Experimental Ideas

I've been kind of neglecting blogging about this project, mainly because I had a lack of ideas for aaaages, and then when I had some, they weren't particularly good. But, this post is to show, that YES, I have actually been doing some work towards it. But more importantly, have now got an idea I want to start working with.

Some reject ideas:

My final idea:

Reminds me of this YouTube video I had a look at (though hopefully my cut-out parts will be animated better):


Camera set-ups for the final idea, the one on the left is how I thought I'd need to set things up, but after talking to Derek, the plan on the right was formed.


So now I need to buy a large piece of glass or plastic, tracing paper, potentially get a tripod and lots of black card/paper.
Work out the music on a dope sheet.
Film the hands.
Prepare the card.
And then animate it all.

I think I'm going to initially use animation paper & a lightbox to figure out my creatures metamorphis and movements.

Also, check out the new header/banner thing, made from lots of scanned in magazine-y bits, because I like collage and the old one was annoying me muchly.

Emotion Change

I know it's jerky when the green man walks up to the blue one, but when I added more inbetweens it looked like he was floating - which was far worse.

Drawing Dump

Summer Drawings:

My Rabbits, Chilly & Molly.

They're the only ones who really sit still long enough to draw.




Scott Pilgrim Fangirling, a doodle for my friend Mark before he left for Uni, he lent me the books so I tucked this inside when I gave them back to him.


Life Drawing:

Emotion change... W.I.P

Work in progress of this week's assignment, changing emotion.

Original storyboarded idea:


First video (mainly used to work out the timing):


Second Video (slightly more detail and an attempt to neaten up the character, which I don't like, I much prefer the little line drawn ones):

Sad Walking

Using the same armatured flash figure as before, I attempted to creat a sad walk.



I feel it's not too bad for a first attempt and no reference material to work with.

Walking assignment and general experimental fail.

This week our assignment is to draw a character walking across the screen. My first idea was to practice using a model made out of paper, (I'm tempted to use cutout for some of our other projects), but it epically failed. My figure was too small and fiddly to use well and with no ghost image I was making it up (horrendously) as I went along... which resulted in a very wobbly, unrealistic and down right rage-inducing less than a second of pure fail.


After giving up on that idea rather swiftly I tried using the armature option in Flash, the video below is a simple test...


...Which led to this:

Both arms and legs are animated using Flash's armature tool, then converted into frame by frame to delete the terrible inbetweens it added. 12fps. No reference material other than an old walk cycle plan I did last year.

Heavy Weight Lifting... Finished *EDITED*

Final animation, I'm tempted to add a bit of a walk cycle ot the beginning, but I just tried to start and it is mind-bending trying to do a walk cycle backwards and trying to do it so that it matches up is nigh on impossible. Especially when I'm struggling to keep the height of my character the same already. But I don't feel bad, the assignment was to do a character lifting a heavy object, not a walk cycle, so that's what I've created. I used my reference material to help animate the 'fall' and my rough drawings/storyboard for the rest.



After seeing a few other people's videos I had a bit of a panic because my character didn't have a face, so I added one, it's funny how much 4 lines add a bit of personality:

Experimental Research

For one of our projects this term we have to create an experimental animation (without the aid of a computer) to some music. As Derek hasn't put up or played any of the music options I haven't really had any ideas for animating yet. So I sifted through YouTube and backwards through my blog and came across a few favourites and some new interesting ones that you may be interested in too...

My Green Crocodile (I came across it in Foundation and I simply love it, I'm sure I've shared it on my blog before, but it's realy worth a watch).


Loof & Let Dime (from Bradford Animation Festival last year, I think it'd be harder to try and replicate something like this without the aid of a computer, but ink and cutout may produce similar results).


Photograph of Jesus (another Bradford find, but could be fun using photographs from real-life in real-life!).


My Paper Mind (a video that Hugh Herbert liked on YouTube that led me to spend time surfing through random animations).


YouTube user nosnoma's "paper horse animation test".


YouTube user mattpee's "Alice in Wonderland".

Diary

I collected my copy of the diary I did the cover for over the summer.

It actually looks pretty good...



...Except for where they put my name...

...bit of a design fail there.

Heavy Weight Lifting...

Nope, I'm not going to be a weightlifter, the title refers to our first assignment.



We have to create an animation of a character lifting up a heavy object. I'm going to use Flash and have created a rough version already:



And thanks to the child who kicked their football into our garden over the ridiculously high fence, I was able to record some horrendous reference material (with my terrible, terrible acting):



(Of course, my character isn't quite as lanky and doesn't have hair to tuck behind its ears).

Second Year Madness...

So I start back this week, as a scary second year *gasp*, we had our introduction session yesterday and have ADVANCED MAYA SKILLS tonight.

That probably would have terrified me a year ago, but this year, I'm actually quite looking forward to it. It's optional, but I plan to go to as many as I can before my mind becomes over-saturated with polygonal crazies.

I'm also going to attempt to model this:

It's my Dad's 1970 Karmann Ghia (called Audrey). I must be a masochist. Hopefully I'll have modelled it by his birthday (July 10th... giving me a pretty lengthy ammount of time, and most likely sanity, to try and achieve it).

I'm putting my "Summer" animation on the back burner for now, I really would like to finish it, but my Uni work is going to come first (plus I've temporarily run out of ideas... hopefully christmas will bring some more inspiration for it).