Cross Course Study Task

Due to personal reasons i missed the morning half of this task but the overview of what happened was that the courses of animation, illustration and graphics were all brought together and split up into groups made of students from each course. The task was to create a product to, at the end of the day, pitch to the rest of the groups going through separate iterations and versions, such as the groups being separated into smaller groups to come up with a product which is then practice pitched to the rest of the group to narrow down to one idea.

The idea that it got narrowed down to was an app that combined just eat with tinder, so food dating app called hangry Hi-5. We had to create a campaign and an advertisement video. The animators took on the advert as they were sequential thinkers and we came up with a storyboard and idea of food being angry looking on their phones and scrolling through hi-5 which penultimately means they meet up thanks to the app and do a high five. To make the animation in the fastest time possible we chose to do it in after effects with a class mate who has quite some skill in it animating and a lot of people designing rough sketches of the food characters. My role was to render them out and get them to our animator. So using a wacom tablet i drew the characters on photoshop saved them as png files and sent them to our animator. But i was working at a fast enough speed so i asked around and had help doing refined versions. Once our animator had all his assets i found myself going around and adding people to the google drive where all the work had collectively been stored for communal access so the presentation, assets and animation could be accessed by those who needed to send work back and forth.

Approaching the end of our production i noticed a different in the speed and urgency that illustration and graphics worked in comparison to animation. the assets being drawn by illustration and layouts being designed by graphics were being done with the intention to have them done by the overall deadline without the consideration of the animation advert. This made me more aware of the fact that when i work with an illustrator or graphics student that they may not necessarily be aware of the speed that is sometimes needed in animation so id have to explain this in a team with them which i wish i was more assertive when we did this task. On the other hand it did mean that the work they produced in comparison to the animators was more refined but this cost time on the actual animating.

Finally just as sound was being added to the animation after effects crashed! Our animator had to make the animation into more of an animatic. This was really frustrating as it crashed just as the deadline came. Again there was a difference in reaction to this from the animators to the other courses. Many animators were seeing if there was a possibility to save it while the others headed down to the lecture hall to do the presentation.

Inktober

During october i had decided to try and do inktober by following the prompts given each day. I started by just doing what ever came to mind and posted them onto instagram. After a couple of days i drew a little pirate character and thought how it might be interesting, good practice and fun to come up with a narrative using him based on the prompts. This went well until the work load started becoming too much as inktober was starting to eat into my regular university work as well as time for relaxation so after about 8-10 days i had decided to stop doing inktober, i was disappointed that i didn't finish it but i had to prioritise course work over personal work.

Character Design Challenge - September

During September i entered the character design challenge which is an online Facebook group that releases a theme every month and from it a character is created. The theme for September was Centaur which i had initially thought to be a really boring theme but after talking with friends we got some ideas going with an initially steam punk with spider legs centaur. This in the end became a victorian centaur ignoring the steampunk aesthetic as i wanted to try and create a character that had life and personality as that is a part of character design, not just the visuals but also the back story behind it. I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to practice photoshop drawing, painting and shading as well as using textures to try and make a more interesting character in colour. With the design i wanted to make her more rounded as 1. victorians were quite chunky (the films lie as do the corsets!) and 2. a horses body is very broad, for the hip to fit on the shoulders and look natural she was going to have to be a much larger woman. with the face i closed her eyes as it had fallen into the uncanny valley too much and was looking really strange as i had done the dress realistic while the face was more cartoony.

Light Night

Last year i went to light night and tried to experience it but it was very dull for me as i couldn't comprehend what it meant. This year i went to go and see my own animation up there.

A brief was set to make a one second animation that along with other one second animations, would be shown as a band from the leeds college of music performed. The theme of the brief was the four elements and the universe. As i only had a week to do this and i was very out of practice with my animating after the summer, I chose to think small, which in turn made me consider and think the theme on a small scale. When you hear the word universe you end up thinking of vast open space and unexplored star systems out there and its massive. But in comparison we are nothing more than atoms or insects in comparison so i considered the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings and within its wings was the galaxy or space, working with how we are all tiny in comparison to the universe.

BUT unfortunately due to time and my lack of confidence on my capabilities to animate after not animating for so long i chose to change the idea. I was still focusing on the idea of a small scale object and went for a match being struck, i was thinking about the idea of a small action sparking a chain reaction similar to when people talk about the butterfly effect.

The animation itself was done first by drawing the timing of the match in traditional hand drawn, scanned into photoshop and then painted over the top. I had to go back a few times removing frames and other elements to try and get the timing right but as it was a one second animation it wasn't something that required my full attention or dedication as the brief was optional. In conclusion I'm not entirely dissatisfied with it but i know for a fact it can be done a lot better.