Thursday 28 February 2013

More Life Drawinggg ~

I've missed a few weeks of life drawing due to deadlines and other commitments, but I intend to continue going from this week ^-^ Below are a few drawings from yesterdays session.

My first piece, a 5 minute drawing. This session focussed a lot on portraying emotions through body language and so our model did a variety of short poses trying to express feeling throughout them. This was portraying sadness.

 
My second piece, another 5 minute piece portraying the happiness in the model.

 
My third drawing, this one showing anguish/sadness, this was a longer drawing at around 10 minutes.

 
My 4th drawing was of the model in an agitated/angry pose, we were asked to draw this using no curves, but only lines.
 
And finally, a 15 minute pose that I did in chalk on black paper, focussing on lighting once more c:

I make sure not to miss sessions from now on, because I really need to practice drawing humans and I'm kinda rusty from missing only 3 sessions.....but yes :D Keep tuned for more stuffs I guess c:

Monday 25 February 2013

Practice in 3D

We've been advised to do around 30 minutes of Maya a day, in order to improve, I've been trying to squeeze as much time in for maya as possible, I found a few quadruped rigs and have done some posing with them for practice, I think I'll continue with the first rig (Nico) and practice animation with him a little bit :3 It's really interesting to see how different rigs work, the second rig (Pierre) worked very, very differently to Nico, so it took quite a while to warm to the controls on both of them c:





Tuesday 19 February 2013

Animation Practice - A new unit

One of our units for this term is 'Motion Studies', we've only had two sessions of this, but as far as I can tell we're going to get small practice tasks for each session, to do with movement. Our first task (for last week) was to do a rough animation of someone lifting a heavy object. This could be done in any medium we had learned so far and we were told to make a reference video to work from with this. My reference video is below

 

and my rough animation is as follows




After showing this to my lecturer, he was curious to know why I didn't include the wobbles in the animation, I didn't because it was not something I meant to do when filming and I wanted to perfect it in the animation. But after talking to him, we both agreed it would've been beneficial to have left the wobble in.

Our class now has weekly motion studies lectures and we get set a variety of tasks every week or every two weeks in relation to performance and character animation. I'll make sure that I keep this blog updated on what I'm doing in relation to that c:

My main interest right now is 3D, but I also want to continue learning and improving my skills with 2D animation (especially in regard to the basic principles as Timing in particular is something I need work on a lot) So I think I will alternate my tasks between 2D and 3D mediums :3

Friday 15 February 2013

A new term, secret production blog and moree~

Okay, so we started our new term, last week. Time is going so fast o-o 4 months left of first year D: What is going on? ...But anyway I've got lots of animation going on for this term. We're now on a group unit called Animation Practice along with an Experimental Animation unit, motion studies and possibly some other stuff that I'll talk about in a future post, once I find out more.

I'll start off with something I've been wanting to talk about for a while, something I'm quite excited about :3 Back in November, Michel Gagne, one of my animation and comic inspirations, started a kickstarter project aiming to turn his comic 'The Saga of Rex' into a short animated film. He planned to get started on this in Feburary and got successfully funded to produce both a 4 minute short film and a trailer with additional footage. I of course backed this project and have since gotten access to his "secret production blog" where he is logging every step of his animation process. He started on this blog at the begining of the month and has been blogging every week day with video's describing every process he goes through on the film. It's been really awesome to see what he's done so far and I'm really excited to follow the process of the film from start to finish :D

 
Below is the progress he had made on the project before making the kickstarter project. His work is done in Toon Boom Harmony and is animated mostly frame by frame.
 
 
Very inspiring stuff, but yes :D I am super excited about all of this >w< Thought I'd share that here c:
I'll be posting very soon about some of the work I've been doing in the past week, for this new term :D

Monday 4 February 2013

Moar updatessss

Heyo again :3 I am back with more ramblings and work related things :3

First off, we had a flash tutorial at the beginning of last week where we learned the basics of 'symbols' and cutout animation. We were asked to do a lipsynch, during this lesson, using only symbols in it.

Below is both my first, 'symbol practice' video and my lipsynch. (With an axolotl in a tophat o-o)





I actually really enjoyed the lipsynch, the above video is both a 'camera test' and a lipsynch as I moved it around a little to simulate camera movements.

In other news, our last hand-in, the cinematography unit was on Thursday and after much hassle with the studio machines, we finally got it rendered and handed in :3
Below is the evaluation from the 5 of us, we were asked to say a little about our work to put at the end of the project.




and finally, my last real update to post is a bit of personal editing work I've done. On my hard drive, I have about 8 or so, different home videos which I don't really do anything with, then occasionally I'll find a song or something and edit them to music, but I've not done this in ages and previously was only using Windows Movie Maker, which is somewhat limited.

I was having kind of a, nostalgic "I miss people crom home" moment xD Which is stupid 'cause I live like 40 miles away from my old house, an hour train journey...but regardless, this weird mood got me productive, so not complaining. Below is about 12 years of old and more recent home video footage and photo's that I edited to 'Of Monsters and Men's song 'King and Lionheart' in Sony Vegas. I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome and how cheery it is :3



but yush, this is all from me o-o You'll probably get a post soonish, seeing as my MAP deadline is midnight tonight, so I'll be animating 7 seconds in flash for that :3 I have a few little side projects going on whilst we don't have deadlines :D

So until next time :3