Weight, Stretch and Squash and Timing assignment

We were asked to create 2 animations of a football dropping into the frame and coming to a halt considering the first 3 principles of animation. 

I think with both of my animations I should have fixed my timings a little better. For the football I would have liked to have more of a bounce, a larger arch and make it more of a fluid movement. For the bowling ball animation I think it would have looked better done a bit slower. I'm still getting the grips of flash but I would definitely love to experiment more on it and I'm most probably going to start a side project done in flash.

For my first brief in the Animation Course we were given a sketchbook project called 'Toy Story'. We had to find a toy and draw it in different locations and varied compositions. Here are some pages from my sketchbook.

His name is Sparx and he is a curious little dragon. 

-X-

Started off with some observational drawings of Sparx..

I then decided to try bring him to life.. Have him standing and give him a smile. I plan on trying different facial expressions and more expressive poses. Perhaps make him a little more stumpy to give him more of a cuteness factor.. We'll see where it goes.

As development work for my silhouette dancer animation I made a Plasticine figurine and was considering to make a stop motion by casting a light on it and making a shadow. This turned out to be too complicated to do as there were leaps in the dance and I wasn't sure how to capture that. So then I decided to experiment with the scanner and see the effect I got from it. Here are the outcomes:

Meet Ayla. 

She is a girl that has grown up living the beach bum life and has to finally start a life in the big city. It's all still a really rough idea, I just enjoyed making doodles of her. 

Sea animals done in biro.

Sketchbook pages.

I discovered a blog by Will Terell and that inspired me to loosen up my drawing, break away from keeping everything realistic so I did some studies of different facial features and hands. I found it to be very liberating to draw in this way and will post some character designs up soon. 

* Link to the Will Terell's blog: http://willterrell.com/

 The final animation.

Throughout the Foundation course I explored different aspects of art that were very new to me but the one thing that has fully grasped my attention was animation. The ability to make something move fascinated me; it was a way to bring your drawings to life. Over the course I experimented with very traditionally based animation exploring the movements of different life forms. I then decided to expand and push myself into a more ambitious project. I have always loved the fluidity of dancers and the stunning grace they portray. The perfect balance and poise they achieve fascinates and greatly inspired me. I wanted to capture the elegant flow of dancers in a similar style to Ryan Woodward’s ‘Thought of you’.

Floris Neususs’s photograms heavily influenced my work. The figures are ghost-like, haunting and they seem to convey a sense of longing, a need for a connection with another world. The figures have been positioned in beautiful feminine poses, and they appear to be in mid air flying peacefully or falling down. His work brings you closer to them and their plea, questioning the boundaries of life and death, or even the in-between. The actual method and processes of Neususs’s work is what intrigued me the most. He uses large sheets of silver bromide paper placing a model on top, this paper is coated with special chemicals which react to light thus ‘catching’ the shadow left behind by the model, the end result is a white figure on a black background and with reversal paper the figure would be black with a white background which appear to be more familiar and similar to the normal human shadow. It is a basic photographic process done without the use of an actual camera and explored professionally by numerous artists such as Susan Degres, Adam Fuss and Floris Neususs. 

Ryan Woodward's 'Thought of You'

Floriss Neususs Photogram