HOME distribution

For my distribution of HOME there are several methods I can partake in. The university has an interest in sending out the film to festivals, which while I want my followers online to see the film, may help to expand the viewer base and get my film seen by people more interested in animation than general viewers. As an alternative, I'm ok to upload the short to Vimeo, but I feel this is highly ineffective for my online work. As someone who works for online teams, and has a small following I'd prefer to be able to show my animation to my peers and followers without having to keep it secret, but some festivals require that the video has a low profile. In the time I'm not allowed to upload my video, I'll work on improving and ironing out any problems.

[Art] HOME poster

[Animation] HOME

Above is my final animation for university, HOME. This animation was made differently to my usual work as I wanted to add more variety in styles. The animation featured no voices, which meant I had to figure out how to tell the story through actions, rather than the characters simply narrating what happened. Because of this I feel I've improved body language in my animations, even with the simple character designs that the video used. I also used colour to tell the story, through things like the red warning lights clashing with a clear blue sky. 

I thought a bit more about the context and messages behind this animation when creating it too, and it has an environmentalist message behind it with the alien's character arc. In their story, they have escaped from an overheated, polluted planet to the calm, natural forest in which the scientist resides. When this area is in danger from their UFO, they decide to sacrifice it in order to protect the environment which they have fallen in love with. I also backed up this message with the screens in the lab, in which the aliens can see the beautiful outside world amidst the chaos in the lab.

The scientist/artist side of the story is intended to be a "don't judge a book by it's cover" type of theme. When the aliens crash land and are taken indoors, I built up an air of suspense through the way the characters interacted with each other. Dan also built up the sound to a climax at the point where the artist holds up a brush to the aliens. At this point the character is revealed to be harmless, and actually friendly to his new found visitors. In the end, he attempts to help the aliens out, and is repaid by them helping fix his lab, and staying with him so that he can paint them.
This animation was a lot of fun to make, the style was refreshing and allowed me to focus on areas I don't normally consider as much, and I feel I've learned more about storytelling and portraying characters through its creation.

[Production] HOME sound

Once I had the animatic and an early timing version done of my animation, I was able to get Dan working on the sound for the video. I spent some time working with him at his house where we were able to give each other feedback, come up with ideas for the video, and create the final soundtrack for the animation, including music, which was originally meant to be someone else, but due to time, Dan was able to fill in for. Below are the different parts of the final soundtrack:

[Animatic] HOME animatic and early renders

Above is the animatic for my graduation film, HOME. This was used to get an idea for the pacing before committing to the video. I knew that light was going to be a part of my video so I put in key colours such as the red glow from the UFO to illustrate the mood I wanted to get across. After this was done, I worked on a version of the video using keyframes that I would send to Dan to base the soundtrack on.

This version was animated mainly on twos, it was just there for Dan to base the sounds on, and as long as I kept the timing the same, I could then go over and put the animation on ones and make any other necessary changes.

With the sound in place, I created this version of the video, most of the video was animated, but this render was done to look for any errors or parts that I had missed out, such as hands and mouths. This was the final test render before the completion of the video, and I'd made some changes based on my thoughts and feedback of past renders. For example in the final scene I decided to change the key colour from a clear blue sky to an orange sunset. This was done because I felt it would add more to the tension of the situation, as well as give a sense of progression of time through the story when the characters were in the lab.

[Art] Big Boss

Above is a picture I drew in my free time. It is a digital drawing of the character Big Boss from the Metal Gear game series. This series has always been special to me as it's the first game I completed on my own and the back story spanning across the games is quite possibly the deepest of anything I've ever played. I drew this entirely using Flash as a way to test out the Wacom Cintiq I got with my university budget. The picture took about 7-8 hours to complete and I really learned a lot about tone and shading. I based the drawing from an iconic pose in Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4, in which Big Boss salutes his old mentor's grave. I also started work on another character from the series, Olga Gurlukovich, in the same style.

[Animation] Russian Dancing Men

Above is a video I created for Mr Weebl. This is the first in a series, based on an older music video on his channel, Russian Dancing Men. It was a lot of fun to work on this video as I was a huge fan of the original video, and Weebls-Stuff in general. In fact it's one of his videos that made me have an interest in web animation in the first place. This video was interesting due to the limited colour pallette, and it also helped me speed up my animation process. What would have taken me several months in the past can now be done in less than one, and I'm happy with that. I've had to make the animation for these simpler than my usual works, but I find that whatever is most effective given the brief is the best way to approach things now. The videos on his channel are weekly, so efficiency is of top priority.I also created a video for him in around a week, which was for Valentines. The video can be found below:

[Animation] Rave on the ISS

I created this music video for Mashed, a YouTube channel created by Channel 4. This one was a lot of fun because I was able to bring back the art style I used for Vampire Pixel, a bright, colourful and sharp style which I felt was nice and punchy for this bright and bouncy song. The video went so well that Oliver and I were asked to make a full series for the channel, which I'll be working on once I graduate.

[Research] UFO designs

Above is a series of images I used when designing the aliens and UFO for my animation. I looked into sighting photos, examples of other ships from the games Metroid and Destroy All Humans, as well as the paranormal photos from the intro sequence of Gravity Falls.

[Pre-Production] Visual Research - Backgrounds

GRAVITY FALLS
Both my original farm based idea and the bunker based idea take an amount of inspiration from the Disney cartoon, Gravity Falls. The show follows two twins on summer vacation in a town filled with paranormal activity and mystery. One of my main influences from this show is the background style, taking full advantage of the mise-en-scene, colour, and easter eggs to create a truly mysterious and wonderful atmosphere.

The pictures above have very strong key colours, which is an important part of my animation as I'll be using the lights in the lab to create a strong atmosphere that communicates the mood to the viewer.

COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG

The background art style for the original farm idea was somewhat inspired by Courage the Cowardly Dog. Using a crooked architecture in the middle of nowhere helped create an atmosphere that reflects the sociophobic protagonist, Hermit.

[Pre-Production] Visual research.- Aliens

POKEMON

Due to the small size of the aliens, I decided to play on cuteness to get an appeal across to the audience. To achieve this, and also envision how they may move and express themselves, I looked at Pokemon. With over 700 current designs, a lot of particular Pokemon were similar to the simple design on my own characters. Below is a selection of character designs:

These designs all feature a similar body structure, with a large, round head roughly the same size as their body. Using this simple base, the characteristics of each design were then brought out using colour, additional features such as ears or tails, and through a variety of eye and mouth styles.

INVADER ZIM

Created by Jhonen Vasquez, Invader Zim is a cartoon about a rogue alien under the illusion he is taking over the planet Earth. One thing I took note of in the character designs is the uniform the aliens wear, each following a similar design, just changed to match the different characters' body styles. I gave my alien tro matching uniforms to create a sense of unity and identity in their characters.

[Pre-Production] Character development.- Hermit

Throughout the course of this animation the storyline has had changes both large and small, and naturally these changes have had an impact on both the setting and the characters used in the final video.
The video initially centred around Hermit, a grumpy farmer character who wanted to be left well alone by others. This privacy was then broken by the introduction of the aliens. Hermit went through a few alternate designs after being called unfit for looking "like a little boy". By the time I'd gone through a few changes, I no longer liked the character and felt he'd slipped too much from my initial intentions, which was when the scientist approach came into play. I moved on from Hermit and created an entirely new character, Clemont. This character takes the same lonely nature as Hermit (as I wanted a gap for the aliens to fix). Clemont lives in an abandoned surveillance bunker, looking for creatures such as bigfoot which have been rumoured to be seen in the area. I followed the same story as my initial idea, with the aliens crash landing and the human character helping to fix their ship before it explodes, but the characters seemed to lack an initial drive and closure. This is when I decided to make Clemont a painter. Using this I gave him a reason to be looking for creatures on the screens in his bunker, as well as something to complete at the end. He lacks technological skills, which are then accounted for when the aliens stay with him at the end, giving him complete focus on his goal, which he finally achieves.

Above is the initial design for Hermit. In the first pass he was planned as a bit of a clumsy scatterbrain, shown by his long arms and blank stare.  I decided the first pass didn't look enough like a farmer, so I had a change of costume and added the grumpy side into his personality at this stage too. With this second design, I made a character sheet:

The style was somewhat impacted by another project I was developing at the time, and I thought the characters looked a little too similar once I'd made this pass. To the left is a concept picture for an online show Eddsworld that I worked on, containing a similar face structure and body build. This, combined with complaints from tutors about the character's age pushed me onto  few redesigns of the character, none of which I particularly grew attached to.

[Research] Lighting and mood boards

Before finalising the art for my graduation animation, I decided to gather some images to use as art reference and create a series of mood boards. I wanted to get a contrast going between interior and exterior environments by using key colours, blues and reds for indoors, and greens and oranges for outdoors. I want to be able to use colour in scenes to tell the progression of the story, for example using red as a key colour in the dangerous and most tense scenes and cool blues for the more stable and calm parts of the story.
A big part of the environments is the difference between natural and artificial light, the outdoor scenes will have more colours, whereas the indoors will focus more on a key colour.

[Animation] Fennekin

Blog's been a little slow over the past week for two reasons. First being that Jack, Will and I have been working on a group job through the uni, which took a big chunk out of last week, and secondly, Pokemon Y came out. As a huge Pokemon fan, I wanted to enjoy my weekend on this game, and now that it's complete, I decided to do a small loop of Fennekin. I went for a lower frame rate on this one as I thought it gave it a nicer feel with the flowing motion.

[Animation] Gaming channel opening

I made an opening for a gaming channel on YouTube over two days. This was a good test for working with a more simplistic style, as well as adapting other characters into different builds. I also put attention into the colour, using filters to set the overall tone of the shot.

[Animation] Unicornius

I made a silly video with YouTuber "Oliver Age 24" featuring his character Unicornius. I animated this in a day and it was a fun break from solid frame by frame drawing, made me remember the fun side of animation!

[Animation] Gaming WIP

A small work in progress GIF for a gaming channel opening I'm working on. We agreed on a simpler, "chibi" style for this opening, which is a nice change of pace and allows me to get some practice in more cartoony expressions.

[Animation] "Hermit" test

I did a quick animation test to see how the character works for my uni final, I needed to get used to the joins, so I tried him shirtless. I may make some changes to the character before the final film. Below is the first character sheet I made, showing the different stages of the character's production, as well as some expression tests.

[Update] Future of Clayos

As those of you who follow my work will have noticed by now, releases on my own personal animations, such as Oddball have pretty much ground to a halt over the last year, so I'm making this entry to put things to rest, explaining my plans for everything I'm involved in. I'll cut to the chase and get straight to Oddball.

Since starting the series before University, I've learned a lot of new things, and a lot of things I did poorly over the course of the "show", whether these be in drawing or writing, most of the show feels heavily flawed or dated to me now, as well as being poorly suited for what I want to get out of animation (namely the animation side of things, rather than the writing/production) To carry on and finish the canon episodes (chapters four to eight) would be a pretty poor use of my time, and an even worse showcase for what I want to bring to potential employers. As such, I'm putting the show on the shelf, I may pick it up later in some form, whether it be animated, or something simpler like a comic, but for the time being, the canon series is being laid aside to make room for better, and more worthwhile productions. I may make the occasional short, as Antique still stands as one of my favourite creations, and I hope to release Chapter 4 in some form so as not to disappoint the voice actors and people who have contributed, but after that point, everything falls into limbo. Hopefully people can understand and respect the decision, it's taken a fair amount of time to realize that I've been stressing over things while my heart just isn't in the project any more.

Moving swiftly onwards to Vampire Pixel. I'm again going to be straight to the point when I say I do want to complete this animation (and yes, it's a one off). Due to the format, a fair few people have come to the assumption that this was intended to be a series, but through my second year of Uni and after failing to complete the animation in time, I learned a few mistakes I made, and hope to apply those to future work. As I said, I do plan to finish this animation once I get time, but I'd rather this be something I sit and plow through than a spare time project I half-ass. I only ask people be patient while I put my time and effort into other projects over this uni year!

So with those two projects aside, I think I can safely go onto one of the big reasons I'm restructuring. As previously mentioned, my big goal for this work is employment, and I'd specifically like to work as an animator, I'm not the best when it comes to writing, nor do I have the biggest interest in it for the most part, but what I would like to do is get experience working in a variety of situations and animate for some different projects. A lot of my personal projects felt the same, and until recently I had the worst case of "same-face" syndrome ever in my drawings. To mix things up, I want to try working with a bunch of different creatives online, this is not only useful for work's sake, but it's also building me a very satisfying network of creative friends, as well as enabling me to work with some people I really respect. To put things simply, I'm branching out to add some variety to my work, as well as taking up some paid opportunities to help support myself while at University.

Shelving a few projects also gives me a lot more much needed time to create my final piece for University, which is arguably the most important animation I will ever make. After a crushing disappointment with Vampire Pixel, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid the same thing happening again. I can't say a huge amount about my project, as it's still in very early pre-production, but what I can say is that I hope to keep it short, achievable, yet effective. Until then, I hope people are ok with the changes in plans, and I hope people stand by for the new Kreid!

[Update] Returning to uni / work projects

The dreaded holiday is finally over and it's time to return to the blissful chaos that is university.
Before I talk about my final project, I thought I'd have a catchup of everything I've been working on over the holiday. I've been involved in projects with a variety of styles and methods, while staying close enough to home to apply what I've learned to my own work.

EDDSWORLD (Online show)

As mentioned a few times in the past, I've started working for an online show called Eddsworld. For those not familiar with the show and it's history, please watch the video above. As a new animator, I was told to make my style a hybrid of the show's and my own, my outcome ended up being the character sheet below. As I'm working on a pre-existing show, I need to make sure I stay faithful to the art and characters, while still keeping myself comfortable with the animation work. I'm very happy to be part of this project, and hope I make a good contribution to the fans and the show.

THE CHARM PRINCESS (iOS app)

I worked on a short scene for an upcoming application. This job was interesting as it got me using different techniques to my usual animation style, as well as animating someone's pre-existing models. Once I'd adapted I was fairly happy with the animation style, and learned some new skills and techniques in Flash in the process. Information on the app is in the video below, please note the shots in the video weren't animated by me, I'll link to them when they are made public!

HOW TO DRAW REALLY GOOD (Online show)

I recently started working with YouTuber "Oliver Age 24", who runs a parody series named "How to draw really good" in which he draws intentionally poor pictures in a tutorial fashion, making fun of the online art community. At the end of his videos, he compares to a well drawn picture, and acts overly critical of them. An example can be seen in the video below:

Over the past week or so I've drawn art for some of his upcoming videos, as well as made two music videos with him, done in an intentionally terribly animated style similar to that of Jerry Jackson.
Not all of the videos are out yet, so I'll share the teaser for one of the upcoming music videos, Unicornius:

TOMMY FINTON: THE INSIDE FACT (Documentary)

Most recently, I worked on a short clip for a documentary being made by my cousin, Chris Harrison. This documentary will be focusing on the struggles of a handicapped YouTuber, and his rise to popularity. I animated a short segment explaining the concept of "trolls" using a rough voice track.
I asked Chris to sum up the documentary:

The documentary looks at the life of Tommy Finton, a 24 year old with learning difficulties, who has become an underground stat among the YouTube community. Speaking to friends and enemies of Tommy, Inside Fact covers not only Tommy's story but also how internet culture has formed its own niche form of entertainment, and what issues come with it.

The content of this documentary is also relavent to my dissertation, which will focus on the impact the internet has had on the world of animation. A lot of online animators have come under harsh feedback from trolls and critics alike, which really tests an individuals willpower to push against the face of the anonymous masses.

Nick Basile Radio #3 (Animated podcast)

I completed the third episode of Nick Basile Radio, which I'll link to once it's uploaded!

Solrac Ventures (Online show)

I made a quick overnight video with Carlos Moreno for a fundraiser for his upcoming show, Solrac Ventures, this was followed by a successful IndieGoGo campaign in which we received well over the initial goal, in return we sent out a huge amount of custom artwork to donators. More information in the video below, followed by some of the art I drew for backers.

SMALLER JOBS

I did artwork for aspiring voice actor, Emily Jones.

Which led onto another.

And finally, I had some time for myself, so I finished the opening to Vampire Pixel!