Life Drawings

Every second week we did life drawing to improve our knowledge of human anatomy and drawing skills. I found that it was extremely helpful and I learnt a lot in each session. I need to stop being so tentative with the postures and maybe do more gesture drawings in my spare time to understand general postures and alignment. I always found feet difficult to draw and tended to avoid it in life drawing which is another thing I think I should start practicing in my spare time. 

Mazed Project

We were given a project to animate a short folktale based in Cornwall for the Mazed project http://www.mazedtales.org/  which would be created for an iPhone app. We were given a short period of time and a lot of work so there was constant stress throughout the whole project.
When we were first given the project and assigned our groups we discussed who would take on what role and played around with character design ideas. I was one of the animators on this particular project, working on the kitchen scene, mining scenes, the knocker's eyes and the picking up and dropping of the food.
As the animation would be played on a small screen we figured it would be best to have the animation made in a very simple style with bright colors contrasting with a watercolor background.


There were many complications throughout the whole project.. people falling behind on deadlines, technical difficulties, lack of organisation. All in all considering the time and knowledge of the softwares I think we ended up creating a good final piece. We redid the piece a few times to perfect it before sending it to the production company.. there are still some things that could do with adjusting, for example the fairly noticeable difference between the two animator styles. As dan,the other animator, and I worked separately but still using our director's designs we ended up with the main character looking slightly different so it is clear the final animation was done by numerous people. We could have avoided that by making it simpler-having it in a cut-out style and having all the assets ready and then animated later.

Here is the E4 sting I animated.. I liked the idea of it and really do wish I had a little more time to work on it. I ran out of time and so the timing just doesnt seem right towards the end, a bit sped up but nonetheless I'm still quite happy with how it turned out in the end considering everything.

We were given a short 2 week project working on an ident for the E4 channel. The first week we had to do design sheets, a storyboard and an animatic using a chosen 10 second sound clip. At the end of the first week we were told to swap our projects with someone else so in the end I had to animate someone else's idea and they animated mine. In all honesty, that was a bit unnerving but in the end I came round and started working on someone else's. 

It was difficult working on this considering the time I had.. I wanted to add more details in the tentacles, make them have a more fluid flow so to speak. There was a problem when it came to exporting the animation from flash so I ended up losing 45 seconds.. I will keep trying to export it and upload it when I can. I'd also quite like to actually animate the one I designed and enter it into the competition later on this year. I had originally planned to make it a stop motion and make the creatures out of paper mache and gears and have it set on glass layers (similar to how the animation mykonos-grandchildren was created). I thought it would be too much to ask someone else to do create it as I originally planned so just told the person to animate it in flash.

First Showreel is up!

It's been a hectic couple of months but learned many things, here is a compilation of everything I've done. I will be making improvements to the animations (in particular the 3D animations) and look forward to the next semester.

Picking Objects up

This one was difficult but interesting. I enjoyed learning new techniques (i.e using constraints in maya) and experimenting with the movements of the rig. It was interesting creating polygons and seeing how I can make the rig react with the surroundings. 

To further improve this I'd make his movements more natural, perhaps moving his body slightly to indicate breathing, having him blink.. just making him look more realistic. I had to redo this one a few times cause it was getting complicated but it was simple complications in reality. I made more problems in my head than there actually were. I want to improve my sense of timing when using maya, I still find the dope sheets hard to use and same goes with the graph editor.

Maya Walk Cycle.

Animating Burt walking wasn't tooo bad but there is something I'd like to adjust given the chance to work on it again.. He has a slight 'limp' in his step. I want to make a smoother walk cycle and also try out different walks, for example a slow, lazy walk.. a feminine walk, one with a little 'hop' in his step and so on. The more I use maya the more interested I get in it and the more I want to learn but I just need to find the right pace for myself and take it at that speed. 

I'd also like to adjust the tips of Burt's toes to give his walk a bit more character.