Sixth and Final Date

VICTORY! I have finally beaten this seeming unbeatable assignment! I have found this assignment quite difficult - not difficult in the sense that i found the actual animating hard, but difficult in the sense that it was hard to commit to an assignment that i had no interest in. I do not like digital animating, the only kind i like is stop motion.  Hopefully this will be the last animation assignment for a long time as after counting and looking back on previous assignments, he have done twice as many animation projects than digital art or design when our class of fifteen outnumbers the animators in the group 4-1!

The editing process when i added sound

Anyway - enough complaining, i am very happy to finally be rid of this assignment. I would say it has been fun, but it hasn't. It has however made me much more comfortable with using flash and i now have a grasp on editing (thanks again to George Roberts for showing me the ropes and letting me use his software). It is always nice to see your drawings come to life and my animation makes me smile for this reason. Above is a screen shot of the editing process and below is my finished animation, sound effects are from Sounddogs.com and all images are my own. Enjoy!

 Goodbye 'The Message', I'm not going to miss you.

Fifth Date

My 'Message' assignment is underway and is pretty much complete with just the editing to go. Whilst I'm taking a break i thought i would post a few progress pictures of the animation that i have taken over the last few days. So far the animating has gone pretty well, but the editing could prove to be very hard since i have never edited before.

Basic posture and background experiments

He he he

Testing a scene

The creation of the flickering candle

Walking with Meaning - Walking Through a Scene

Finished off my last walk cycle today, although the walk cycle is a re-use of my first walk cycle, i managed to make this one look like she is naturally walking through the scene (the assignment didn't say you couldn't re-use you walk cycles so I'm guessing this is allowed). Anyway, i am fairly happy with how this turned out as, like i said, it looks like she is taking a nice leisurely stroll through a restaurant and she is moving at a realistic pace and not gliding along the ground.

Walking with Meaning - Perspective Walk

Here is my character walking from a perspective view. This was the second part of my Message assignment and i still have another walk cycle to do. Although i am not particularly impressed with the finished animation, it is far better than my previous attempts... However, i do very much like a particular frame which is the one where her hips swing to the far left (her right).

Take Some Organs Back - Final Animatic

I have finally finished my Design for Society project and have produced the animatic below. I am incredibly happy to have finished it even if i do have The Message to still finish... Overall i quite liked this assignment in comparison to The Message. I have always liked coming up with advert ideas so this assignment was right up my alley. Special thank you to George Roberts for his awesome voice acting and credit for the sound effects go to Sounddogs.com. I hope you enjoy the animatic and please do visit www.uktransplant.org.uk if you are interested in organ donation, it can really help change someones life.

Rough Plan for Animatic and Updates!

So i know where to place my finished frames in my animatic, i have made a rough plan of what will happen. It have to stress that it is only the rough plan for the animatic so the actual thing should look much more professional and well done.

I'm pretty happy with this plan and hopefully it should make the actual making of my animatic much easier. I'm aiming to finish the animatic tomorrow but i guess we'll see how that plan goes. Here are some final images that will appear in the animatic and some images of the animatic in prgress.

Scripts! Storyboards! Organs!

After writing a script for my Design For Society organ donation campaign i asked a few friends what they thought of it and if they thought it could be improved. The feedback i got back was not to cut any information but to explain a certain part better and to simplify and shorten one or two lengthy sentences.
Below is the original script with a few tweaks and ideas scribbled on it.

 I decided to add in which organs could be donated as it turns out a lot of people don't know and this would inform them about the subject. There are six organs that can be donated but seven parts of the body if you include bone and tissue. To help people understand what these organs were i used my five previously designed characters and assigned them each with a body part, but i still needed two more characters for the pancreas and kidneys. I added a plumper woman and a skinny man  and assigned them with the colour orange and brown as they were the two body shapes and colours my group of characters were missing.

I am fairly happy with the group of characters now, although i still prefer my original five, i needed to add the other two to make the advert make sense, otherwise people would have been asking why only a few organs were represented. It is a good job i didn't have nine characters as with the main character being pink and the other characters taking the other colours there wouldn't be any other colours left for any other character! I will now show my script to the person i have asked to do my voice over to see what he thinks and hopefully record it soon.

I now also have a neat and coloured storyboard to help me plan out my animatic when i get round to doing it in the next few days. I like how it looks, although very simple it is informative enough to let you know what is going on (to a certain extent, you do need the script too obviously). If the shot has a star next to it, it means i may not be including that particular shot in the final animatic as it may prove to be unnecessary.

 Update!

Here is my final version of the script, which my friend George Roberts kindly did a voiceover for. I left out a couple of unimportant lines and added a couple of others. Enjoy!

Turnaround Please

Here are my character turnarounds for The Message. I am fairly happy with how these turned out, even if the waiter looks a little crazy... But i digress, sorry for the short post!

Take My Organs!

I may or may not have done a lot of design for society work in the last few weeks, (I'd put my money on the latter). I have neglected this assignment as The Message is a much bigger and more difficult assignment and i had been told i had a solid idea for design for society, so i just sort of... ignored it. However, i bought a new scanner over the weekend and after getting thoroughly peeved off with my Flash animation i decided to use it and re-visit this assignment instead and i actually had a lot of fun. I forgot how relaxing it was to just sketch and scan and experiment. Here are a few of my planning ideas and a basic storyboard to help we with the animatic i will be doing in a couple of days.

 This was my planning, my first idea were characters made of very simple shapes, similar to the Bupa adverts on television. The yellow man with the big head and tiny body was an experiment for this idea but straight after drawing it i realised it was the wrong direction to go in. Next i went for humans with big heads and simple clothes but again, this didn't feel like the right direction. I eventually drew different simplified body shapes with few features with a basic colour and their hair in another basic colour. However, after a discussion with my tutor about how the characters should look i decided to remove their features apart from hair, which would now be a darker shade of their base colour. Here are the results.

 I came up with the idea that the people who need organ transplants will have part of there body shaded in the shape of the organ they need. For example, the red woman needs a new heart and so her heart is black. I decided to keep the colours simple and not give the characters any features as to keep them as simple as possible. I think the above characters also give a fair representation of the population and are hopefully relatable.

Organ donors in black

I decided to swap the male bodybuilder's colour from orange to yellow as yellow is a primary colour and stands out more than orange (and orange is my least favourite colour!). I think the group of people are now more pleasing to the eye and their colours work well together. I have also drawn the chain of organ donors who will all be coloured black as it is a strong shade and i want organ donors to appear strong and generous.

These are my storyboards that will help me in the animatic, although very simple, they tell me which shots i need to do and remind me of the main parts in the story.

After doing this planning work i am now really looking forward to doing design for society and have a clear image of what i want the final product to look like, although i still think it is a good idea to focus on The Message for now as it is such a big assignment that i am very far behind in. Wish me luck!

Fourth Date

Another short update to show how the pencil crayon hand drawn effect looked in flash. I have to say I'm really impressed with how it turned out and i feel it really does give it a hand drawn look without becoming an eyesore. However, i don't think i will use this effect in all of my animation, for example if i were to use it as the floor, walls, props, skin etc it would start looking messy so i just have to choose which parts to use this effect on carefully. I'll post more updates when i make more progress.

Cut out pieces

Rough idea of how the dress will look

Rough version of how the animation will look

I suppose I should get some work done...

*Sigh* There are a few assignments or tasks you get at school/ college/ university that make you feel really depressed and uninspired, they seem like huge unconquerable obstacles that want you to fail. The first time this happened was in primary school during fractions- i was so bad at fractions. The second time was in secondary school where we had to take an exam in French and were expected to speak for over three minutes fluently - luckily i got the two easiest topics to talk about. The third time was in Sixth Form in Film Studies during a micro-essay on Kill Bill, where we had to analyse everything in a thirty second clip and write five pages on it - I actually did well on this one but the assignment seemed huge. And the fourth time is this assignment: The Message. However, this assignment isn't going to do itself and there is no point in just putting it off so i better get started.

I decided recently that i wanted my animation to have a hand drawn, simple look, but as it has to be a digital animation, i will have to settle for a hand coloured look instead. So i scribbled the basic colours down with a pencil crayon and scanned them.

I then selected, copied and pasted each colour individually in photoshop to get a full block of colour that i can use later on to colour my flash animation. Here are the colours in more detail, i think this will look pretty good when it is added to my drawings, hopefully it turn out ok and doesn't look like a hot mess at the end of the assignment.

I particularly like the orange as i added small circles in it, this is because my character has curly ginger hair and this will hopefully translate from the JPEG to the actual animation. I also like the texture of the purple as it is different to the other colours which is good as this is the colour of the dress which needs to stand out from the background.

Doodles and Sketches

Here a few of the doodles and sketches i've done over christmas, i think it is important to show doodle work because a lot of the time it looks pretty awesome and shows what is whirling around in people's subconcious and isn't ever as perfect or finished as proper pieces of work. I think some of my best artwork has come from doodles so it is always something i enjoy doing, i may have said this before but doodling whilst on the phone is the best place to doodle, your drawings seem to follow the course of the conversation - very cool.

The Dance with No Pants

Not really a dance, more like we just drew John from twelve different angles going antti-clockwise. This was pretty boring if i'm being honest, it wasn't until my seventh or so drawing that i started to have fun with it and not particularly pay too much attention to how john looked and instead drew my own style. I think the last few sketches are my favourite i have done in life drawing, they look like my style yet are clearly still the life model. Enjoy! (if that's possible).

Third Date

I haven't posted much about my animation for The Message in a little while so i thought I'd give you an update. I have finalised a storyboard and storyline, drawn out some rough cut out body parts and have been thinking about giving my animation a hand drawn look or something similar if it clashes with the brief since i think it has to be fully digital. Here are my finished (but still fairly rough looking) storyboards with a few close ups of important parts. There is also a turnaround picture of my character walking, a design of the dress and the basic cut out shape pages that might be of some interest.

Terrible quality but you get the idea

Character is happy at first and keeps waiting

She meets the waiter but doesn't pay much attention to him

After hours of waiting she asks for the bill and find the waiter's note

Here is the character turnaround

Some dress designs, shorter but easier to animate

The layered dress

The dresses above were particularly hard to design as i had to be able to show movement from them in a cutout animation, without it being too complicated as I'm no whizz kid on Flash. A friend suggested using different layers of material so the dress had a sort of frayed edge, i liked this idea and designed the above dress.

Rough cut out body parts

More body parts