Animation idea and Pitch of idea

My idea is to animate the different seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter in first person similar to the animation above, I love its use of colour and its transition for scene to scene its very good with perspectives and depicting the environments to the point where you can make out where the characters are.

For my pitch people considered the idea to be very well thought out and great as an idea but I need to think about how I am going to depict the seasons with in each scene and the sound I will use. People asked why I chose to do this for my idea, I would say because I like to experiment and this is a new challenge for me which I would like to work with, something I would like to experiment with and get out of my comfort zone because I believe I will never become a better animation if I don't work with different methods, I don't want to become one dimensional as an animator.

This my rational with my proposed idea listing sources and explaining my idea, I am the only person working on this project and I will be looking at many visual animations and concepts to help further the progress of my idea. Personally I don't want to work with anyone because I am the only who understands my current idea and I personally know how I want to execute it.

Planning 2

 This timetable is a table I have created to help Juggle my work load because I find taking things step by step to be very useful and manageable when it comes to working a set of massive projects, so far it has worked very well and I am hoping to continue working like this to help keep my self on top of my work load.

This another plan which I have created for my Extended Practice project to stay on track with my concept work up to my final out come, I am adding the festivals I plan to enter according to the submission date along side a rough estimation of how long it will take to work on my final animation.

Planning

I have have set my self particular days to be working on Extended practice, Thursdays and Fridays. The structure for my whole week is revolved around context of practice Monday to Friday but only on mornings for Thursday and Friday and the rest is dedicated for extended practice and the weekend is personal PPP3 every think is balanced i can also dedicate my time to all three projects.

    

Animex festival

http://animex.tees.ac.uk/student_awards.cfm

This is another animation festival which fits the description in relation to the length of my animation, for this animation I am not limited by the time frame of my animation because this brief excepts anything. I am thinking about entering this competition but I am very sceptical because the information provided by Animex is not very specific and could be considered to be too vague.

https://filmfreeway.com/festival/AnimexAwards?utm_campaign=Submission+Button&utm_medium=External&utm_source=Submission+Button

Sicaf 2016 animation festival

http://sicaf.org/eng/?page_id=4723

This is a Korean animation festival which allows free entery from October 24, 2016 - December 30, 2016 it allows me to submit an animation which is 1 min - 10 mins. It will be exciting for me to have my work shown on the other side of the world, especially in Korea because I want my pieces to communicate with people around the world.

entry form :

http://sicaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SSFF-EntryForm_2017.pdf

Finding festival or competition to enter

http://www.animation-festivals.com/animation-festivals-free-to-submit/

I have been looking to enter my potential animation into, I found this site which lists many different animations festivals worldwide, my objective is to look through a few of them and narrow my juices down to a few. The animation I am creating is going to be a 1min long so I need to make sure that I pick a festival which fits this description.

Lil fuchs

http://www.lilfuchs.com

Adam Fuchs also known as Lil Fuchs is an animator/freelance professional who works on many different animations for various clients, he has done work for many different musicians and adultswim. He is responsible for the work of zodiacshit a lot of the his work features a reacquiring theme/pattern of working on a multicoloured backgrounds and very visually expressive imagery in motion. I will be using his site a primary research to build an understanding of is work because I want to apply similar techniques to my own work, an approach will need to be developed not really sure what my intentions are at the moment.

 

Zodiac shit

The inspirational piece which has trigged my idea is flying lotuses zodiac shit because it is very experimental with its colours and style. I like the transition from one image to another and the way in which they connect, the narrative is all about the months of the Chinese zodiac. I am inspired to do my own piece which follows this them in relation to months but uses colours and women to communicate feeling almost similar to inside out and how the characters represent emotion based on colour. I want my characters to represent emotion and colour, the theme for now is to develop 12 different characters for each month with a representation of different colours.

   

Reason for not using animated text

Originally I intended to use animate text with in our group animation but I decided to disregard this idea. The reason for disregarding this Idea was because I felt that it didn't work with this animation because I feel that the animation it self would not suit any style of font, I think that there would be too many different style involved if I was to add moving text with in each scene, I just could not picture the right font for this animation and the deadline, I also would have the hassle of having to sync each word to what is being said with in each scene which would take sometime, plus the deadline was too close for me to be working on these features. I would say that this has effected the animation because we now have long sentences in a standard font which look very week in communication the importance of what is being said because they can hardly be scene and the colouring for the text is very flat.

If I was to do this again I would say that the font would be hand drawn because I think that my style of animation would make it flow better based on my style being line drawing and I would have preferred if the text would slide in because what we have now doesn't move, it does not look very good because it does not do the animation any justice just being still. 

Evaluation

Over the course of this project we focused on creating a documentary which depicted a sense of documentation of a truthful event, which was where we decided to talk about the death of a family member relating to one of my partners. Personally over all I think this project went partly well, but has been disappointing in how it was planned out.

This was positive in the sense that we managed to sort out our scenes and was able to create a finished animation. The main problem which dampened the project the bad organisation and miscommunication with in our group we didn't inform each often of our progress and Molly one of my partners failed to attend set meeting revolved around the issue of our progress we never saw her as often as we should have which meant our group was not organised well enough. A lot of work by Molly was handed to both me and James, they did not feature any of these scenes created by me which slowed the progress of our work because the animated scenes were not shared well between everyone with in the group. Both me and my partner James ended up working on our own bits individually before combining both my scenery and his characters. Generally, Communication slowed down our progress because we did not have enough communication between us all even though we use social media we did not stay in touch regularly. Me and James waited a very long time for Molly to finish her scene very close to the deadline.

For this project we got a lot of inspiration for our animation from books and other documented animations which were shown to us by our tutors and helped in spire our animated ideas even further by giving us an understanding into what communicates well with a target audience e.g. colours, style. I also looked at one of my very own favourite artists called R.Kikuo Johnson reason being that his art was very simplistic and effective in its representation of human characters in making them look appealing both colours and style this was to help with both characters and environment.

Over all I would say that the project went well generally but the was negatively effected by the lack of communication with I myself, Molly and James, if I was to do this project again, I would say that I would have decided on picking partners who I knew that I would get on with well and people I would be able to trust with their side of the project. One of the things I would focus on is the social media side of communicating, even though we formed a group on Facebook the communication on that was not regular so I would say that better organisation of social media would be need to help improve our experience of working with each other because we lacking in communication skill based on this area.

The main thing I can take away from this brief is that I have worked as part of a team experienced what is like to bring multiple styles to create one animated piece. I have also improved my animating skills even more because I learned to use more new tools like the Puppet Tool in After-effects which I never knew existed in. I have developed an understanding of what styles work well with one another and how to make an animation appeal to a specific audience through visuals. Things I would say that I would need to learn from this overall experience is to have better communication with my partners mainly because we spent too much time apart and did not talk about our work much, another problem was our drawing styles which were said to not work well with one other, we managed to get them working with one another but majority of this was spent sorting out making sure our drawings styles worked well for the final outcome of our work.

I was very sceptical about working in a collaborative group for this brief, my idea was to work on my own animation and I was not too keen on who I would be paired. I slowly started to warm to the idea the more the project went on and would now say that is a great experience because it has developed both my communication and has made me in to a better animator because I have now developed not just the skill to animate but the ability to share ideas and work alongside others. Personally I didn't feel comfortable with the story based on family deaths, I think it could have been based on something else reason being that I would say this is a common thing people talk about when giving a family documentary and the idea that we were aiming this animation at young children seemed a bit depressing for a child. I didn't think that representing this idea in a childlike style would take any child’s mind of the idea of death as an issue, I would say it was too much of a sad issue to pitch to children as a document.

Things I would personally critique on the final animation is the colour of the text and how it was presented, it is very basic in its appearance and the way the character’s work well but could interact better with the background, I would say that I would have made the characters e.g. prints when they walked or just made them look like they work involved with the scenery maybe through the style which they were presented and the colours could have been a bit darker. I think, there are not enough movements in characters, they seem very rigid in how they move on screen.

I am planning to work with the puppet pin tool a lot more in the future, personally I think I need to practice more with After-effects so I am able to use it a lot more fluently because during this project I was still learning new skills whilst still working which slowed down the progress I was making with my animated work, so I plan to prefect this for my future project through watching tutorials using After-effects over the summer to help build my animated work skills.      

                

        

Experimenting

during this project I personally think there was not enough experimenting done by me, I would say that I didn't do as much as I should have because I was impatient and just wanted to get on with the practical work I my self can't stand it went process and production takes too long. I am now learning to plan my work properly and take time to experiment before going into production, this is something I should have been doing during this project because it could have resulted in us coming up with a better idea that which could have been better than the one idea we now have. The design work is was said by tutors to be well executed but at times I had problems with animating my drawing style because it didn't move very well, I personally wanted to experiment with traditional animation and this to the animation it self but this became complicated because of my style being different to the intended style for the group animation which both Molly and James intended on.

 
I was using Flying Lotus's animated music video for my original idea because I wanted all the features of my animation to flow and communicated the narration through its change and movement, sadly my group had a different idea.

If I was to do this again I would use tradition animation like this because I think that an animation like this is clean in how it moves and and the colour used works very well, I would have rather had each scene of our animation pop in one after the other.

I personally don't like how the style for our animation has turned out because I prefer if it was clean and sharp in its appearance not blurry and too child like because I personally like my animated characters to have form, these characters are too smudged and simplistic.  

Outcome of final animation

Today we finally finished our animation, I feel that our organisation was left too late and at the last minute we decided to finish our animation, we have had many complications during the making of this project and I feel that out of a group of three, only two of us were doing most of the work. The reason for me saying so is because Molly our extra partner was not around for a lot of our group meetings and did not keep in contact as regular a she should have and another problem was the fact that we created a social media group for us all and didn't use it as much as we intended to. This effected our final animation because sections of the final animation were split between us each and we didn't communicate enough to find out how each of us were progressing during the production or even met up to see if the work that was being done was good enough, this alone resulted in scenes being created in correctly.

Overly the out come of this project has been well executed because we have accomplished what we have set out to do in making the animation look child like and appeal to little children which is a positive, but my negative would be that we should have chosen a story which was not too depressing for children because I don't think children would really want to hear about death as a tragedy.

My improvements for the final animation would be to change the story to something more suitable for children something soft and probably funny in its narrative, I personally think the footage is a bit blurry and the designs of the characters aren't too good because they look too simple in their appearance e.g. I would make the hands look more like hands rather than smudges or blurs.

(The video is too big to fit on this page so it will just be submitted separately in a folder)

    

Progress

to day we talked through the plan for weeks a head to do with our progress and targets. We did this to understand where in terms of progress but to also highlight the importance our roles in order for us to complete this project well. Doing this made us move forward with our work because it got us to understand what needed to be done in order to move on and we talked about what we need to do for our roles individually which helped give each of use a focus and goal when working on this brief. This went well because we found out that all of us were on target and that the work was being done, we found out that we should be finished in a weeks time, weeks before the deadline. My future improvement for this type of collaborative in the future is to make sure that all team members of my team keep in contact even if we are not having a meeting and will make sure that we set up a form of communication other than social media in order to stay in contact.

Home scene

I worked on developing the first scene of my animated backgrounds which is of a house. Spent half an hour making sure every bit of movements was fluent with in the scene, reason being because this scene needed to be smooth along with with the others because I want them all to be running at a similar paste. Doing this has made the project move forward because I have allowed my self to polish my scenes in order to improve the motion for the final animation so it runs a lot smooth as a piece when its finally finished.This task went well because I was able to produce an animated scene which me, my teams and my tutors were happy with as a finished animated scene, plus the motion was smooth and worked how I planned it to.

Final crit

To day I had my final crit, I provided samples of work I had done over the course of these few weeks along with my team mates to show our development. Our progression was a lot better than our last meeting, I have sorted out all my scenes and have tested them along side my partners character animation to check if they worked well with the background and the styles of both the background and characters didn't clash.

The reason for this crit was to check our progress to see whether it was near being finished, unfortunately we were not yet finished because the characters still needed to be finished animating. The reason for the characters needing to work with the scenes is because the scenes are different in style, we were suggested to test both the characters and scenes together because we were told that the styles would clash and might not work well with one another, to day everything was cleared up  and we found out that issue was resolved because our animation was liked by many, no feedbacks were suggested which means we are on the right track with our work.

Doing this final crit has made the work load move forward even more because it has provided us with knowledge of where we were with our work in progress and but mainly it was an opportunity to receive feedback in order to improve our work. This moved us in the right direction because we were able to get feedback from and an audience who would physically tell us whether everything was right and whether we were heading in the right direction. My scenes were said to be smooth in their motion which was a bonus for me and meant we could move on to partnering the characters with the scenery which was the next large step to finishing the animation we set out to produce, its said by our tutors to be looking good, there were no faults.

It went well because we received positive comments all around from everyone with in the crit, no improvements were suggested which meant we were on the right track and we were given a few tips on how to make it even better with a few small touches which are optional to add.

Puppet tool

To day I have been working with the puppet tool to add secondary motion to my animated background scenes for our animation and watched a tutorial whilst doing so to help me with understanding how to use the tool better.

The reason for watching this tutorials was to help me understand the puppet tool a lot better because I need the puppet tool to help me with secondary motion and applied this method to my animated scenes because they looked very rigged and static in their movement, reason being they had only one way of moving.

This made the project move forward because it provided  my animation with the secondary motion needed to improve my scenes for the animations but also provided me with a new skill which I have been wanting to learn in AfterEffects for a very long which I can now apply to my current applied animation work. I can now use this to improve each and every scene of my animations so that they all look lively and realistic with secondary motion.

I have learnt how to add both secondary motion and a moving a effect to my animation all thanks to the tutorial provided above. This tutorial was very useful because it guided me carefully through the methods on how to use the puppet tool and made me understand each section step for step explaining each function the tool provides to get me used to its capabilities before moving on, before using this tutorial I did not know what the puppet tool was. I watched this tutorial to help me improve my animation skills in AfterEffects because I haven't fully grasped the package yet and their were many things I still need to learn in order to get better, the puppet tool was one of them.

This went well because I managed to get a few of my scenes completed with secondary motion which my team members were very impressed with based on the content in relation to the story and the characters because the colours communicated the sadness with in the story of the animation.

In the future I will keep practising with the puppet tool to make sure I understand how to use the tool in the future to help make my animations look more professional in the way they move on screen.    







    

Progression review

To day we had a progress review on our work with our Tutors, just to see where we were in terms of progress on with our group animation for applied which turned out to be disappointing in terms of progress.

We received this tutorial to check up on our progress just to see how far I had progressed with my project and whether not I was functioning well with my role along side my team members. Reason for the disappointment is because it turned out that me and my team were not functioning well as a team which was evident in the work I produced  because our animated work does not work well together and the amount of work produced is low based on our schedule,we are be schedule and our animated styles are far too different to work together for our final animation.

The group issue has affected work and slowed down our progress, we are not meeting our set targets or goals because the issue with our team has prevented us from being able to produce more work, no one knows what each others work looks like and we have not been able to critique each others animated pieces so we can understand where we are in terms of of progression, I would say this is all down to the lack of communication or in other words bad communication skills.

This meeting did not go very well because our over all feedback was very negative and our work progression was poor and behind schedule, my backgrounds for the animation were said to be too bright in contrast to the characters and the plot of the story which is supposed to be very sad and emotional.

In order to improve my work for the future in the recompensing weeks of this project we will need to arrange meetings to keep each other updated with each others works so we all know where we stand with our design and whether we are on track for finishing our animation. Keeping in contact is key so will create a group for project and make sure to message each other regularly. I will need to run more tests with my background work to find a style which work with both the characters and the story.        

Summative Evaluation

Over the course of this project I myself have been working with both illustration and animation work. First module I focused on illustrating most of my work for the personal practice brief because I felt this was the best way to help develop the weak areas of my drawing skills that I needed to improve on by encouraging me to produce something that was exceptional in its design. Then for the collaborative work I worked with my chosen group to formulate an idea together where we could all animate, our chosen brief was dazed and Confused which involved creating four individual animations which would later come together to make one show reel.

The reason for focusing on illustration in the first module was to help build my drawings but to also help me develop a style of drawing I could be satisfied with for animating, reason being because I have not been happy with my drawing style for sometime and felt when I traditionally animated that it looked poor in its presentation because of its roughness which I wanted to improve my self by practising regularly. This is why I entered briefs like Infected by Art was to help develop my art style.

For the part of the the responsive project, which was the collaborative brief I chose to do Dazed and confused because it was an animation brief which I could practice the new illustration style I had developed, I had also been practising animating and I wanted to put these skills into practice when approaching a brief I felt Illustrating again would be considered taking the easy way out of having to work harder or being afraid of failing and making mistakes, I knew at some point I would have to combat my weakness with in my animating.

Individually when working on these briefs I have identified that my ability to illustrate and have been satisfied with what I have produced which has allowed me to move on both with the individual and collaborative briefs. This mainly because when I was not happy with my previous drawing style I would take a very long time to develop a drawing, because I would have to correct every little bit of detail I got wrong, this would result in large amounts of time wastage, making me take me longer than I should have. During this process I felt that having developed both my animation and illustration skills have allowed all my projects for this brief to move forward. The group work involved the same issue, both my drawing and animating skills were involved and my whole team during the planning of the project decided each others roles and animation styles. My chosen type of animation was traditional which is personally strongest animating skill.

To help with the direction of my artwork and style I have been using Banksy because his graffiti art style is very similar to mine. I have practised the the stencil style my self have been drawing this way weeks before my collaborative brief took place. Took interest in Banksy's style because I really like the way his images looked, they were bold and really stood out and this is how I wanted my art style to look for my work so I used his work as a guideline for my own.

All the project work went well because I planned out all my work load my self and worked to both my personally set deadlines to make sure I was on track. From this experience I learnt new techniques for my animation and developed a new art style, also gained an understanding of what is like to work in a team and how good it is to have other team members who can help me develop a project with a thoroughly thought out idea. I identified new skills which I now possess which I can put to use for my personal work.          

Responsive Project Report

Collaborative Animation

This is the final animation provided on my blog for this I animated my characters traditionally and inked in the details with a water based ink pen.

Reason why I chose the traditional method was because I like drawing by hand because I feel that I get more satisfaction from knowing that the hard work which is put in to the animation has paid off and my hand drawing skills are what has helped build the animation. I don't like animating digitally because I don't really like the style of digitally animated work because my style of drawing does not look effective digital and I am inexperienced with animating digitally and my form drawing on computer is poor because I don't have a good understanding on how to draw with brushes.

Drawing has made the project move on faster than expected because I amused to this method and enjoy drawing, and have practice day in and out in perfecting my drawing style so that it suited the brief  I was working on.

For my animation I used Banksy as inspiration to help me draw mainly because of my style being monochromatic and the fact I wanted my character to look like a stencil so I thought he would be the best option for inspiration.

Over all this project went very well because I produced the work I wanted the style of drawing was very good and detailed and I am happy that I have developed an even better drawing style because I felt that my previous one was in effective when presented and really rough and rigid in its appearance. The only thing i would change with my animation is that the character looks plain and boring by herself and that there should be a background and some colours to add life to the animation. I think went it comes to developing an atmosphere, I always fall short because I don't provide scenery which I now think would have worked with the characters.

Mega Crit

This session was all about show off the work both done on my individual and collaborative briefs for responsive to other members of our class and received feedback.

I took part in this to receive feedback on my work and was there to find out if the pieces I had done were worth posting to my chosen competition.

This made my project move forward because it allowed me to improve all the faults with my work as suggested by others and I experienced peoples views on my own progress and was able to receive the advise needed to improve every feature of my project which helped me move on successfully.

This whole experience went well because my work was regarded as very good, small improvements were suggested, but on a whole everything was already good enough for hand in, so I did not need to worry about my work.

  

We are all migrants poster competition Art Board

Infected by art Art Board

International KYM cartoon competition Art Board

Onform Art Board

International reggae poster competition Art Board

We Are All Migrants Poster Competition 2016 (deadline 06/07/16)

This brief was based on the issue of migrants and urged you to create a poster that tackled the negativity revolving around this issue alone about immigrants.

I would say the target audience was everybody around the world and this issue is being used to make them aware of the importance of immigration not just for them but for the people migrating themselves.

Set out to create three poster which were revolved immigration but strongly around nationality and the discrimination of races with in this issue because I felt that this was the biggest problem of all when talking about racism.

Chose Designed my posters mainly around racism and Nationalities because I feel that is the biggest in relation to immigration because people in general because people tend to focus on the mostly on the migration and race rather that the reason for people leaving a country, people always seem to think negative of migration so I wanted to fight against the negative views with in all three poster based on the idea the competition was representing, which was for migration, as am I.

Doing this competition has helped push my project forward because it has helped develop my drawing style a lot further by putting them into practice but helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to me as my own
professional Illustrator and animator.

I used Ollie Moss for inspiration because he him self is and poster illustrator, I admire his work and thought that it would be good to use it for guidance because his pieces comunicate feelings and messages through images and less words.
I wanted to apply this same rule to my own work so I refelected on his work and compared it to my own pieces to make sure my work was not copying but communicate to my target audience the same way but effective in its approach through colour and more imagery.

This project went well because I managed to complete the work that was required and developed a new drawing style in the process which I am really impressed with because I was not originally happy with the way I was drawing before. I felt that my drawing style was very rigid and weak in its appearance and did not stand out when presented with colour.

Collaborative DAZED Art Board

After Effects tutorial

I have been watch tutorials on how to create special effects in After Effects because I believe that I have a basic understanding of After Effects and I want to develop a broader knowledge of the package mainly because I might consider adding special effects to our current applied project and want to be able to do more than just move layers.

So far from watch both of these guides I have learnt how to create an optical flare and moving particles, if these experiments turn out well I will consider using them in our documentary in the background, because I think they will add more character to the animation and will liven up the atmosphere for the characters because there is more going in each scene.

Scene and animation Experimentation

To day I have been experimenting with my animation for the background and scenery with in our group animation for our documentary. The reason for this is because our previous crit highlighted many flaws relating to the background work and its movements which were considered as static with in each scene in relation to the foreground animation. This was brought to my attention during the crit session the background animation was said to be very slow and the characters were not in sync with each scene, my role with in this whole project is to make sure the background animation helps tell a story just as much as the characters in  the foreground, through the use of colours for emotions and good time framed movement to make sure that the animation does not exceed its time frame.

These experimentations will help this project move forward  because this will allow me to develop an understanding of different ways I can approach each scene and to make them even better through the practice of different techniques. This will not just develop my techniques when making these animations but I will also be able to receive critical feedback and reviews from my peers on how I could make my animations better or they could decide on which animations from my tests they possibly like or would like to see me develop further.

So far the experimentation has been going well because the movements are flowing a lot better that my previous animations and there is more going on because I have added additional effects to give the animation more emotion and excitement to avoid the fullness my other test presented. The previous tests were dull because they only had one vain of movement which happened to be very slow, this was highlighted on in the interm crit.

Development and behind the scenes

For my bit of the dazed and confused I decided to develop a traditional animation which illustrated the the stages of change relating to one female character, her appearance was altered along with some off her features to demonstrate her sense of individuality.

I decided to use traditional animation to animate my character because I felt comfortable with this medium and I have realised that this is an animation technique I enjoy using the most because I prefer to draw and develop my animated scenery and characters by hand, I find that I am stronger using traditional animation because I find it easier to work work with.

My contribution to this project has all been about me using my traditional animating skills, which I believe has allowed this project to move forward because it has provide a different style and approach to our group animation along with the other animations created by my group peers. The reason for this is because our aim was to communicate individuality for Dazed and Confused through the use our own individual styles and separate characters and to demonstrate the differences between everyone's personality and appearance. We all contributed using different styles and types of animation so they were identifiable based on their style and appearance of the animations which has been our aim through out the development of this project.

I used Shepard Fairy as inspiration based on his style of work because I really like his work mainly because its the style I like to work to and looks similar to my work, I like his use of colour and how each piece is graphically presented neatly and used a few main selective colours through out pieces of his, which it where I developed the idea for making my artwork two both selective and distinct colours (monochromatic). This was also used to help me progress because it was used as a guideline and I reflected on some of his pieces to help with the design when drawing out my animated frames.

    

Interm crit feedback

Today we had and interm crit, over all the feedback was positive and we look like we are making progress. We have sorted out our animatic for guide and referencing and developed some tests for our animation which means we now have a style to follow for the rest of the animation.

The feedback has been mainly about the animating stages of my animation not flowing and thinking about how my scenes appear and disappear. Elements of my practice animation needs to flow a lot better because they are too static and are slow in their transition when appearing on screen.

My aim now it to work with a couple of test relating to both these animations, when doing so I will need to consider the movement of the elements with in both scenes and also will need to look at the transition between scene and work on making these main points smoother.

Animated background inspiration

Here are some examples I have use for inspiration to help me with my animated backgrounds:





These are animation pieces developed by Golden Wolf the animation company. I think the background animation work is superb and works very well in relation to the foreground animation in all the animations presented above, because  they all work well with both style and colour. they also appeal to both the style of the animation and the colours work to help to communicate the feeling of the animation it self based on the colours e.g. the my summer animation is supposed to be "exciting, happy and loving, so they have used both multicoloured background and colours to help communicate this feeling.

Why have I used this for inspiration ?

I have chosen to use these animation for inspiration because they use the colours in the background are effectively to communicate the feeling of the animations presented. I like them mainly because they use a similar colour pallet I intend to use for my background, I am looking at this aspect of all three animations because they are used very well to communicate feeling and emotion all the animations which is what I plan to work with when producing my own.  

Developing background and scenery

To day I have been working on background and scenery for James story with in the animation, I am making sure that I am sticking to the theme of a tea stained background for his side of the animation. I have been working with textures and Colours whilst experimenting with a tree I designed and have attempted to animate it along with the scenery created.

I have not been to sure on my approach when coming to animate the backgrounds, based on style and way of animating e.g. using Photoshop, After Effects or hand drawn skills to animate the scenes. But experimenting has allowed me to develop my decision of how to approach this animation and what methods to use, when doing so. Experimenting has helped because me to investigate various methods of how to execute my animation in both appearance using both After Effects and Photoshop which I now plan to use for my final animation.

I am very happy with the out come of my practice animation because it moves clean and fluent in its motion but also fit with my animated theme in the way its presented on screen. I plan to make each scene like a motion comic slide because I have previously working in this style for previous briefs and it works very well for me, I am not just wanting work in this style because it works for me but because its a type of animation I feel comfortable with when using After Effects. This is mainly because After Effects works well with camera angles and shapes.

To make sure everything is going right I makes sure I consult James and Molly on a regular basis to check that each animated scene fits with their stories and that they work well because one I think I have to focus on is making sure that my scenes run in time with the narrating in the back ground, I still have text to animate and will also have to a make sure the scenes and the text work together and make an introduction at the sometime.

            

Progress, Ideas and organisation

Our progression has been solid, we have talked through plenty of ideas and have kept in contact through college and social media. We have brain stormed out our ideas and came to the decision of making our animation something that demonstrates an individual evolving through time based on the theme being "Individuality". we have decided to show a character that slowly changes appearances almost like they are apart of different subcultures. Each of use have our own very individual and distinctive styles so we have decided to combine these to make the make four separate animations that communicate individuality through their styles and characters.

I took my inspiration form this David Bowie animation which walked through his many different appearances through time, the reason for this idea is because I think it best expresses a persons individuality through change and style and appearance of the characters.

This example has helped me progress drastically because it has both given me and idea helped me to develop concept which the whole group could share to build our project animation for Dazed and Confused.


                                         

 
                                          https://youtu.be/Kag6B4qDoDA

Who are dazed and confused ?

Dazed and confused is a fashion magazine which looks at youth culture and fashion of to day they explore the latest trends and have a vast link with celebrties who themselves take part in photograph shoots and feature on many of the front covers for the dazed magazines.

I chose this because it involved various opportunities to approach my animations because it requires me and my group to make four animations, we have plenty of ideas shared between us and we can combine our styles to make each individual animations interesting. The main reason for doing this brief was because it is both challenging and allowing me to animate and get used to creating a clean and cut animation for a popular and worldly recognising competition, but also because this dazed also appeals to me as a young individual and because of its orientation around young people I personally think that we would have a better understanding for the target market when producing our animations for this project.

    

Dragon framing

Dragon framing was understanding what dragon framing is and how it is used by big stop-motion company's like e.g. Liaka, Ardman. We watched documentaries relating to these two companies and what make stop-motion both successful and enjoyable as a technique.

This induction was just to introduce us to the art of stop-motion if we wanted to use it for our current documentation brief, we were made look at a few stop-motion figures to get an understanding of what it takes to make them and were made to understand the scale of work involved working on a stop-motion piece with a team.

I am not really a fan of stop-motion and will not be using this for my animation, I prefer 2D and do not like playing around with clay figures so much but don't mind animating figures.      

Lip syncing

Yesterday was a session on lip syncing relating to animation it was a basic tutorial on understanding the phonetic sounds/letters and how they are illustrated when they are said by a character. we looked at the comparisons between the letters and what sounds they made in relation to some one speaking certain words to work out what sound matched with which mouth based on the mouths positioning.

We under went this exercise because most people with in our class have not had an induction relating to lip syncing and want to understand how it works in relation to an animated character and what needed to be done in order to lip sync correctly.

We practised lip syncing with an existing character and many different styles of mouths making phonetic, Even though I have learnt a lot relating to lip syncing I will not be using this for my final animation because my animation does not involve any speaking from the characters. Only background music, sound and narrating will be added to the animation.

I personally like this tutorial because it made me understanding a technique I have been waiting to try out for a long time, I never knew how syncing speech with a voice worked so I never had the two elements come together. I feel this lesson has made me understand the technique of lip syncing a lot because Mark talked through the sounds thoroughly and explain the sounds they making in comparison to the expression and made these links clear so when we came to animate these sounds we understood them well.      

Animation Test for background

This is another test I was working on today involving my background work. I have used the tea staining technique to create the back ground colour and water colours to help develop the trees colour. Reason for experimenting with this technique is because I am still deciding on whether it would be a good Idea to use water colours or would it be better to do everything digital. After testing both my artwork in digital and and traditional I have decided on digital because it will easier to edit and animate my features digitally and would be a lot quicker and progressive rather than doing it traditional because I feel that I am weak with this traditional style, I have worked with will be non progressive because my painting skills are not very good and would not work with the style of our animation because I think it looks poor and feel My strength is with digital designing.

The background will be animated in After effects with multiple moving layers. For future progression with this work I will focus on using multiple layers.  

Another Onform

This another Onform shape which I had to design around it was a very funny and abstract shape which I struggled to think of a design for so imagined it to look like a type of rocket thrust and worked with that idea and designed a rocket to go with it to make it stand out to the other submissions. My idea was to always submit something that no one else could imagine based on that shape, which means no one would be designing the same image as me.

I decided to do another Onform shape which used a very basic shape, when approaching an Onform, I try to think outside the box and avoid using the most common ideas people might think of when looking at the shape. With this design I thought of rocket thrust and decided to create a rocket to attach to the thrust so it looked like it was moving forward with force. Most people when looking at this might not be able to see where the idea of thrust fits in with the shape but I think it is imagination that helps people create something that is different an unseen regarding the idea of the shape and its appearance.

Presentations

On  Monday we had our presentations and we decided to pitch our idea to our class first were missing a partner "Molly" reason unknown. It went well all the slides I developed were there along with some additional information provided by Molly and James.

Our ideas were liked by everyone in our class the only issue was that our animatic and presentation of the animation needed working on because it was hard for our audience to give critique because there was not much to go by in terms of sound and visuals because the animatic was out of time with the sound and images. Nothing was synced which left people scratching there heads, it was said that it need to be more clearer in its explanation of telling the story an some references made by Molly or James did not link to the scenery presented in the animated content.

To improve our animation we need to look at looking through our script taking out the irrelevant description or consider changing the scenes presented in comparison to the text and work on making sure that the animatic is right before moving on to the final animation because leaving the content how it will effect our understanding of the work meaning we could struggle to produce something right and relative to our project based on presentation of our ideas and animatic work.

    

Another 2 Illustration Friday submissions

Mysterious Swords Man

Mysterious Man

This weeks word for Illustration Friday was mystery so I decided to develop darkly inked images with a lot of shadow as a way of hiding these character features as a link to the work mystery because you can't work out who exactly they are as people.

I took part in the illustration Friday, which is a competition which runs a different theme every Friday which artist have to draw to. The theme for the two images above was mystery, the reason why I created these two characters so dark was because when I thought of mystery, I thought of darkness which is associated to mystery a lot of the time and black is often questioned as a colour. to follow this theme I developed an image of a investigator like sherlock holmes because he solves mystery so I thought of this as a simple idea because it related strongly to the theme of mystery.  

I love to draw and ink, it is my style and the way draw, I use it because it makes my drawings stand out as bold images and I feel that they are more effect this way rather than using thin lines because they are more visible.

Font tests

I recently was experimenting with the animating of my fonts because we have decided to add fonts to our animation in relation to the text, text will only appear when molly and James are telling their stories. Originally we thought about making the text run with everything both and James say in each scene but after having our crib presentation we realised that animating the text with the stories would be too much and we were advised to reduce it to only animating text to the important words in a only two styles of fonts for both separate for molly and James.

I started practice different techniques for animating the text because It needs to look stylish and effective when entering the page the text and font need to bring forth the emotion and feeling through their movement, style and presentation. I feel that this will also contribute to the emotion of the documentary because it will add feeling through it appearance depending on its colour and style of font.

I practiced moving the letters around in after effects and was introduced to this type of animating by a friend called stroke which works very well and uses the effect of making letters re-appear and disappear through covering the letters presented with a continuous painted stroke almost making the letters invisible. I prefer this style because it will let the text appear and disappear on of screen quickly according to one word.

The Granddad animation which we took inspiration from when starting the project because that featured different styled font which talked through the death of a boys grandfather and his death.


 

Inspirational fonts for an animation

These are the current fonts I have been looking at today based on their styles, me and my group decided that we wanted and written fonts, almost like a child's hand writing to run along with each scene. I decided to search some child like fonts that related to the style of our animation so I looked at calligraphy and handwritten based fonts because me and my team feel that they would be best suited for the animation and our target audience being young children. We felt that these style of fonts are soft on the eye and will be clearer for the children to read and understand.

I am using these fonts to help generate an idea for my own hand written font which I am currently working on for this animation. Mainly this is being done because it sets a guideline for me to follow continuously when animating, I will always remember I have these mood boards to refer to when looking for ideas.

Dafont is my inspiration when looking to create a font because it provides a variety of different styles which almost act like colours in their appearances because they present feelings based on the forms a shapes of the letters e.g. rigid and jaggy represent rough on the edges and hardness. Just from looking at these features they give of various feelings and emotions. This is how I want the target audience to seen the font as when they look at it along with the animation, I want them to build a connection with the animation through the use of colours text and background colours which could be used to indicate emotions and feelings.

The main thing I will need to consider for the future when finally developing this animation is to make sure my font is readable to the audience, because some of these fonts look hard to read, mainly the calligraphy is harder to read so I am going to avoid this style and use normal handwriting because the letters will be easier to read and the audience will be able to build a connect better with the text because if the text is not clear or building, there is no purpose or reason for it being on screen. To avoid this problem, all I will need to do is write all my type letter spaced and make sure the text is thick, bold and clear to see.

 

Font moodboard 1

Font moodboard 2

The End 

This font makes feel as if a film has just ended happily, reason being because of its nice continuous flowing style and looped edges which makes everything feel nice, easy and straight forward. the colours also contribute to the feeling the use of orange as an outline could be considered a happy colour , though black can be considered dark it works well along with other light colours and the from there on can change based on the addition of what colours added.

inspirational book artists

Jon Klassen





Jon Klassen is a Canadian book writer and illustrator who was suggested to me by my Tutors based on his style of drawing. I personally am glad I was introduced to his work because I have been looking for many inspirational illustrative practitioners who's styles work well with the type of animation my group is trying to make. Klassen's style is very simplistic and straight forward and his his backgrounds are minimalistic and work well with the scenery provided.

I like his work for the being soft on the eye in its appearance and the way it is put together simplistically, you can make out clear what is supposed to be happening in each scene because there is no clutter of background colour and imagery placed behind the characters. The background is plane which means the characters stand out clear on each page and are easy to identify by the readers. Another major factor which helps me here is that the characters are made to appeal to a young target audience because they are all designed for children's books.  


Marie Thornhauge





Love Marie Thornhauge's drawing style with a passion, she too is another artist suggested my tutors who works on developing illustrative characters for people in general who need assistance with character design background work and other things. Her style is also simple like Klassen's but completely different in a great way because she creates characters of all shapes and forms and uses very simple environment to tell a story with shapes and shading which is another concept I could follow. I like her work mostly because it reminds me of my own but also seems very exciting in its presence based on the colours used because they set the mood in relation to the colours and the background because she uses both a contrast of both light and dark colours to give the viewer a real feel of the atmosphere from looking at the colours and the emotion s of the character to help.

Both her and klassen's work will be beneficial for me when developing my animation because they will help keep in mind what makes scenery and characters important based on their decisions and how the artwork they have produced has turned out.

I feel my scenery ideas are weak at the moment because they do not feature much detail or a variety of colours to help convey emotions which means they lack feeling, because the colours are all bright and the story we are telling is sad so we need to reduce the bright colours to something dull to indicate when emotions are up or down in scenes just likes Marie Thornhauge's bed room scene which helps indicate it is night through the use of the moon and the dim darkly shaded bedroom.

Background Work Experimenting

I looked at a book called Max the brave which is a children's book that uses multicoloured backgrounds  and minimalistic images. This book and its content was suggested by my Tutors who thought That I needed to experiment more with background colours because each scene needs to convey some emotion.

I decided to use this book because the backgrounds are positioned exactly how I plan to execute my scenes in my animation so I thought it would be the perfect guideline for creating my clean backgrounds for each scene. I like This book based on the backgrounds and characters because the scenes change in colour regularly giving a change to the atmosphere and feeling in each scene, my idea of this concept I feel makes the book look fun because of its variety, it is not always presenting the same boring colours and scenery, it presents something new to a child in every scene.

        

My background colour swatches :

This a test colour swatch I developed my self for my animation based on Max the brave which is varied in colour because it it gives me a rough idea of what my animation scene will look like in my own style, my group peers have reviewed this idea and think it works well because it present variety of feelings and emotions to the viewer.

This swatch will be beneficial to me for the future because it will provide me with the idea of what I need to create for each scene based on what colours are provided on the swatch. I will be able to reference regularly when developing final animation content.

Though I still need to experiment with backgrounds because they are not yet finalised but I have my concept sorted.  
  

Test animation

Another 2 Onforms

Resubmission based on colours used, can only be black and white

First submission

Crazy dog submission

These are another set of Onforms recently done in addition to the other four previously produced, I have enjoyed because it has challenged me to think creatively through giving me a concept to develop further into something effective and usable. Because of this challenge I now approach anything I do creative, I think of it as problem I need to solve, doing Onform every week and hope to continue taking part in the future.

I have done another set of Onform over the course of these three weeks revolved around few shapes. The first shark at the top was created relation to the shape because I imagined it as though it was the ocean so I designed a shark to go along with it. The second shark was not submitted based on the colours that were used, because the theme is to only stick with black and white when designing around the shape, but as you can see I have not used the required colours so that is why I  made the shark black instead, which looks non-effective to  because there is not much detail. The very last shape was made in to a dogs head because when first approaching the shape I imagined animal ears featured at the top shape and though of a dog and then decided to develop the shape into a dog.