Back in the Saddle.

So, after what was, due to lots of personal reasons, a fantastically crap Christmas break, I'm back at Uni, not feeling very refreshed, but keen to get on with anything.

This term we have to help the 3rd Years with their projects, I'm working on Alex Jolliffe's project, Barista.

My job is to animate a pigeon flying through the opening shot of a city which Alex has already been working on (and I helped cut out a few of the buildings!):

Untitled from Joleaf on Vimeo.

Just a little bird-y test to get back into things:


Alex thought I'd be good at the pigeon after seeing my experimental video :) when I've finished the opening scene I'll then move on and help with the character animation. To do this I'll be using Animate (once I learn a bit more about how it all works of course...) I downloaded my own copy since it's a better version of Flash, which I've enjoyed using for previous projects, despite its limitations (and crash count...!). I love the 2D vector style it can produce.

Also for this term I've decided to do the Pre-Production Project, although I still really want to learn how to Composite (not compost...) so I'm still going to try and attend as many Post lectures as possible.

I feel like the Pre-Production project will be a lot more interesting for me personally thanks to the cards I picked (in our seminar, Derek got us to pick 4 cards, one for setting/character/type of show/style). Originally the four I ended up with completely clashed with each other:

Setting: World War II Berlin
Character: Astral Body
Style: Hokusai (which I had no idea what it was!)
Show: Pre-School Children's Show.

I mean really, teaching pre-schoolers about WW2 Berlin with crazy spirits in an ancient Japanese art story style? I can't see myself being able to achieve that. Hats off to anyone else who can.

I swapped Hokusai (which I would epically fail at attempting) and got Watercolour, and swapped Pre-School to Music show. Again a little bit incensitive WW2 Berlin/Astral Body to music, but far more managable.
I'm also alot more excited about this project because A. I've actually visited Berlin when I was on my foundation course, so it feels a bit more personal and I can relate to it more, and B. The Second World War interested me already, so I feel I know a bit about it already and won't mind putting in the time it's going to take to do the research and C. I get to splash paint around (that last one was a joke - I suck at watercolours but at least I feel I'll actually be able to achieve the style).

Despite this picture suggesting otherwise, Berlin is in fact a very interesting place:









(gosh my hair was short).

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".

Kicking it Old School (well, old foundation, but it doesn't have the same ring to it...)

Today I’ve decided i’ll dump post some more old work of mine, so that you can see what I got up to last year and the sort of style I developed...

This one (Teapot), doesn’t really have an introduction or background story about it, the project was “Angles”, but I think it’s my favourite little animation from the year: it combines drawing, stop motion and [I think the term is] pixilation...


My Final Piece has a lot more of a background story to it...
I wanted to try to explore more traditional methods of animation for my final project. So, I researched traditional animation techniques used in the industry, which led me into looking at traditional methods of presenting animations before the invention of television and the cinema. Traditional optical toys, such as Phenakistoscopes and Zoetropes (and not forgetting the humble flipbook) were the most popular gadgets of the day.
I set myself a test to make one of these machines and decided to make one of these machines myself and picked the ‘Mutoscope’, aka the “Penny Peep Show”. (I originally got the idea to make one after watching an episode of the television program “What the Victorians Did For Us”!) It was one of the more popular and longstanding machines, and had fairly simple mechanics behind it.
Sadly, I don’t have a video of the finished thing, but I do have one of it during construction (being modelled wonderfully by my Dad):



My final clips, put together for the Foundation end of year show, (some are rotoscoped some hand drawn) were displayed on both my Mutoscope and on a screen behind it:


Yeah, that’s it really for today (she says...) I might update later because at the moment I’m trying to create a banner for the bottom or top of the page. And please, don’t steal my work or try and claim it as their own, I realise most people wouldn’t, but the internet is full of people who do. Seriously, I worked my ass off on these things.

a little introduction...

Now to bore you with a little background information about yours truly (remember the promise of pictures and shiny videos!)...

I’m a first year student at University College Falmouth studying a BA(Hons) in Digital Animation. Before this I did the standard Art Foundation course for a year, and before that I served my time in Sixth Form.

The first real introduction to Animation (not counting the healthy obsession with all things Disney I had growing up), was on my Foundation course. The third workshop I did was called “Time and Image”, our first project was to create two different self portraits of ourselves, not really animation-yin principle, until we were told that we had to find a way to get from the first picture to the second. Then to go from our second picture to the next person’s first, which has a pretty amazing result when there’s about 25 of you all doing the same thing with completely different pictures.

My tutor, Jack Southern, was primarily for Film & Fine Art students (though the degree he studied was actually in Sculpture, go figure), so the students who showed an interest in Animation were pretty much left to discover different animation techniques on our own and through trial and error. I loved it, it’s hard enough to try and get just one accurate drawing of something from real life, but to try and get enough so that you can make the object move is an entirely different task altogether. It’s the hardest thing to do, but certainly the most self-satisfying when you see it work.

I mainly took videos of things from real life that I wanted to study the movement of. Mainly this including the things I had close to hand, so lots of my early tests and drawings were done from studying my pets (mainly my cat and rabbits). I’d end up taking videos to slow them down and study, and taking enough frames so that the action would flow naturally (nowhere near to the industry standard 24fps, it was probably about 8 or 10) and using these pictures as a reference, I’d draw my own, or use them as a base to rotoscope over the top of.

I’ll probably post some more of my old foundation stuff at some point, the main focus is going to be on my new university orientated stuff, but I thought this’d be a nice little introduction.