Monday 28 May 2012

[Animation practice] Lip sync test

I made a 100 frame lip sync test in Flash at 2 in the morning. That's just how I roll...

Friday 25 May 2012

[Research] Summer reading list

Well, I have a week until I move back home for the summer, only problem being I bloody hate summer. The heat makes me dizzy and I get allergies galore! Not my idea of fun, winter please!
Seems to me like the best time to get down and study (if only younger me could read this now!)
I got myself some character design books as I'm in the stage in Oddball that introduces everyone, so they need to be perfected for that.
I also bought myself some anatomy books as I'd like to improve my poses for these characters over the break.




[Influence] Goldfish



DAMN I love the music videos for Goldfish. This one's got some very interesting mixed medium too in both the backgrounds and the animation. I really need to learn how to make backgrounds and animation blend together, rather than them clearly being on different planes. Even simple shadows can greatly change the depth of a shot and make the characters actually seem a part of it rather than sitting on top of the background layer.

[Casting] Voice Acting Hub



In order to tidy up the voice auditioning process, I've created a Flash file that includes all the current roles and information on how to audition. This should hopefully help organise the process better on both mine and the auditioner's ends.

Tuesday 22 May 2012

[Reflection] End of year reflection

Now that my first year of University is finished, I'm looking back at what I've accomplished and what I'd like to be able to do.
I'm very happy with the improvements my Flash work has shown, and I've finally moved into a mix with After Effects, which is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. My goal now is to push my abilities in After Effects so that I can make the best work possible.
Over the holidays I have set myself a few goals to keep me sharp;

  • Animate at least one Oddball chapter
  • Do several frame by frame tests, practising perspective and secondary motion.
  • Create the animatics for Oddball up to Chapter 8.
  • Work on improving my After Effects knowledge.
  • Draw as much as possible, working on perspective, backgrounds and characters.
  • Learn the basics of other programs, such as Toon Boom and Maya.
All in all I'm happy with the improvements I've made this year in my chosen area, and hope to improve further before the start of the second year.

For now... BREAK TIME!

Thursday 17 May 2012

[Fan project] Global Clayos!

It's come to my attention lately that some of my videos are now in a few languages. I have a friend who dubs my videos into Spanish, but I also found a German dub of a Universithing episode the other day. Neat, huh?

[Influence] It hit two times

You may recall from an earlier post that I'm a huge Pokemon fan. You may also remember from the same post that I was impressed by the new way the Pokemon anime is made, mixig 2D and 3D elements seamlessly, this is partially what inspired me to move my work into a mix of Flash and After Effects, so that I could have a more mixed looking medium than Flash alone.
Recently a trailer has emerged for the upcoming Pokemon games, "Black 2" and "White 2", and I've been impressed yet again. While people close to me will know that I don't find anime particularly inspiring, I'm very interested in this video as it does exactly what I want to be able to do, seamlessly mix together mediums for an amazing visual result, with excellent animation to boot. It also adds some interesting camera work due to the new medium, such as the 3D shot through the characters eyes at around 50 seconds.
The backgrounds also have a lot of parralax scrolling which adds a lot of depth to the scenes, something that I feel I am missing from mine.
I also learned the importance of camera movement from this video and now that I'm using After Effects, it's much easier to manipulate the flash files to do this. There aren't any parts of this video where the camera is completely static, and I feel this brings a lot more life to the shots and helps prevent static frames. I believe this is my next step in my videos as one of the things I didn't like in Cameraocular was how static some sections were.



While on the topic of mixing mediums, here's an earlier video that's always inspired me every time I watch it. I know I'm primarily 2D animation, but things like this make me want to at least explore the basics of 3D, it's interesting to see how the two are mixed together and still manage to create a sense of depth.

[Uni project] Go with the Flow


My first full length After Effects animation. We were told about a Quay Brothers exhibition that was taking place in Leeds with the theme of "Flow" and told to interpret it in our own work. For my animation I chose to base the story on the flow of digital information and how much we rely on it now.
My idea changed a lot over development, but the core message remained the same. The initial idea was to have binary flying around in the air, that I would edit in After Effects. This binary would enter electronic devices and lock them with the word "Flow".
When making this effect I didn't like the look of it, so I chose a different approach, to show the before and after states of the screens. This was a relatively easy process as all it needed was Photoshop editing.
As for the pictures, I went around Leeds and tried to find as many screens as I could, but after a low count, I decided to ask my friends for help by getting them to send in pictures of their phones, laptops, etc.

Before Flow, I'd taken some After Effects basic tutorials and created this short clip. After Effects is definitely a program I'd like to use more as it brings a new level to the possibilities open to my work.

[Reflection] 5 years of Clayos

The 5th birthday of my website, www.clayos.co.uk is coming up soon (11/6/12) so I thought now would be a good time to set in metaphorical stone the history of Clayos and how I got into animation.

My earliest memory of understanding animation was all thanks to cereal. Yep, remember when cereal used to have the free toys in them? In a way I owe my damn life to them! When I was very young, I got an "Aah! Real Monsters!" flipbook in my cereal, and when flicking through the pages, went through the heart breaking moment every child goes through when they realise that cartoon characters aren't real people.
I loved my cartoons as a kid, mainly Cartoon Network, shows like "Dexters Lab", "Ed, Edd and Eddy", and admittedly, "The Powerpuff Girls" (who'd have known that I'd later be sucked into another Lauren Faust related franchise recently). However, due to having a younger sister, my exposure to cartoons was limited to things that we both agreed on. I was also somewhat sheltered from the evils of the universe as far as I can remember.
There were a fair few shows I remember not being allowed to watch, I remember the number of Dragonball Z episodes I was allowed to watch slowly falling to zero, and repeats of Pokemon also withered, yet watching the same 3episodes of Dexters Lab was acceptable. And now to deliver a crippling blow to the hearts of animators worldwide. I didn't have a huge exposure to Disney. My mother dislikes the films, so I did all my Disney watching at my Dad's house, I can remember my favourites being The Aristocats, Snow White and Jungle Book.
So far it sounds like I didn't exactly have the best exposure to cartoons, right? And surely that's the complete opposite of your typical animator. The thing is, that's exactly what made me want to animate. Call it an act of rebellion or whatever the hell you want, but you should know that when you tell a kid he can't do something, he's obviously going to do it for shits and giggles.
When I was in school, I was sat in class one day. The computer rooms were right next to our classroom so we could hear what was going on. One fateful day the silence in class was broken by a sound from the heavens. The great Jonti Picking spoke the following heavenly words to me through a computer:
"Badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers! Mushroom! Mushroom!"
I had discovered web animation. A place where I could watch cartoons about almost anything on the internet, free of limits of what my sister and mother approved of. And I loved it.
Once I'd passed that border, my head was just crammed full of an explosion of videos, ranging from the work of David Firth to Egoraptor. These were my first main inspirations. To this day I still tell people that I want to meet Weebl one day just to thank him for introducing me to this world of web animation.
At the time I didn't have access to Flash, so for years I was using Powerpoint to make animations. Rather than going out at a break in school, I'd stay in the computer rooms and make (terrible) stick man animations with my friend. For a few years, this was as far as I went. I was happy just to make stupid gif videos in PowerPoint until one day in year 10 at school, my art class held the annual Arts Week, one of the topics being animation.
2 weeks later, this piece of crap was produced.

This is when I decided what I wanted to be. There was something about bringing life to these things that caused a spark in me, and got me into animation.
Shortly after making this video I got myself a webcam and threw together some stop motion animations of my own. At the time I was inspired by Robert Benfer and his clay animations (again, web animation over say, something like Aardman!) I made some animations featuring red claymen and started up my first site here (warning, it's awful)
After some time, my site moved from shitty, free piczo to a shitty Dreamweaver site, of which I've lost the original copy. Clayos.co.nr was made, and eventually in 2007, Clayos.co.uk.
Eventually, I got sick of stop motion and moved onto Flash, closer to my original influences and have been chasing animation since then...

[Influences] Influence Map [ONGOING]

There are a lot of things that influence my animation work, whether it be other animations, places or even people. In this post I'm going to list as many as I can think of as well as a brief reason how and why they have influenced me.

JOSH PALMER (ZEUREL)

This animator would without a doubt be my main influence. I've also been told in several comments that my style has some similarities, so the influence certainly seems to be shining through. My favourite aspects of his work would be the unique character designs and backgrounds, something that I feel is extremely important in animation. Bland characters make for a bland story. It's because of Zeurel that I now strive to improve my frame by frame movement, rather than using symbols and models. I also like the general bounciness and life to his work, as shown in the link below he is great at emphasised movement:


EDD GOULD (EDDSWORLD)

Edd Gould was a British animator and founder of the internet series "Eddsworld". This series was  avery early inspiration of mine as it was one of the first web series I saw focused around the same three characters, rather than every animation being completely different. I thought that this was important as viewers will remember the characters and want to watch more episodes, which increases the chances of people sticking around for more.

WEEBL'S-STUFF




HARRY PARTRIDGE

Like Zeurel, this animator is great at frame by frame animation in Flash and is another big influence to my work. His use of colour also interests me, although he doesn't do all of his own backgrounds, but this allows him to work faster.

ARIN HANSON (EGORAPTOR)

A very early influence from when I discovered Newgrounds.com
This animator often does parodies, which I started to dislike writing for myself, but his sense of humour and voice acting still make them very entertaining to watch.

MAX GELARDI (HOTDIGGEDYDEMON)

A more recent influence to my work. This animator uses symbol animation in Flash rather than frame by frame redrawing, a style that I've been neglecting lately but still feel is very important.

NIGHTWAYFARER

TOM RIDGEWELL (TOMSKA)

A member and now director of the aforementioned Eddsworld series. I like Tom's sense of humour and writing. As a director rather than an animator, he can put a lot more focus into the writing side of things and he knows his target audience extremely well. His own series, ASDFMOVIE is aimed as viral videos, so it is filled with short, nonsensical clips that people will want to spread around.

TERRY PRATCHETT

The work of Terry Pratchett (author of the "Discworld" books) has been an influence since my childhood, as my Dad's side of the family were always referencing it. Looking at it in relation to my own work, I have learned the importance of creating a world full of imagination that will keep the viewer interested. However I've also learned to add limits to these too. His characters are also among my favourites, the video above shows my favourite of his characters, Teatime.

FABLE 2
Another influence that people seem to have picked up on is Fable 2, a game for the Xbox 360. The world of Oddball has some strong influences from the art direction in this game and I often use it as reference material. Something I learned from this game is colour too, the non-important characters in Oddball now tend to have muted browns and greys for their clothing. In the Fable picture above there is also a strong sense of identity in the two classes, which are both unified by the art style. A strong style like this also allows the important characters (like my protagonist Redi) to stand out from the crowd through colour and design.
Redi is the only character with bright orange hair, which helps to enforce her "oddball" personality, her clothing choices are also a more gothic style in comparison to the Victorian styles the other characters wear. As I said earlier, a unified style is also very important. As the city my cartoons is set in is full of snow, I make sure that there are some similarities in the warm clothing they all wear.

DR STEEL

As it turns out, music is also influential to my work. In fact, I have a playlist specifically for Redi, with the sort of music I associate with her, this is a big help when I'm getting her character down. Dr. Steel is a multimedia character, spanning across music and videos. I've taken a fair amount of inspiration from his character and music videos.

Personal Reflection

Now that I've effectively finished my work for the first year of University, I think now's as good a time as any to list my strengths and weaknesses I've discovered over the course. 


STRENGTHS:
  • Very motivated to work with a strong passion for animation.
  • Able to carry on with my own work as well as University work.
  • Willing to work all hours to do what I love.
  • Establishing connections that could be useful in the future
  • Slowly growing internet presence
  • Able to give relevant critique.
  • Existing knowledge before course comes in handy.
  • Enjoys helping others with their work.
  • Can de-construct animation and learn techniques.
  • Always striving to improve.

WEAKNESSES:
  • Low self esteem when comparing my work to others.
  • Often too eager to show my work, to the point where people see to much of it before it's released.
  • Can become very opinionated against work such as anime and parodies.
  • Not much medium variety.
  • Sleep loss can often affect the quality of my work.
  • Has been told I overwork myself at times to the point people worry about my health.
  • Poor speaker and presenter, often present things when very tired.
  • Easily distracted.
  • Often push my opinions too much onto other people.
  • Never happy with my own work.
  • Little understanding of sound.
  • Can be indecisive.

In an earlier entry I stated that I was making a schedule for a week to track my time, the result is posted below. I learned a few things from this, one being that I spent 54 hours in one week on my personal work.
My sleep was interesting in this week too as it's an irregular pattern, but I still get a reasonable amount of sleep in, however on one day I went 30 hours without sleep and the chart shows how my productivity fell.
I also seem to focus on one task at a time and do nothing but, then move onto another.


[Drawing] This year in drawings

The sequence above is a selected number of drawings from my sketchbooks that I've been using since I started University. I've tried to include a variety of pictures including life drawing, my normal "style" and some experimental work. I feel that the life drawing sessions and the lessons with Tony Garth helped with my character design a lot, as I now think a lot more about structure and how things will be animated, rather than concentrating on a flat image.

Oddball: The Amazing Cameraocular Device



The Amazing Cameraocular Device (or Oddball: Cameraocular) is my final piece for my first year at University. The brief was to write a 3 act story based on an object in the Leeds City Museum. My object was the camera in the picture below:
After some thought I was able to think up an idea. At the time I also wanted to practice my side episodes for Oddball, keeping in mind new viewers and the character information they would need to know for each episode.I decided to kill two proverbial birds with one stone by putting a camera into an Oddball script! After some writing and development, I was able to pitch this animatic in class, which eventually went on to being the final video:

For this project I wanted to use some of my inspiration and mix in After Effects for more detailed backgrounds and effects. I tried to texture the backgrounds in the Safety Gnome, but due to Flash having the virtual memory of a stunted peanut, I experienced a lot of issues. After Effects also allowed me to add snow effects a lot easier than Flash so I was able to make the animation a lot quicker overall.
The only sacrifice of this was that Newgrounds.com, the site where I get most of my traffic from only accepts .swf, but as if by fate, they finally started accepting .mp4 video files too, and the image below should speak for itself when I say the new format was a big help.


The images below are from the Powerpoint I used to pitch my animation in class, they go into a lot more detail about my decisions:


[Personal project] Oddball: Chapter 2 [INCOMPLETE]

[Casting] Finding the voice

An important part in my animations is strong voice acting, without it my characters would be lacking in... character! Over the years I've made a few connections across the internet to voice actors and animators, these connections come in handy when I'm auditioning for voices. In this post are some videos I've put together for each characters auditions.