It's 11:32 and i'm writing an blog :P

Shot and sweet this week as it’s late, I am ill and I am half-way though this essay, which is rapidly becoming too long. Will start off by answering Andy’s comment from last week; I spent my holidays watching way to many Bond films and that rubbed off on me and I ended up creating my Bond villain chair, complete with secret-agent, incompetent henchmen and unfaithful mistress disposal buttons, plus five more for any unexpected situations. I think I scribbled this somewhere in my notes and I even ended up doing some observation sketches from the films, glorified scribbles really. Last week I referred to ‘dodgy bits’ on my chair, this is an extremely technical term and basically means that there are some bits on the chair which I could have probably done better if I had taken my time; this was mainly in areas such as the piping on the cushions, which suddenly gets a bit thick or distorted in places, I think a hole appeared somewhere at some point on the back but I hid it by bashing random buttons and swearing a lot, and if you put the model in wire frame mode there is a mysterious collection of lines on the bottom of the chair, don’t know how they got there but you can’t really see it so I did not worry about it. Somehow I don’t think I am cut out for 3D modelling.

Quick note on this week; I really like Flash, which is a relief as I have been struggling to find something I can actually do. The animation I did on it was dire even by my standards but I wasn’t trying that hard and it was the first time I have used it. I like using the graphics tablets though. The old essay is coming along ok, a bit too well, as it is a monster of a thing and nowhere near done so it will need hacking up a bit to meet the word limit. Also, spending a week being fuelled solely by coffee, pasta, Nurofen and Stanley Kubrick films has done strange things to my head so I have babbled on a bit for a couple of pages about capitalism in Spirited Away, which I am not even sure exists. Anyway, Sergi Esenstein’s The Film Sense has once again proved to be useful when talking about camera angles, montage and the like, which is just as well because it is the only book on the reading list I have finished, I am still attempting to read Richard William’s The Animator’s Survival Kit, Timing for Animation and Anatomy for the Artist all at the same time, as well as reading Brian May’s biography, no relevance to anything I know.

Oh, quick note for Andy, I but the film titles in last weeks blog in italics but when I transferred it from word the computer took it off and I forgot to put it back, just though I would mention it as its something we get marked on.

A Bit About Everything

First week back and I am finding it surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of things; got the Maya project done although I think I might have rushed it a bit as there are some bits where the piping went a bit dodgy so I will probably get marked down for neatness but all in all I am farley pleased with it. Once this essay is out of the way I hope to spend some more time on Maya trying to learn everything and just having a general play.

My character for motion studies has been completely revamped and I can actually draw him reasonably quickly now. Here is the video i talked about last time:


I have done some Photoshop pictures of him over Christmas too and I have tried to continue doing that since I got back but the version of Photoshop that’s on the studio computers is a lot more up-to-date than the one I had at home and all the buttons are in different places, so I will have to sit down one day and figure all of that out. I am really starting to get into the storey for this character and have started to jot down some ideas for scenes and I am finding that going through ideas with Rosie, my partner for this project, is producing some good ideas, although I am a bit worried that I tend to take over on projects like this.

Ideas for the essay are coming thick and fast too; I read Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man the other day and I think I could just write the essay on its relationship with The Iron Giant. I have also watched Porco Rosso and The Incredibals which have helped me to establish some recurring themes and trends in The Iron Giant and Spirited Away, if I have the time I want to try and watch some more of Miyazaki’s films mainly because I have never really been into anime and I am finding the differences between this and western styles really interesting. I have also found some really useful stuff on the internet, including interviews with Bird and Miyazaki, below is a list of them:

http://www.onlineghibli.com/spirited_away/
http://nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0594503/
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=51
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/hayao_miyazaki.shtml
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1569689,00.html
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083348/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129167/
http://www.timeout.com/film/chicago/features/show-feature/3073/cartoon-crusader.html
http://movies.nytimes.com/person/81910/Brad-Bird/filmography
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/features/film/e3i653608aa3a0ea3bba6ec63fa98301e01
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2004-11-02-bird-secret-identity_x.htm
http://www.slate.com/id/2169280/
http://uk.dvd.ign.com/articles/594/594806p1.html
http://www.collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/5920/tcid/1
http://www2.warnerbros.com/corpcomm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Animation
http://www.animationusa.com/wbmore2.html
http://www.xsibase.com/articles.php?detail=67

So now I think I need to go through all the stuff that I have found and see what is the best angle to approach the essay from.

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.