’t got any feed-back on what I did so wrong or how I can improve and that seems to be the general consensus amongst people that I have talked too. Ho-hum, it won’t draw itself so I better start doing something.

Sorry, moaning again, thought I said I was happier! To end on a more up-beat tone I am looking forward to the weight thing tomorrow, hopefully it will give me the kick-start I need to do these character sheets.

My very very late entry (oops) :P

Sorry this is a bit late this week, the old blog took the backseat whilst Dan and I frantically tried to put together our presentation. Difficult to know how well it went but I think in the course of doing this project I have successfully lost any passion that I had for Monkey Dust, hope that didn’t show in the presentation but it probably did.

Anyway, in response to Andy’s comments from last week: the acting workshop was ‘different’, it has helped to certain degree, especially when we where starting to do the character walks last week. Although some of the stuff we did towards the end did not seem to relate much to movement but you never know, it could come in useful, trying to keep an open mind and all that.

Maya still succeeds in confusing me and leaving me swearing at the computer, I am fine in the lessons but the moment I try and do anything myself everything I have learned goes completely out of the window and buttons that did things in the lessons mysteriously stop working or acquire different functions that often have disastrous consequences; I have lost count of the number of times I have turned my so called chair into a shapeless blob. Perhaps some kind of handout with all of Maya’s key dooblybangs on would solve my chair melting dilemma, especially if we are expected to create our own masterpiece over Christmas. Having said that the only time I will be able to use Maya will be in what remains of this week and the two or three days before the deadline when I get back from my holidays since my computer does not have Maya on it and it would most likely implode if I tried to put it on it; I have enough problems with word.

Sorry, having a bit of a rant. I’m off for a beer and a burger to calm the nerves.

Bradford and Things

I have spent all afternoon watching MonkeyDust so I’m sorry if this week’s blog is a bit vague. Really enjoyed the visit to Bradford; I found it interesting and useful to see such a wide range of animation styles and techniques. Two films that really stood out for me where Rune Christensen’s ‘Down The Road’ and Vincent Paronnaud’s and Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persopolis’ (sorry I don’t think any of the stuff on this link is subtitled). I thought that both had really good storylines and that has got me looking forward to the scriptwriting module but what I really liked in the films was the use of ‘economy of style’. I did not realise that what appears to be simple animation could be so effective and I want to try and adapt the drawing style from the films for my own character.

Moving on to this week: I found yesterdays session useful but a bit confusing; my chair looked OK apart from its rather hastily added legs and I couldn’t get the cushion propped up so it just sat on the chair and looked a bit boring, I suppose that I will become more comfortable with Maya the more I use it. Hopefully, if I get time, I will be able to practice more with it on Friday although my life does seem to be revolving around the exhibition project at the moment.

Not too sure what I think about tomorrow’s acting thing; I can see how it’s going to be useful to us but I do not think I am going to be confident enough to do it properly. Having said that everyone is most likely to be feeling the same and the guy doing it is a professional. I will probably write something about it tomorrow or over the weekend.

The Ball Task

Apologies for not getting the pictures of the animation I talked about last week; they took a lot longer to ink in than I thought it would. Anyway, they are in this week’s entry, although I think most people saw it on Tuesday:
I put in these two frames from last weeks task because they are just two of the drawings that I am most pleased with. Overall the whole thing worked pretty well, especially the walk, which surprised me as I thought I would just end up with a dodgy looking shuffle. My attempt to use more subtle stretch and squash backfired and ended up with hardly any anticipation at all. There was also a bit where I tried to make the character spin round which didn’t work at all but nobody seemed to notice it, so it might just be one of those things that you see if you no its there.

In this week’s task, the one with the ball, I experimented with using a much more sketchy animation style:

Admittedly this was because I was in a rush and didn’t want to spend all week animating it like I did with the last task. Personally I don’t think that the finished product looks that different but it is a good way to save time and it might become more noticeable with more complex characters and actions. I am really pleased with how this task turned out, I especially like a bit where one of the characters falls over and the other laughs at them. Once again I have been attempting to get the hang of stretch and squash; I have had a quick look at the finished sequence and think that I might be closer to getting it right his time but I’ll see what Andy says when he sees it.

Andy's Comment

Andy did try and comment on my blog last week but I’d somehow blocked him from doing that, so here is his comment and my response:

Andy: “Fantasia is a flawed film, but I'm glad you've begun to appreciate some of the technical mastery of the animators in that studio. I'd be interested on your thoughts of how you progressed in your understanding of animation in the two tasks you did on Tuesday. Svankmajer is a fascinating animator. If you like the darkness of his films you may also enjoy the Quay Brothers. Some good thoughts in your blog, keep it up.”

Right… the two tasks last week where my fist proper attempt at 2D animation, everything I have done up to this point has been 3D, so I was a bit daunted by it. However, I have had a quick flick through Richard William’s The Animator’s Survival Kit so I had a rough idea of what I was doing. In the first task, with the heavy character, I put a lot of work into the anticipation of the jump and was reasonably happy with the result, although I did loose the proportions of the figure a bit. The jump was not very good as it just seemed that the character was gliding through the air and the fall was too slow. I was able to correct the fall by editing out some of the drawings. With the landing I had similar problems as I did with the anticipation; where the figure became too distorted.

For the second task I tried to correct the problems with the jump by adjusting the arc and using fewer drawings, this did improve things but I still don’t feel that there right and I messed up the vibrations in the board; instead of moving with the character during the anticipation it just started vibrating when they jumped.

This week I had the advantage of having seen Fantasia and have tried to use much more subtle ‘stretch and squash’. It’s hard to gauge at this point how effectively I have done this as the animation is still a work in progress; but there are some bits that I am quite happy with as well as other bits that I am not too pleased with and I am begging to get the feeling that I might have been a bit over ambitious with this task. If I can I will try and scan some frames from it tomorrow.

I did some research on the Quay brothers last year, I have not had a chance to look at any of their work this week but I remember liking a lot of their work and being impressed by the their lighting techniques, especially in Nocturna Articificialia (1979), couldn’t find this on the internet but there are some interesting interviews. I will hopefully get a chance to pop into the library at some point to see if I can find some of their films.

Continuing From Yesturday

Continuing from where I left off yesterday but moving on from Fantasia. I have started to really get into the idea of showing movement in animation; have just ordered Timing for Animation. Quite liked the rotoscoping that was used in Fleischer’s Betty Boop’s Snow White, I thought that it achieved a really fluid and natural movement, which I suppose it would considering it was taken from real life. Not sure what opportunities I will have to experiment with something like this, although I imagine its not hard to film something and then put it into a computer programme.

I also liked the animation in the Svankmajer piece, Jabberwocky is not one of my favourites in terms of something to watch but I think that the animation is excellent. Two of my favourites are Dimensions of a Dialogue and Picnic With Weismann (1969). In both of these I like the sinister feel as well as the way that Svankmajer anthropomorphises everyday objects and makes them believable characters. The clay work in Dimensions of a Dialogue is also really good.

Fantasia

Just got back from the studio, still a bit spaced out after watching Fantasia, and thought I would do this. Never really been a Disney fan; find most of the films too soppy but over the last week or so I have gained more of an appreciation for the technical aspect of the films especially after watching Fantasia and attempting to do the animation yesterday. I definitely want to look further into the work of Art Babbit and Preston Blair; I thought the scene with the hippo dancing had a really good sense of weight as well as how well the animation was synced with the soundtrack throughout the entire film. Other scenes from the film that I liked where the way that the reflection of the flowers in the water where captured and how their movement resembled dancers. I especially liked the varying textures, such as the glossy quality of the snowflakes and the contrast between the lava and the water in the dinosaur bit. Got more stuff I want to say on this but a bit rushed at the moment so will try and do it tomorrow.

Motion Studies

Got lots of stuff to work on after motion studies yesterday:

need to start using more confident lines as more drawings are looking a bit hesitent and overworked - might try some more contour drawings to develop this
also want to practice doing some 360 turnarounds - got a feeling that my flatmates may have to be roped into posing for that.

Testing

Just testing that this works and to give general update of whats going on

still reading Eisenstein's 'The Film Sense' a bit confusing in places but i'm getting some useful info out of it
trying to develop my sketches for motion studies; moving away from my character and focusing more on movement and experimenting with differant materials