I'm back!
This week has been the busiest so far, full of ups, downs and weddings. I have been working on my clean keyframes all week as well as the props and backgrounds.
I have had me work critiqued today as well, the following images are to be featured in a long shot of a witches hut however I have been advised to make use of camera shots to bring them into close up shots so that they can be fully appreciated. The follwing images are the props in question:
Essence of Moles Breath.
Demon Cinders.
Soul Fragment.
Celestial Inkcap.
Hagnail Grass.
The desired effect for my backgrounds is pretty dynamic, I still want to achieve a traditional look and have resorted to traditional looking brushes in Photoshop as the deadline is ever closer. Below is a relativly finished background, I might make tweaks in post-production regarding the lighting effects.
Cat on the Shelf, Scene 2.
All in all the project is going well, for now. I have cut a tremendous chunk of the project out, I am still doing the animated shot, The Adventures of Edra and Phobos: Cat on the Shelf and the interactive comic book The Adventures of Edra and Phobos: Cat & Mouse. However the final installment The Adventures of Edra and Phobos: From the Flames has been cut due to time restraints, however! This is not the end, I plan on creating this short as a comic book instead and everything is in place to get this created.
The story is a lot deeper than I originally thought, I have put a lot of work in this week developing lore and story arcs so this is much more than a final university project. More on that as it unfolds.
This coming week I expect to posting more on the development of the project!
While i think my hand in went ok, I really need to figure out how to organise my files correctly and why some files were over a Gb. It took almost 15 minutes for my preproduction to upload, while I did do a lot there is no way it should of taken that long.
There are some major improvements I would of like to make to my preproduction, firstly I would of like to put my prop research and concepts in, however, on the day I could not find the file where I have put them, in essence; I was cleaning out my files and I "cleaned" them too well and removed the concepts from the folder- not deleted (I usually move folders I have finished with in to a "used" folder to show that I no longer need it). Therefore with the production project I will not have a warren of folders to navigate through.
Below are the forgotten ones, the images that will be unseen and ungraded.
I would of had these cleaned up and coloured if, I could only find them in my hard drive. *massive mental note - organise your files!!- *
I also submitted for the film brief rather than the show reel as, I do think my 3 scenarios are more film based.
I will be going in to depth about the research that went into my film scenarios and characters for my current project.
For an overview please view my earlier post here.
Edra the Witch
My witch is not an evil witch but she is sassy, comes across as cruel and domineering, perhaps clumsy at times. From these traits a i drew a few rough characters then found some characters that were similar in attitude.
I wanted her to look like a witch, but also have a glamorous appeal. quite like a 50's pin up girl, this lead me to look at characters like Vampira, Elvira, Lily Munster and Morticia Addams (both versions of the character portrayed by Carolyn Jones and Anjelica Huston). In terms of appearene I think these character capture perfectly dark witch/vampiric characters, I wanted this mysterious dark vibe with my own character too. As for personality they all possess an attractive arrogance, that situated them higher than anybody in the room.
Sybill Trelawney
I also wanted to make her a bit bumble-y, I immediately thought of Sybill Trelawney the Professor of Divination from Harry Potter. All these characters I purposely used aesthetic and personality traits from.
As far as animated characters, I looked at Disney's Cruella-de-Vil and the Evil Queen (Queen Grimhilde) From Snow White. They are inherently evil, but I thought I would take this to create a false sense of evil; my witch likes to be intimidating but it is not ultimately who she is this is why I love Cruella's sassiness, she doesn't have anytime for drivel, she just wants things to be her way, she is very much as snob. Like wise with the Evil Queen, just that she is much more two-face about it. I love both of these personality traits and i have studied their expressions and movement.
In terms of design, I like the exaggeration on Cruella's figure and how squinty the Evil Queens eyes can go, both I have implemented in to my character.
Phobos the Cat/Raven
The cat was originally my main character where a Edra the witch was more of a background character, but it later developed that they would feature equally in the scenarios.
I knew that the cat would have some magic ability, maybe a spell gone wrong on Edras part. I was thinking either an odd fur colouration, glowing runes, tattoos maybe a garment like a little witch hat or a saddle bags to put him apart from the rest.
I settled on transformation I dabbled with having him covered with eyes or transforming into array of creatures, I settled with a raven transformation and the eyes .. he is magic after all.
Mouse
Mouse line work, by myself.
He is a one-off character for the Cat & Mouse scenario. He is there to demonstrate my figurative animation, he is a chubby little glutton that tries to steal Phobos' bowl of mile then gets his just desserts.
I am collaborating with my friend Alex Thompson for this, she is designing me a mouse character that would work for the scenario. Click here to see some of her work.
However I do have a couple of concepts myself.
Demon
I had a lot of trouble designing this character, he was going to start off as an imp familiar that would transform into a cat and visa versa. He was meant to be small and mischievous, I still liked the idea so I put it on a back burner. I later realised that I would not have enough time to go into intricate detail of the transformation with the amount of time i had to make a show reel. Since I am now aiming for the film brief now I could of gone into more depth with the transformation of the character. Alas, the character has changed into a demon that Edra summons from a fire and Phobos gets rid off when they realise summoning the creature was a grave mistake.
That is all for Initial research: Characters so far!!
My first idea was to make a sort of documentary animated film about Cormorant fishing in
Japan. I found the idea when reading about the last surviving tribes and people
slicking to the old ways.
Cormorant
fishing is a fishing technique using the Cormorant bird, the fisherman would
tie a loose tie around the cormorants neck and the bird would proceed to catch
fish, the fish unable to go down the birds throat would be caught in the birds
mouth, once the bird had caught enough fish to fill its pouch it would return
to the fisherman where he would dispense the fish in a basket and let the
cormorant eat the smaller fish. The fisherman would have up to 5 birds on his
raft to help him fish.
I found this
process or co-dependency interesting; it had an air of fantasy about it. In fact it had sparked a few other ideas and I had researched other tribes that use animals to hunt, there was a Mongolian Falcon Hunting tribe and another mountain tribe that used horses, falcons and dogs to catch hare and other small creatures.
However my Cormorant fishing idea was the strongest of these and I decided I would portray the traditional technique it in an East Asian in woodblock style or brush/blot ink technique. Using 2D traditional animation with minimal colour.
My story was going to start with the journey of a koi carp in a small lake, it was mostly abstract but it illustrated the day of a cormorant fisherman.
It would reflect my skills in animation people and animals in a figurative sense as well as tackling animating water and ripples.
The Shaman/Druid
I had
several ideas buzzing around at the start and my second strongest was a set a
bit closer to home, it was about Scottish druids. The story was fuzzy but it
was a device mainly to illustrate my capabilities in animation and
illustration.
I was planning to do a lot of figurative animation of a shaman like character casting spells/curses. It was fueled by a lot of research of my previous film Out of Time. And a Scottish folk tale about a dark man-wolf creature that looked after the helpless and punished the evil/greedy.
I was very focused on having the main shaman character being based off a bird either a harbinger of death with the metaphor that he/she can conrtol life. So that left me to choose from a raven or an owl, both omens of death
The design was fantastical of course almost witch doctor/shaman-esque
with a bit of plague doctor mixed in. The other part I had to decide was if they were going to be intimidating or welcoming, or perhaps look different depending on who viewed them.
I liked
researching this idea so much that I thought I would stick in my comfort zone
and develop a witch story; with Halloween so close at this time it seemed to be
my calling. I developed a short story about a cat and witch; the cat collected ingredients
for his witch master to enable her to make spells, charms and potions.
(I then went through the creation progress again, sticking with the bird like features for my witch character, be then deciding against them a lot later into development)
Choosing a
final production, after much research and debate, I decided I would actually
like to make a show reel being as none of my ideas seemed strong enough to
create a 90 second film. I went with
the witch and cat story and fashioned it into scenarios that would work for a
show reel; walk cycles, head turns, hand gestures etc.
From here I have gone on to research my final production, now shaping up to be more of a film than a show reel, so I am now going by the show reel brief as of a couple of weeks ago being as I feel it is more a long the lines of what I want to achieve with this production.
My next update will be Initial Research #2 - the research that when into creating my current project.
Hello The Christmas break is here!! But by no means do I get a
break.
I am planning to carry on with my work at a steady pace through the
holidays. Yesterday I did a little bit of my business studies, planning on
where my future is going to be to write up my business report.
Today I am mainly spending a little time on my practical animation
module as yesterday I put all my video reference together as a sort of live
action animatic, it has become apparent 3 of my scenarios are over 2 minute
long that is 6 minutes in total- this is way too long so I have to take a
couple of days after Christmas to sort this out and re-tie them, just a quick
re-jig of what I am doing.
I have got a musician working on the music already he is currently
having PC issues so I won’t get my music snippets until after my hand in.
My plan for today is just start from the top and work my way down
through everything that I have done, to see if I have missed anything.
Being as it is Christmas Eve it think my dissertation will be neglected
tonight, but I am not too worried, I have a pretty clear of which direction I
am taking it, and it is coming together well.
A couple of week’s back I was researching huts and cabins and I came
across an artist,
Richard Greaves the "Anarchitect" has been very influential on
how I design the exterior of my witches hut, I don't even know if I will be
using it for a scene but I still wanted to give her a place of being, to ground
my character and build her up. Read more about him here.
It is final film & show reel time and I am so excited !
For our final animation brief we have to make a film, pre-production- in great depth or a show reel.
I being the awkward soul I am, have opted for a series of mini scenario films that are art heavy as oppose to animation heavy. So I have a concoction of all the of the briefs!
While I do love animation and I do want to be an animator, I haven't lost sight that I want to be a comic book illustrator for a career, so I am making animated comic books for a part of my show reel/film to address both these sides of my passion.
I wanted to make a witch film earlier in the year, and now I have done extensive research into this topic and my project has now developed immensely from what I started with, it has taken upon many looks and I have taken on board many suggestions.
I hope to be collaborating a lot this year, people working on my film/show reel and myself working on others projects too. Research for my character!
Mavis, Hotel Transylvania
I have done a lot of research into my character, I did the early concepts of her around September time. The she was put on hold until a couple of weeks ago when I did some proper research into designing her.
I have taken some major inspiration from Mavis (Hotel Transylvania). I found Mavis while looking for inspiration for hair styles, although I didn't use her hair style I took inspiration from her body shape to create my character.
Artists and their styles that influenced me are Loish and Randy Bishop.
Loish, Drift.
I love Loish's style, colour palette and textures, I also love the line she uses creates energy in her work in contrast to how delicate the characters look. Her characters look anatomically correct and that is a look I hope to achieve in my project.
As Loish has done, I would also really like to do an animation test with an immense amount of detail, however it be very subtle like a blink or an eye glisten, maybe hair caught in a breeze.
Randy Bishop,
Randy Bishop's ability to get a feel for a character is flawless, and I love how you can instantly look at one of his characters and know who they are. His line is a lot cleaner and his colour is more bold and simple than Loish's art.
His main inspiration for me is again, anatomy. But the facial features on his characters are so expressive, I hope to achieve this in my work.
Other key inspirations for my project is my love of sorcery and witchcraft, I have loved it ever since I was little. Obviously films like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were very infulencial on me, but a main inspiration for my film is The Dark Crystal and the concepts by Brian Frowd.
Blayne Fox
I have had other inspirations too, for the familiar I was inspired by Blayne Fox's entry to a character design competition. I love the idea of the cat being covered in eyes and I have seen it as a real challenge for my animation and redesign for my familiar.
Environment
Other inspirations: dark crystal - brian frowd
Inspiration for Hut Interior
I found a few interesting things for inside the witches hut on Pinterest, they were very inspirational, I hope to upload concept background sketches next week to show how I have implemented them.
In terms of backgrounds as a whole Kazuo Oga is personally my undisputed background genius, he is amazing. I do want a traditional look to my film even though it is being made mostly in a digital format. But if I can make background half as good as him I will be happy.
I hope to do some watercolour backgrounds soon I will upload in my next update.
In the mean time watch this sorcery.
Scenarios
I plan on having 3 scenarios in my show reel as well as a few line tests, and walk cycles and possibly arcs. The 3 scenarios are going to be in different styles and software but all based in the same world- this is because the scenarios are longer and wouldn't leave me with any time to design more characters so I would like to stick to 2-3 characters for the scenarios, instead of having lots of short clips and lots of characters and be preproduction heavy as there is not a lot of time.
Comic Scenario
I have a script, storyboard and rough thumbnails and animatic, i was going to do it in CelAction but my lecturers advised against it as it would take more time than I have to complete the scenario, mainly due to all the replacement shapes cutting into my time and the characters are very "human" as it was described and wouldn't have a good flow, it may seem floaty or clunky which isn't what I am going for for the comic book animation. Originally I took inspiration from the Watchmen Motion comic on YouTube, which I later found to be a bit too floaty for what I want to do:
For the comic section I love the looks of Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Wytches Scott Snyder so my comic book is mainly going to art heavy, I am thinking of doing it in Adobe Animate and After Effects so I can get the multi-plane aspect nailed and mixed with some smooth and graceful animation. My preprodcution will include the usual character design, turnaround, and expression sheets but I need to make loads of textures to achieve that Wytches look. By and artist simply know as Jock
I was also thinking of attempting to capture the style and finesse of J.H Williams' art work from Sandman.
I have my thumbnails my storyboard is still rough but it is nearly there, I think it needs some tweaks and the other 2 storyboards should be finalised by next week. For now I have my very rough animatic for the comic book sequence, I will be introducing pops of colour in the final i am so excited to make this!!
I think that is enough Information for this post I will upload most of my work in the next update, I want to get parts finalised before I show my progress.
Hey!
I have just handed in my after effects projects.
The brief was to make an Advert for a chosen charity, I chose the Wale Air Ambulance.
Over all I think the project went ok, i did have some issue with time management- but in honesty i thought i would of gone as smoothly as my Flash project went. However After Effects was certainly more complicated to use.
I feel like 4 weeks would of been a good amount of time to get my head around the software and have a good final piece. Also a structure would of been nice to work to, being a newby to the software, for example: Week 1 ideas, week 2-3 preproduction and week 3 production.
I found it especailly hard to find a good source for industry research, i found a lot for live action film. I was perhaps looking in the wrong places. I would like to conduct more research into this once i have had a rest.
If i were to do it again i think i would refrain from using a character and focus more on facts and imagery. I would like to further this by doing my other charities; Save the Bees and Little Princess Trust.
If you want to help out that charities:
Wales Air Ambulance: Here
Save the Bees: Here
Little Princess Trust: Here
I would just like to drop a bit of my process below:
