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.