Monday 26 November 2012

[Drawing] Oddball teaser

I've recently got back into production for Oddball, writing down the key plot elements as well as thinking about the act structure for chapters 4 to 8. The setting in the story has moved to the "Otherworld", which is essentially the limbo between heaven and hell, where the dead are brought once collected by the reaper race, the Timekeepers. I wanted the art style to change dramatically with the switch to the new surroundings, the dominant colour is red, to connote the danger and deathly themes of the story. It is also the theme colour for Death Party, which contrasts with the slight green tint moving in from the sides.
Redi has had slight changes to her design as well, I've added more detail fo her robe and changed her hair slightly too, her eye is now bandaged up as well and she now carries a shield, but no weapon.

[Influence] Ultimate Sweetie Belle (effects analysis)

This analysis isn't so much about animation, but subtle effects I could add to my own work. Seeing as Antique (one of my characters who is a talking clock) have no mouths to animate, certain shots may make it difficult to establish who is talking, so I may take inspiration from this video by mapping glow effects to the sound files associated with his character.
See the video below to get an idea, look at the eyes:

Monday 19 November 2012

Weekly update: 19/11/12


Hey all, now that I have a weekly schedule, i'm going to try a new structure for journals, here goes!

MONDAY
Crusaders
Crusaders now has a blog open where you can keep up to date with the progress, I'm currently preparing for the teaser/ad for it, waiting on a voice for Sweetie Belle, you can find casting information on the blog, as well as this week's guests.
Solrac Ventures
For those that missed it, you can see the unfinished promo for Solrac Ventures on Youtube. More episodes are currently being written and planned, for the time being I'm spending my Mondays on Crusaders.

TUESDAYLeeds Royal Armouries Commission
This project is for University, I'm soon to take over production as the lead animator once we finally break out of all the pre-production chores, you'll likely see more character designs, rotations and animation samples on my blog when that time comes. We have a production meeting this week to show our progress so far, so hopefully all will go well!

WEDNESDAY
Oddball
Barrels is coming along at a steady pace, I'm also redesigning Redi slightly for Chapter 4. I've decided to redesignate the next episode as chapter 3.5, as it's more of a filler/plot episode than anything, and Redi and Antique don't make an appearance. I'm hoping to get a new episode out by Christmas, so hold tight!

THURSDAY
Studying
Not much to say here, we have an essay to work on so that's my Thursdays taken up, this one was spent planning and getting books ready.

FRIDAY-SUNDAY
Commissions + Pixel
This weekend I had a day working on my commissioned piece, but I spent most of it cooling down, I've nto had a good days rest in a while, so I invited CurlyPanda and Vallhemn round for the weekend to play some games, get some work done and have a general chillout session. Not much work on pixel as I'm putting it aside for the time being.

That's about it for last week, and now for some links!
Voice acting hub: Roles open!
Crusaders blog

NEW BLOG POSTS:
[Analysis] Analyzing videos and group discussions
[Drawing] Life drawing - The head
[Pre-production] Storyboarding and pre-production lesson
[Influences] City influences
[Organisation] Work schedule
[Uni project] Elroy Simmons animation talk
[Drawing] Speed drawing
[Personal/fan project] New blog open
[Drawing] Easely pun

Thursday 15 November 2012

[Drawing] Easely pun

Today we didn't have a life model in, so we brave second years volunteered ourselves to take up the task. I earned a new level of respect for the brave souls that do this as a living, because even a short 3 minute pose could become an eternity of achy arms and legs if you didn't distribute your weight correctly.
Oh! We also did some drawing or something!

This week we were blessed with easels. Part of me wishes they were called hardels. It's surprising how much of a difference having your paper upright can make. The first handful of drawings were a half and half mix of getting my wrist in the right position and actually putting the marks down. After some suggestion from the teacher, I moved my easel from the same side as my drawing arm to the opposite. This helped my wrist out a lot and also came me more freedom to move my arm for certain lines.

Onto the actual drawing, we started the session with the usual warm up activities, some one minute poses using silhouette and scribble techniques we explored in previous lessons. These warmups are good to get used to spacial awareness on the page again. Seeing as the silhouette is one continuous line, it starts to get you thinking, rather than mindlessly drawing something and then correcting it.

The rest of the lesson was spent taking it in turns to do 3 poses. Each pose lasted 3:20 to add up to around 10 minutes with pose change time included. In this time, we were told to draw a scribbly silhouette to get the form idea down, followed by a basic stick man to get the gesture lines, then finally a drawing of the full pose. For the entirety of today's lesson I chose to work in pen rather than my usual pencil, so that any mistakes I made would show through, rather than me hiding them. This was good practice for me as I could see just what I did wrong and right in the final picture and take these into consideration. I also found myself measuring proportions with my pen this lesson, which is a technique I very rarely use. This really helped me to get the anatomy correct by measuring the head in relation to the rest of the body. The pictures I'm most proud of are the pictures of Arron (bottom picture, top right).
All in all, I feel today went well, and the purpose of our exercise was very clear and worked out.

The poses still got achy though.


Monday 12 November 2012

[Personal/fan project] New blog open


Due to me not having much of a hand in the production side of our Royal Armouries project, I decided to use one of my projects as a chance to test my management skills. I've now turned my Crusaders animation into a community based project where people can send in their characters to be part of the video, I'll also be looking for other animators to help animate the many background characters for the final video, so I can really get some practice at managing people. The project is still in its early days, but you can check out progress on the blog here, and I'll be mentioning any key updates and skills I've learned on this blog occasionally!

Sunday 11 November 2012

[Drawing] Speed drawing


[Uni project] Elroy Simmons animation talk

THE LECTURE

It's always an interest of mine to hear stories from animation professionals of how they got into the industry, so when we had a full lecture from Elroy Simmons about how he got into the industry and how things have been since then, I was incredibly happy. You can view his demo reel here. It's always a strange feeling to meet people who've worked on animation you've watched as a kid, there's a strange sense of accomplishment just from meeting them. I also took the opportunity to get some feedback on my own work from Elroy, I showed him the first two chapters of Oddball and we had a small talk about how they were produced. Coincidentally  he suggested that I have other projects in the works too to show that I can handle variety, Oddball is largely dialogue based, so he suggested I try something that shows more movement and has a different art style, which is the exact reason I'm working on my new series. This made me feel as if I'm taking a step in the right direction as I got praised for my work and also got given advice that was similar to my own trail of thought.

Back to Elroy, he showed us a variety of animation, by himself and by others. I find occasions like this very useful as it really puts your own work into perspective. After watching a variety of well made animations, my notes simply said something along the lines of "god dammit Anthony IMPROVE". At first this felt like a defeat, but I realized this is how I progress. I get to a certain happy level with my work, then sit there for a while. It takes a creative kick up the backside to get me up to the "next level", which I then repeat the cycle in.

All in all the talk from Elroy was inspiring as I have some reference level to what animation skill I need to be showing right now.

THE PRACTICAL

The next day, we were all set up in Electric Press with a light box each. After I got over my excitement of actually feeling like an animation class and learning techniques, the session began. Our goal for the day was similar to our workshop with Tony Garth, create a traditional hand drawn animation that showed anticipation, one of the 12 principles. I'll quickly describe anticipation for you:

Anticipation is a negative movement before the action designed to lead in to the motion and give the audience a clue as to what will happen. This isn't always the case however, as anticipation can be used to set up jokes and break the viewers expectations. An example in the Animators Survival Kit shows a man reaching back dramatically to play the piano, only to fall backwards in the action stage instead. Traditionally however, the action will have three stages, anticipation, action and reaction.

Without further delay, here's my short loop I made;

As you can see, I used one of my new characters as practice to see how adaptable they are for animation. These work slightly different to my usual style as the focus is more on the lines than the form. I felt that as I was practicing my new characters, I was drawing too slow compared to the rest of the group, so I may need to practice with these characters a bit more. I also brought in my character book full of reference art on that day, which was extremely helpful when drawing Viare.
I feel that animating on paper with a lightbox is a lot more stressful, as you can't preview your work, but it forces you to think more due to this, and also cuts out the shortcuts you may exploit in digital animation, like copying frames and sections and re positioning them. I'm not disappointed in my hop cycle, but I feel as if I could have done better. Also, to clarify, the original animation isn't a loop, this was a later edit in flash when I was drawing it digitally. The original shows anticipation by having Viare bend down before springing up.

Wednesday 7 November 2012

[Organisation] Work schedule


I feel I've been a tad unorganized with my animations and work lately, so I'm trying working to a schedule for a while to see how my work improves, below is the current plan:

MONDAY
Crusaders: An animation test I created that I'm going to be doing a music video of, I'm currently contemplating turning it into a big community project where people can send in their characters to include in the crowd and backgrounds.
Solrac Ventures: See my earlier post for information on this, I'll be working on future episodes on Mondays.

TUESDAY
Armouries: Tuesday will be dedicated to the Royal Armouries project. I'll be staying in the university to work with my classmates at this time.


WEDNESDAY
Oddball: I have two episodes of Oddball planned, so on Wednesdays (my day off) I'll be working on these.
Catchup: I'll also be using Wednesdays as my catch up time for any projects that need extra work.

THURSDAY
Study time: Thursday is my day dedicated to blogging, studying, essays and any other non-animation work.


FRIDAY
Nick Basile Radio Commisison: I'll be working on my commissioned work on Fridays and Sundays, I've told the client about this plan and they're OK with the idea.
"Vampire Pixel": Friday will also be dedicated to planning and writing my new series for 2013. I'm hoping to have a set of episodes written before I start the animation work.

SATURDAY
Saturday is my free day. I had people worried last year that I was overworking myself, so I'm setting a day aside to do other things.

SUNDAY
Nick Basile Radio
Catchup/misc work


Monday 5 November 2012

[Influences] City influences

For my new series I'm working on, I want to make the city vibrant and neon light filled. Below are a series of images I've collected from across the internet as visual reference:


MIRROR'S EDGE

Mirror's Edge is an EA videogame set in a futuristic, heavily stylized city. I particularly like the clean, colour coordinated sections of the city, as shown in the images below. The game often uses the (I feel as if I mention this a lot) blue/orange contrast well to highlight certain areas of the city. As the game is so fast paced (first person free running) this was a very clever design aspect as the player can take in the important details pretty fast as they leap from rooftop to rooftop. This environment style will be effective for me for the same reasons. In the static scenes I can have a variety of colours and details, but then in the heavily action based scenes, I can use colour effectively to draw attention to important areas.




REAL WORLD EXAMPLES


A big part of the environment I'm hoping to create is all about the lights and advertising. For examples. I've been looking at areas such as Tokyo and New York. The variety of colours can create a very high contrast background. The only trouble I think I'll face is that the backgrounds will distract people from the characters. Below are some examples I found:




ART EXAMPLES


The pictures below have given me some ideas about how to stop the bckgrounds being distracting, while still including the high contrast feel.The cities below stick to a small number of key colours for the glowy details. Once again, the blue/orange contrast is visible in some of these.




[Pre-production] Storyboarding and pre-production lesson [WIP]

This lesson was was exactly what I felt I needed. Some of the main feedback on my latest video, Oddball was that I needed to work more on camera work and shot composition. Conveniently, we had a lesson focusing on just that, and I now have a lot more information to practice with.

STORYTELLING
We started up by looking at the basis of storytelling. The first thing we looked at was a three act structure, meaning a story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

STORYBOARD PURPOSE
Once a script is written, the storyboard comes into play. The storyboard is a working document that is meant to help visualize the project. It also plans out the stage direction and is constantly updated as the project goes along, until the final product is ready to be shot. We were showed the video below as an example of how much a storyboard can help get vision of a scene. This can also help a lot in pitching as running through the video and narrating it really helps give a sense of timing and sound, essentially making it a  live animatic.


The storyboards go through three stages in its life:

  • A rough thumbnail showing the layout
  • A first pass of the shot, tidied up from the thumbnail
  • A rendered and tidier version that includes all the information needed for the crew to work from
The storyboard can be black and white rather than in colour. This helps in a studio as it can be photocopied easier and cheaper to be passed around to the crew. Colour can sometimes be important in storyboards for some shots, this will help background artists and also give indication on colour keys and lighting for the visual team. These are also best for clients as it's even clearer for them to envision how the video will play out.

STORYBOARD LAYOUT

Storyboards can have a variety of sizes and ratios, three standard sizes are 1.33.1, for a 4x3 ratio, 1.78.1 for a 16:9 widescreen ratio and 2.35:1 for an anamorphic scope. The width of the screen can really change the amount of information the viewer takes in on the screen, which leads onto the next part, TV cutoff guides.
Cutoff guides are there to help keep the action on screen in case the video is resized. There are title safe guides and action safe guides.

COMPOSTION AND SHOT TYPE
Composing with light
Selective focus
On a surface
Depth
Asymmetrical form
In line
In colour
Geometric shapes

RULE OF THIRDS

TYPES OF SHOT
Extreme long shot – wide shot
Long shot – Full shot
Medium Long shot – knee shot
Medium shot – waist shot
Close up – head shot
Extreme close up – detail shot

CAMERA ANGLES
Horizontal/eye level
Down shot
Up shot
Tilt shot
CAMERA MOVEMENT
Tracking in/out shot
Pan
Zoom
Zip pan
The shake
The tilt

180 RULE

DIRECTION
Each panel should have info.
Storyboard can be adapted
Transitions – changes in setting, time, narrative jumps
The cut – clean jump from one shot to another
The dissolve – fade in/out / cross dissolve
Effect transitions
Metamorphosis

FEATURE FILM ANIMATION
Always need storyboard – mass production – May take years
Colour key storyboards
TV series – budget/duration
Independent film makers may work without, still need a plan
Animated advert – client storyboard + working storyboard


THE ANIMATIC

Can be created in various ways
Bar sheets
Pipe line
Animatics and storyboards inc.

[Drawing] Life drawing - The head

In one of our life drawing sessions, we focused only on the head. This was a good opportunity to get some practice at different angles as this is the main part of character turnarounds that I have trouble with. For the first bunch of drawings we did an 8 angle rotation with each pose lasting 5 minutes. Throughout this I learned more about the structure of the face rather than just the silhouette. The structure of the nose, cheeks and lips were a bit part in creating the outlines, especially in tough angles such as the rear 3/4 view.


For the next bunch of poses, we dropped the time to 3 minutes. I'm naturally a slow drawer as I put too much time into getting the fine detail down, so in the 3 minute drawings I was starting to have some trouble getting everything down in time, however these exercises should help me to speed up my drawing from here on in.
By the time the 2 minute poses came around, the drawing had gotten extremely cartoony, focusing only on the main details. However there is one pose (second to the right on the middle row) that I liked the style of. The one minute poses were anatomically terrible as I was rushing to get even the base down. The model was unrecognizable, but looking back I realized that this was the point I started focusing more on the silhouette again rather than the form. The following 10 second drawings were just unbearable.


[Analysis] Analyzing videos and group discussions [incomplete]

On our Tuesday sessions, the class gather to watch clips and discuss them. These are soon becoming my favourite sessions as we get to see new styles of animation and also learn new methods and ways of looking at them by taking each other's feedback on board. Below is a catch up on some of the videos we have watched so far, as well as my opinions on them:

ALMA
This video was chosen by my classmate Emma, who is a big fan of Pixar animation. This short was made by an ex-pixar animator and follows the story of a young girl trying to get a doll from a toy shop. This film is silent, so it relies heavily on expression and music to convey the story. The character design for this is well suited as it's a child with typical large, expressive eyes. The key to the video is to get the viewer attached to the character with her endearing design and movement, the gap teeth and mittened hands create a cute feel to the protagonist. Because the audience is more involved in the character, they feel the sense of danger and suspense leading up to the twist at the end of the video.
ARK
This video was chosen by my classmate Will. This 3d animation uses clever sound design and lighting to create a strong, dystopian environment. We drew some similarities to the environment in the videogame Fallout 3, which has an area named Rivet city which has a very similar atmosphere.
The dull colour scheme in the area as well as the dim lighting compliment the escalating tension in the protagonists mind as he begins to accept his fate. 
One thing we discussed in class is if the video could have worked as a live action instead. While it's true there was no animation specific techniques used in the video, I personally feel that the way the characters were designed, and the overall art direction gave the film a depth that live action would not be able to reach. The distorted and exaggerated structure of the characters helped with the theme of disconnection from reality, however if this then changed to live action when the story switched to the "real world" I feel this could have worked.









Sunday 4 November 2012

[Commission] Solrac Ventures

I've been working on a few videos lately, and because of this, I've been neglecting my blog. As the first catch up post, I'm going to explain just what's been taking up my time.

A shouty horsey.
I've been asked by Solrac, a YouTuber in the Brony community to help animate a YouTube series for him. This was beneficial for a number of reasons:
  • I could get practice in working with other people's characters.
  • I can branch out a bit more in art direction.
  • It helps me to make more connections and work with big internet names, such as The Living Tombstone.
  • It's a chance to get more people watching my own work.
  • Solrac is a pretty swell guy! He's also done some voices for some upcoming animations of mine, so it's a good opportunity to pay him back.
FIRST STEPS

My first task was to learn how to draw the character Solrac, luckily I wasn't the first person to animate him, and he gets a LOT of fan art, so I had plenty of reference material to work from. In the video below, you can see another animator's work which I was told to use as a base, I advise you lower your volume...

The art style in this video has obvious differences to the actual show style on the right, so I had to look at it carefully in order to tell what the main changes are. As it turns out, the main focus is on the mouth and eyes, which add to the screamy "in your face" style. With this in mind, and a bunch of reference material, I got to drawing some test images. I was asked not to make the animation in the show style, but to show I've worked in it before, here's an old video of mine:

These pictures went down well and I then got the script and a rough animatic for the video. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to finish the video by the time the convention came around that was premiering the video. To help speed up the process, I had my good friend Jack create the backgrounds. I've had experience working with him in the past and the two of us work as an excellent team. You can read his blog entry on the backgrounds here. As for myself, Solrac and I agreed that this preview episode would consist of key poses, in the style of some of Egoraptor's work, as long as it contained some animation at the end to give the viewers some expectations, below is an example.


After some time the video was ready, just in time for the convention, you can see the result below:


Despite the video being incomplete, the response at the convention (shown below) was amazingly positive, with people literally getting up out of their seats. The response was also positive on YouTube too, the community opened it with welcoming arms. It was good to work on a piece with someone else that didn't turn into a total damn disaster. I'll be working with him on future episodes, so expect more blog posts!


I think things went well...