Group Project Logs

Here's a log of which roles I played in the various different group projects we've been assigned throughout the first year

Pixelation Project
I believe this was the first group project we had to do, although it was a minor one. I didn't actually feature in the video, or really play a big part, but there was a lot of us in the group and the entire thing was created in one day. My part in this video was some work with the camera, taking the stills, positioning and moving props around and small bits and pieces like that. I believe James and Sean edited it and added the titles etc afterwards.
Role: Camera work, Bits and Bobs.



Exhibition Project
In this project Sean and I decided to create an exhibition for the work of the Animator Jan Svankmajer. We came together on numerous occasions to discuss thoughts and ideas for the project, and spent a few days working on the plan for the exhibition and the pieces that we would show in it. We worked up a final booklet to showcase the exhibition, which I created in photoshop while Sean helped make decisions about the look of it. Deciding on the writing inside the booklet was very much a joint process.
Role: Ideas/Brainstorming with Sean, Creating look of Booklet in Photoshop, Co-writing Booklet with Sean.







Student Project
I was mainly in the Pre-production team for this project. I initially went through the script with the rest of the team and brainstormed ideas for the characters we would create from it. We then went away and each drew a few rough pages of ideas and a final look for the characters we were assigned to by the project manager, Holly. In my case this was the Ant character. When all the characters were designed, most of the team went away to storyboard, while I had the job of creating backgrounds for most of the animations. I created 5 in all and handed them over to the team to animate.
Role: Pre-production (Brainstorming/Ideas, Character Design), Background Design in Photoshop.

Alien Background

Beetle Background

Dolphin Background

Ant Background

Rhino Background


Library Project
I moved onto this project straight after completing the backgrounds for the Student Project, and was assigned the opening scene of the animation. My job was to Animate the character over the top of the rough render of the 3D scenes, which I completed yesterday :D
Role: 2D Animator, Scene One.



Original Video - More videos at TinyPic
(Ignore the rough background and crappy quality)

stuff

Time for an update, I think. So yesterday was the third(?) day of intense flash animation for me and... I didn't like it. I was sick of flash already and found myself getting increasingly frustrated with it, not necessarily for a certain reason but I was in a bad mood with it. I kept going though, and I'm actually very pleased with the results. I did the scene where the guy is swallowed by the book, and even though I had to deal with nasty camera angles/movements and perspective, I did it and looking at it today i like it. I think that's the thing with flash and other 2D animating stuff, you fiddle around drawing a million drawings and nudge them along in tiny incriments, clearly punishing yourself horribly because you hate yourself or something, then in the end you get a lovely moving thing.

Yeah so I hated it yesterday, I wondered why I was doing this when I would much rather be keyframing some model that was already made and didn't need me to draw out every single frame. And I'm not sure whether it's the rewarding feeling I got from looking at the scene this morning, or the fact i'm listening to my favourite band whilst doing today's scene, or maybe because I haven't done anything complicated today, but by some freak brain accident I've actually been enjoying it and am considering doing some animating in my own time??!??? It feels therapeutic, helps forget my hangover.

I just tried to make a movie of my last scene but I'm not sure how, so I won't upload it, but here's a crappy mockup of how the final thing will look to make my blog more beautiful:

Doneee... on this project

Here are the final two backgrounds :D. Miraculously the beetle one only took me a few hours and is one of my favourite backgrounds. Nice and simple and fun to draw. The Alien background may look familiar... that's because I completely cheated, flipped the Ant background, erased some trees and fixed it up a bit and called it anew :P I really had to get onto the Library project, though, (which i'm starting today) so it's allowed.

In this Library project, my job is flash animating... which even though I hate flash I don't really mind, i'm looking forward to making some good animations, although maybe when I actually start i'll become slightly less enthusiastic. Anyway, time to start flashing. The painting was fun, now the hard work begins.

updateupdate

k just 'finished' the Rhino BG a few hours ago:



I'm not really happy with how it turned out to be honest. I was really happy with it in the rough stages, and I think it was possibly stronger than it is now at that point. I threw quite a few snazzy textures and crap on the painting, initially to add the grit and dirt to the roads and walls, but I think in the end they were there more to cover up my poor painting than to directly add to the painting itself. And after three completely covers, playing around with photoshop I finally realised that I never had Opacity set to pen pressure... which would have made things a ton easier for me. Stupid. I feel quite worn out right now, so i've allowed myself a break for an hour or two. Can't decide whether to play in photoshop or maya, but i'm doing something for fun rather than for the project. I think i'll start my next (and possibly last? or second to last) painting in the morning. That's the dung beetle one, which is looking quite simple to complete; just a little patch of dirt and a background. Hopefully it'll be as easy as it looks. Andy's been doing a few of the backgrounds since he's animating some of the characters in flash, and while this eases the load for me, it's probably not the best idea for unity of style.

I've been looking at a lot of amazing paintings by digital and traditional artists today and i'm not sure whether they inspire or discourage me. I guess a bit of both, I definitely feel an urge to improve and while i'm not super optimistic at the moment I think i'm on the right tracks right now. Still working hard in class and when I get home I just look up more and more paintings and 3D stuff. Both mediums compliment each other really well too I think. It feels like 3D modeling is a lot more technical than painting, less emphasis on your artistic ability and more your mind for space. Or something like that. So when I'm not feeling particularly creative I can work with the mechanics of the stuff, and vice versa. It's hard to fit everything in but i'm sure that's a good thing, it means I won't be stopping for a while.

Also i'm quite into this blogging thing too, i'm quite a loudmouth really.

p.s. Bugger off Han :P

Wooo

Everything's going well with the new project; I've finished two of the eight? (*gulp*) backgrounds, and my third is coming along well, as of the last few minutes. I've been free to get on with my paintings and have been putting alot of time into them, most nights i'm in til past 6, but the atmosphere is really nice and I haven't really been feeling frustrated at all. The Dolphin background caused me a little annoyance with it's colour scheme and architectural details (it's really annoying drawing straight/curved lines all the time) but i managed to finish it, and while i'm not entirely pleased with the results, it'll do for the time being. Here are my backgrounds so far, Ant, Dolphin (completed apart from the Water. At present i'm unsure whether or not it will be animated. I do have a rough sketch of the water which looks much nicer than the plain blue, but I'm not going to waste my time finalising it if it'll just be painted over in the end anyway) and Rhino (rough) respectively. Click for larger images:










My favourite so far is the Ant, closely followed by the Rhino which might beat out the Ant if I do it well enough. The Dolphin painting doesn't sit well with me, maybe because it wasn't a lot of fun to paint all of those steps and poles. The colour scheme's a bit bright for me too, but really it had to be since it's an aquarium type place. I think it'll be okay as the actual background when it all comes together though, i'm not worried.

I think i'm doing reasonably well on time, I was never going to finish one per day like i'd have liked to, but that's quite unreasonable to ask of myself considering I usually take forever. I am learning to let myself loosen up a little though, which helps quite a bit. I'm getting each painting completely in about 2.5 days at the minute, which will do for me. I'm not sure what's going to happen next week when I'm meant to switch to the Library project and I inevitably haven't finished all of the backgrounds, but i'll cross that bridge when I come to it. At the minute i'm happy just to plod along having fun in photoshop :D I don't think i've learnt a lot more than I knew as far as photoshop goes before I started the project, but the practice helps a lot, and I think i'm wising up my colour choices and challenging my eye for composition. All in all i'm very much enjoying this project so far :)

new haps

Another week, another project. With the new setup (4 teams on 4 projects and mixing and matching) it's a bit strange but we've just finished the ideas phase and it's going okay. When we work in teams like this it's a little difficult fitting everyones ideas and expectations together, but as long as you come to a compromise it's not so bad. I'm a bit of a control freak so it's a little difficult for me. I'd like to be able to do everything myself but obviously I can't, I just have to have faith in the others lol.

I've given myself the hefty task of doing the backgrounds for the student project. This'll definitely keep me busy and surely improve my photoshop skills which is nice. Especially situations like this where you won't always be doing something which you want to be doing. In this case i'm skipping storyboarding for background design and this suits me fine. My only worry is taking forever on these things which is a very likely outcome, but i'm aware of my time restrictions and in one day i've managed to rough out the first background and have started polishing it already, which is probably a record for me. Maybe i'll upload some pictures in a few days.

Apart from the project, for the past week or two i've really been trying to study human anatomy. I've got the basic landmarks on the front of a human down and it's quite satisfying. It's something i've wanted to learn for probably about 2 years now, something which I think is extremely important if I want to improve as an artist, and i'm happy to have started. Up until now it's just seemed a bit daunting but when I was bored the other day I started reading a book by Andrew Loomis that I downloaded a while ago. It's a very good book and inspired me to finally start learning seriously. The book's out of print or something, so it's free and legal to download and distribute, and i've uploaded it incase anyone else would like to have a read. I'd highly reccomend it. Anyway, I think i should be able to keep up this learning and hopefully soon enough i should be able to draw completely accurate people :D Download down there.

ANDREW LOOMIS FIGURE DRAWING PDF

The Flour Sack

Just a quick post about my progress with the flour sack. This is HARD WORK. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, in fact I think i'm enjoying it, but it's almost 8 o'clock and i've been in the studio all week and i'm about half way done. It's going well though, I feel like the sack has some character, even though he's only walked a few steps at the minute. The technical side of it is a bit messy; i'm sure i'm doing quite a few things wrong (or at least going about doing them the hard way, my graph editor is hilariously messy) but these are mistakes i'll just have to make until I learn how to do them the right way. I'm happy with the amount that i'm learning at the minute, and i'm just about managing to pull the animation off the way I want to. I'm feeling very motivated, not just in this task but in general and it's lasted for a week or so already and still going, rather than the occasional flicker. I'm trying to do and learn as much as I can, I know I need to be like this to get a good job and all that crap. Hopefully it'll last. Anyway, Here's the sack so far:



UPDATE 01/05/08: Spent today getting as much done as possible after the storyboard session (which I actually enjoyed :o) and i've come a little way. Today was the most frustrating day for me so far, but only because of a short period of time where I completely messed up my character's ears in the section I was working on. They completely spazzed out and I couldn't figure out why, which led me to restart from a previous save, losing a short part of my work. I don't really mind, it's probably better off for losing it. Now my character is ready to jump, but i'm undecided which route to choose. Either the sack will puff up his chest and bravely jump off, or close his non-present eyes tight and throw himself off the edge. The first option is quite a change in the personality of the character, which is why i'm hesitant to choose it, but to be frank it's probably easier and I only have one day left. The second is more in-keeping with the sack's cowardly character but i've had some problems with the ears and they'd have to be used quite a lot showing the 'scrunched up' reluctancy of him. Since I only have one more day to complete him i'll probably choose the first option and deal with the inconsistencies. He is only a sack after all. They can't be that intelligent.

UPDATE 2/05/08: Done :D It's not bad either, I decided to go with the superman off the edge and it looks okay. The anticipation is a little dodgy (I couldn't get a really big squish before the jump without it looking funny) but I put that down to the rig being poor/me being poor at controlling the rig properly. Same with the ears, I would've liked to have animated them a little more or a little better, but I just found the ears in particular so difficult. Two out of the three rings around the ears seemed to have very little control over the ear itself, and the other seemed a little irrational. Due to this I kept the ear movements down to a minimum but what I have is okay. Surprisingly I haven't really felt forced to complete this animation. There have been times (but only very few) where I felt frustrated with it, but apart from that it's been reasonably pleasant, and i've just got on with it at my own pace. I still have time which I could use to tinker around with it, but I think i'll call it a day and wait for my next project :) Here's the finished animation: