Wednesday 30 December 2009

Little Piece of Heaven

Yesterday was a sad day for me. The drummer from my favourite band, Avenged Sevenfold died. At 28, it's far too young to be taken from this world. They were halfway through recording a new album and I was so stoked about the subsquent tour that would come with it where i'd finally get to see them. Sadly, even if they do tour, it won't be the same.

Jimmy "The Reverand Tholomew Plague" Owen Sullivan (aka The Rev) was quite possibly one of the most talented drummers on this earth and no other drummer could possibly fill the space he's now left in Avenged.

My favourite song, Little Piece of Heaven, was written by him, and has one of the most twisted concepts going. But it's fantastic, beautifully composed and has a brilliant animated video, which is why I'm posting it.

So, yeah, R.I.P. Rev x

Sunday 13 December 2009

christmas

I'm home for Christmas and feeling as Scrooge-like as ever.

I wish I was back at Uni, or (dare I say it?) that we'd been set some work to do over Christmas. Inspiration has deserted me completely in recent months, and I would've liked it if I had something to try and get the creative juices flowing (although, had we been set an essay or something along those lines, I'm pretty sure that would've drained whatever inspiration is knocking about).

Anyway, I hope everyone has a nice Christmas, and if I don't update before then, I'll post some shit for you in January.

Monday 7 December 2009

Bradford [2]

I’ve been meaning to get round to talking about Bradford again (like I promised a good while ago). I’ve hunted out some of my favourite films I saw on YouTube, and provided the links so you can have a cheeky peek at them (and either agree with me on how cool they are, or completely disagree).


The Professional Films

I have to say, if I’m brutally honest, I thought the quality of the student films were (dare I say it?) better than the professional ones. The Student ones have been proved much harder to find online, probably because they’re still owned by the Colleges that made them, two of the films I really liked (“Bruce” by Tom Judd & “I See What You’re Saying” dir. By Lottie White), came from the RCA but even though they’re mentioned on the website, there’s no link to see the films, which is a shame.


The Cat Piano
Directed by Eddie White & Ari Gibson (Australia/2009/8mins, 23secs)
I really loved the style of both this film and the one below, the story is a pretty strange one but engages your attention all the way through which some of the other professional films didn’t succeed in doing.


Lettin’ Go
Directed by Malika Whitaker (France/2008/5mins)
I love the style used for this, it almost looks like it has been drawn with spray paint and stencils, I also like the looseness to the story, I style can’t really figure out the ending and what has supposed to have happened to the male character.
Other films I really liked in this category were “French Roast” directed by Fabric O Joubert (France/2008/8mins, 15secs) and “Alma” directed by Rodrigo Blaas (Spain/2009/5mins, 2secs), both were done in 3D and are simply amazing animations. They both won awards, but sadly I couldn’t find videos for them.

Commercials
I love animated adverts so much, they make a nice break from the normal low budget adverts that are constantly repeated. I only saw this advert on TV a couple of times so was really pleased when it was featured at BAF (and won the Commercial award). It’s a clever combination of 2D and what must be Pixilation, I also love the song that goes with it, it fits really well, and you’ll see why:

Audi Unboxed


Panoramas


Photograph of Jesus
Directed by Laurie Hill (UK/2008/6mins, 40secs).
I really like this one (well, I like all of them which is why I’m writing about them), but I think this one is pretty clever, it uses Cutout and Collage with Pixilation which is something I’ve been really tempted to do myself at some point (who knows, I could try it out over Christmas...). It’s also a visual piece that goes with a spoken interview (like Creature Comforts).


Loof and Let Dime
Directed by Vereshchak Roman (Russia/2008/2mins, 31 secs).
This is similar to “Photograph of Jesus” in that it creates a visual to spoken words, but it couldn’t be more different. A lot of my fellow students disliked this film, but I thought, even though it wasn’t one of my favourites, it was worth talking about. It creates a visual to a nonsense repeated poem, even though the images it uses don’t have anything to do with the words being spoken, I love how the text travels around the screen, it reminds me of a similar thing on of my classmates did in foundation.

It’s been nice to be able to watch the videos again and write about them, I can’t believe Bradford was nearly a month ago! It’s not nice when you realise just how quickly time has slipped through your fingers!

Walk This Way... [sorry]

Once again, the reason for lack of updates is down to the epic FAIL of the internet connection at Glasney View. I wrote this update on the 3rd of December and have only just been able to upload it!

We had to take the walk cycle a step further, by having to animate our own walks! We got filmed walking along: a normal walk and a silly one and were told we had to animate one (or both of them) in 2D and 3D. I chose to do my normal walk (my silly walk wasn’t silly at all, it was supposed to be a sad walk, but i’m a terrible actress – I did drama in Year 12 for one of my AS-levels but was cringe worthy awful when it came to the physical acting side of it!).



I actually found this task easier to do on Maya (SHOCK) than I did drawing it – but I think this is because I tried to get my figure looking as life-like (or at least as human-like and in proportion) as I could. I originally started with the head just being a bald circle but it looked very strange, especially when I decided to draw my trousers and shoes a bit of detail, so I added the hair and profile which were a bit of a nightmare trying to get looking right.



I did two versions of my 2D walk, but I prefer the rough version in blue pencil to the one with clean lines, the blue figure looks like it has more weight and character to it, so this was the one I submitted for marking. If you spot a face appear on the right hand side you’re not going mad! As it was only meant to be a rough version I practised drawing my profile on frame 5, so a face appears for the briefest second (well, one 24th of a second to factually correct, haha). I would’ve scrubbed it off but I quite liked it and didn’t get a chance to scan it before I shot it all on the line tester. I still need to shoot the other one!



We also had life drawing this week, and after a few weeks off from it I was quite rusty. This wasn’t helped by the fact we had a new model, so it was the first time I’d drawn a woman as well. I couldn’t get the proportions right for quite a while, I kept giving Jane a really small torso compared to her really long legs and large upper body, but I was quite pleased with the final drawing I did- I was even brave enough to attempt to draw her facial features! I’ll upload a post with lots of life drawing pictures at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future!