The scanner is working!

I have finally got the scanner up and running so this week I have all the pictures that I promised plus a video!

Which brings me round nicely to the stop motion workshop as the video is of my attempt at lip sync that I talked about last week, although the sound dosn't seem to want to work. My character is the pink thing on the left. If I can I will try to get the video of the stuff that I did this week too, which were ‘head turns’ and ‘body bends’. I liked working with the armatures, although it is early days I am finding using these puppets the most enjoyable and rewarding form of animation that I have tried so far. The stuff I did this week was O.K. although I think I was more concerned with giving the armature character than actually getting realistic movement.




Mondays session has also rekindled my interest in my shelved stop motion project, I am yet to make any attempts at doing any new work for it but I am starting to mull over things again and I have included one of the few sketches that I was happy with, which is of the main character.

This week has also been spent attempting to build the ‘spaceship’ that I designed over the summer. I decided that it might be a good idea to try and build it in Maya as it is quite a simple shape and it would be a right pain to animate in 2D. From what I have done so far things are going O.K., there are a couple of iffy bits, which I’m not too worried about as my plan is to export any animation to flash and draw over it but it would be quite nice to get it right. Next week I’ll try and put in some screen shots of it but for now you shall have to content yourself with a picture of my Bruce Willis inspired astronaut.

And finally, onto the pitch project: Ben is working on backgrounds and Rosie is bulking out the script, I have been working on some more ideas for how the whole thing could work, my new job is character design, I have done some sketches but the character designs are by no means finished and are constantly being tweaked so the final thing could look very different.

Sorry I forgot to scan my summer stuff

Not an awful lot new has happened this week, so this may be a bit short… and I still have not scanned the stuff that I did over the summer, for which I apologies.

As I have said not much new has really happened, we are still trying to find a style to use on the pitch project. I have tried out a couple of ideas but they don’t seem quite right. That said we have been experimenting with different voiceover styles and the results of that have given me some ideas so I will see where that takes me.

I’m really enjoying the stop-motion stuff; we tried animating our characters to the chart things that we did last week. Mine was a bit out, which I think is because I am used to doing it on a computer where you can instantly see if it is right our wrong. It was also a bit strange animating without the sound track. The other problem I found was that where I was physically remodeling the head every time it moved as opposed to using an interchangeable mouth, I got a sort of ripple effect, which was a bit off-putting.

Well that’s about it really, I’m hoping that by next week I will have a better idea of what we are doing on the pitch project and I can tell you about that.

Maya shall not beat me... again

Quite a lot has happened since last week, what with the start of the Exeter project and all the other workshops and what not.

First things first, the stop motion sessions, which I am really glad we are doing, although we have only done two sessions and am finding it very useful. At the moment I am still interpreting the audio track for lip sync, which hopefully shouldn’t be too much trouble as I did a fair bit of that last year. I am a bit worried about animating my model, as it’s not that movable and will probably just fall apart as I haven’t made any separate mouths, but we shall see.

The pitch project, which I am doing with Ben and Rosie, is going O.K.. We are using bloopers from student’s essays as our inspiration. I think if we approach it the right way we will be able to come up with something quite good but it’s a fine line between getting it wrong and right in terms of how we interpret the text so that the animation brings something extra to the mix.

My audio project is almost done, I just need to get it all into Audition and have a play. I haven’t really recorded the sound with a specific plot in mind but I have tried to record unusual noises and I’m going to try and distort them a bit so I will hopefully end up with a completely bonkers track.

Finally, the Exeter Project, which I think, I might not be doing for the time being as I have defected to the Maya stuff. That’s right Maya! Whilst not yet a complete convert I did try and be good and do the Internet tutorials over the summer and I am now determined not to let it beat me… again.

My Summer

So once again I return to the good old blog, hurrah! Actually in a sort of strange way I have missed it over the summer, it’s like being reunited with an old friend.

Well then, what have I been up to over the summer?

Just after we broke up I was full of wonderful plans for my stop motion epic, which I am still not going to say what it is, and for a while that was chugging along nicely but as I was trying to adapt a book which had already been converted into a film I found it increasingly difficult to come up with anything original. Also, I think I was just a smidgen over ambitious; taking on an entire book. Anyway to cut a long story short I ran out of inspiration and chucked it all into a corner in disgust. That said, now I have had time to cool off I find myself wanting to return to it again so all may not be lost just quite yet.

My second little project was going to be a bit of a political rant about this year’s Olympics, featuring a character that is forced to leave his home for the big city after his house is crushed by a falling Olympic stadium (subtle). After that it descended into a range of bizarre drink inspired events featuring, among other things, evil rickshaw gangs and strange pointy things that sold handbags. This did not progress much further than a couple of sketches as the plot wasn’t going anywhere. Still, I would like to think that one or two ideas could be plucked out and used for other things.

My final project came to me on a whim when I was watching Armageddon, (which was painful to watch) and I thought what would happen if Bruce Willis and co had failed to blow up the big nasty asteroid, resulting in Earth being destroyed leaving the failed heroes floating around in space. So I came up with my Bruce Willis hybrid character who is stuck in a space ship when Earth is destroyed and left all on his lonesome. I haven’t quite worked out how the story will progress beyond this point but I do have a pretty finalised character design and I got a bit carried away designing his spaceship and have done cross-sections of it and other sad things like that. I haven’t got round to rigging up my scanner yet so next week I will try to post some pictures.