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.