Acting Workshop 2

3D Animation Lesson 3

Acting Workshop 1

Back to the Future Day

Ok so this post is slightly unrelated to animation, but as this is the day that Marty McFly travles to the future in what is one of my favourite film series of all time, I thought I'd post some BTTF related art I've done over whilst at college. 

This first piece is based on a design by Billie Jean for Nike shoes, when given a brief to design posters for a Future Everything festival I came up with the idea of doing a similar thing to Billie Jean's design, only with the shoes from BTTF Part II as they were also Nike. In Billie's original design, he had many doodles of 80's iconography as the shoes he was promoting were originally from the 80's however I chose to take props from the film and use them instead. In the original design, it was going for a back of the exercise book doodle page kind of feel which I originally tried, however I then decided to fit the Future Everything feel better to future it up a bit more and combine it with the design style of TRON Legacy:

Combining the Nike MAG with the Tron Grid helped to give atruly 80's optimistic futuist outlook to the image which I was going for, also the amount of glowing effects used helped heavily in covering up my being a novice in Photoshop at the time.

Based on the work of the designer Florey, I created these images of the character Marty McFly in both his 1985 and his 2015 costumes. The style was extremely vectorised and simplistic and I found the style fun to work in.

 On a slightly more animation related note, during Foundation, we were given the project of a Visual Self Portrait, and so I at first decided to illustrate moments from my life, this scene in particular was from a few years ago when I went to a McBusted concert, and they burst onto the stage in a flaming delorean after a BTTF inspired VT explaining how Busted and McFly formed McBusted after the Busted split. About halfway though producing the image I decided to mess around with the timeline/ animation setting on photoshop and created an animated Gif of the scene after Matt and James step out of the car. The silhouettes of the McFly members were added in for effect, as they weren't actually in these positions on the tour.

Understanding the 4 Meanings of Big Hero 6

For our unit Contextualising Practice, as to understand narrative, we were asked to watch something recent from our subject area (Animation/Film/Photography), and so I chose to watch the animated film Disney's Big Hero 6, a personal favourite of mine that was only released 9 months ago in the UK. We were then told to write up the 4 different meanings of the film, as presented by Bordwell and Thompson in The Significance of Film Form.

Referential Meaning:
In the near future, a boy befriends his late brother's robot to get justice for his killer. After a series of super heroic adventures with his brother's friends they manage to capture the man responsible for his brother's death.

Explicit Meaning:
A boy mourns the loss o his brother and seeks revenge for his death. He soon finds that his brother is still with him in his heart, his friends and the robot he left behind, as well as realising that revenge is not the justice his brother would want.

Implicit Meaning:
An adolescent is forced to face the adult world after the loss of his brother. Throught the help of his peers he is able to mourn his loss as well as face the demands of growing up.

Symptomatic Meaning:
In a Society where the impossible seems possible, the importance of family and friends is still the staple of human values and relationships. This beleif is especially storng during times of great loss.

Experiment Animation Proposal

For our first assignment in Animation Principles, we have to create two pieces of experimental animation, the first is 30 seconds long set to one of five pieces of music, and the other is a 10 second long E4 sting for the TV channel, both of which produced using similar techniques. I will produce both pieces of animation at 25 fps as this is the UK TV standard which is necessary for E4, however I will shoot it on two’s effectively halving the amount of images I will have to produce as each image will be held for two frames.

For my 30 second piece I have chosen track 4 Mind Control as this piece it what gave me the most inspiration. The piece starts off saying “Take a look at the world around you,” which in turn made me think of a camera panning and seeing all around you, because of this I started to look at different kinds of backgrounds. Traditionally backgrounds are painted on white, and darker areas are simply achieved with dark paints, however for Batman: The Animated Series, show creator Erik Radomski came up with the idea of painting light colours on black paper to give the show its overall darker mood. I thought this would be a good technique to try out, and but rather than having heavily detailed static backgrounds, I would go for a more simplistic look and have the backgrounds move. The actual music itself has quite a fast tempo which is why I want the backgrounds to move, as well as being ideal for an experimental animation, as I don’t want to plan out the entire animation, but rather allow myself to be spontaneous and let the actions change as I animate it straight ahead.

I know that I want my animation to start with the buildings being drawn so I will take pictures of the background being drawn as I go along so that when they are played back, the buildings will seem to grow on the paper. I will then have a character walking down the road and zoom in on his face as we see the world around him. The character in my animation will be very blocky and be completely in black and white. In keeping with the backgrounds, the world of my animation will be very dark and set at night, so the character will only be half in light and half in shadow, with additional animation coming from the shadows he casts. It will all be kept very sketchy as I like the quality of a sketchy line, as when I draw I sometimes prefer the drawing with all the guidelines on them rather than in the finished cleaned up colour. A particular piece of animation that showcases sketchy quality well is that of Glen Keane’s Duet, which is also experimental for its interactive software. The character will then proceed to bounce around the page in a similar way to comic book characters, very bouncy but keeping the lines nice and loose.

For my E4 sting I am going to use the same technique, but rather than using mainly white on black, this will mainly be purple on black to match the E4 logo. The logo will be the feature of the animation rather than the person and I am planning on animating it much like a bouncy ball featuring a heavy use of squash and stretch. Preliminarily I will be using the rock track provided, however I may change my mind between animating the first piece and this one.

3D Animation Lesson 2

Life Drawing 3

3D Animation lesson 1

Life Drawing 2

Life Drawing 1