Preproduction 

In this project I was given Four cards.

One setting 

One character

One theme

One artist

Whatever was on each card would be what you need to use to make a story.

I received

Cruise liner _ setting

Angel’s _ character

Talent show_ theme

Lorenzo Mattotti_ artist

I began researching my characters first and found a lot of Christianity based themes. Which I didn't think would work well with my other card so I continued looking at other religions and mythology that depict angels and came across the Morrigan and the Valkyrie. Reading up on their mythology I started link it with my theme. Valkyrie are known as choosers of the fallen. Which was easy to link to my theme talent show and make them judges. I made the series a Nordic talent show competing for a place in Valhalla. Each week the contestants would have to fight or survive a task with their talents to win a place in the next week until there were only two left to compete for the grand prize. With this idea it was very difficult to put together a key target audience, so I decided it would be best suited as a 6 part web series. There are many online animated web series that appeal to a wider audience but I also found talent show themed, animated web series called Total Drama Island and Drawn Together.

As I was researching my characters I was also looking at my artist’s style. Lorenzo Mattotti as an illustrator a small variety of artistic styles. I began looking at his colour work and developing my characters to suit the shapes that he uses in his work. I also developed some drawings for my setting using long perspectives that Mattotti uses in his work.

 After looking at some of the comics and books Mattotti has worked on I much preferred his black and white work and found a lot of inspiration in the paintings he did for Neil Gaiman’s Hansel and Gretel. With the direction the show was heading the cruise liner setting seemed very out of place but still wanting to keep that type of setting I looked at Nordic boats and different designs of them to fit the show.

 I looked at costumes and mythical creatures that would also appear in the series.

motion studies task 4

For this final task we needed to make a dance sequence using a reference from strictly come dancing. I like parts of the animation but I think next time I will need to spend more time practising with Celaction to be able to get a better overall animation. I can definitely do better.

Motion Studies

Task 3

For this task we were asked to create a rough piece of animation that showed two characters interacting with one another. Once this was done we were to hand over our rough animation to someone else who would then clean up. We had to create character designs and a timing chart for the next person to follow.

Here is the final product, in the end I had to clean up and colour my own work as the person i was working with was unable to hand theirs over to me in time but I think the outcome looks good even though it is simple.

motion studies task 2

Lip Sync
we had to record some dialogue and create two characters, one talking and one reacting.
I'm quite pleased with how mine turned out however it has parts where it can be a bit shaky, this is because I had to go back and adjust the characters at a later stage.

title sequence

This is the final show reel of work that I contributed to the final title sequence, we had some issues rendering out the lighting for the final film without much time left before the hand in to fix it. I mostly worked on the pre-production stuff as I am not very confident with Maya, which is what we mostly worked with I did however make a short pixelation sequence of a cup coming through a painting.

Background

Weekly tasks

Each week we were to look at something new, considering perspective, stand point, eye level, aerial perspective and more.

These first two are parallax, moving backgrounds.

                                       These are a few outline copies of backgrounds from various movies
This task really helped me to consider the layout and gave me more of a understanding of how to set a scene.

 We were also tasked to look up different artists and copy some of their work. I looked at Jeff Turley, a production manager at paramount who has worked on varios disney project and has published a book. He can be found here http://www.jeffturley.tumblr.com/

I also looked at Claire Keane who has done a lot of concept work for disney movies and also has made her own book, and she can be found here

http://claireonacloud.com/

I moved on to development work for my final pieces


First choosing story boards to work from.

 Then considering the layout and set up of the scenes.

After experimenting with different ideas and angles I was finally able to make my final outcomes.





Layouts

Paintings

Dudley Zoo

Over Easter I took a trip to Dudley zoo and castle, it was a great trip i got to see a lot of the animals up close and get some good photos and some sketches. It was interesting to watch the way different animals move, the way they walk and different gestures that they have. 

Sketches to follow soon.

When I was first handed this project I did a lot of research into various methods and animators both contemporary and historical.

        

Animators such as John and James Whitney and Len Lye

As well as these animators Javan Ivey and Angela Kohler and Ithyle Griffiths      

I found these works very inspiring for this project alongside all of the different techniques i found that i could try out, such as cut out, chalk, scratching or drawing directly onto film, pixelation, paint on glass, flipbook and sand animation. 

I decided to begin experimenting with masking tape using it at different lengths to create movement, I thought that it would be good to use as i could make different patterns and shapes with the tape as well as drawing on the tape to make smaller pieces of animation within the original, using different camera angles and close up, I think that this could have worked well and been an interesting piece of work however the planning and time we had limited this idea and wouldn't have worked as well, the tape loses its stickiness after a while so I would have been difficult to shoot with having to keep replacing the tape, particularly if it had images already drawn on.

I moved onto the idea of using fairy lights, I thought that it would be a good idea to use plain and coloured lights in the dark and move them gradually as well as turning them on and off at different intervals to fit in with the music.When I tried this out the light were quite difficult to keep up with the blu tac and if I hung them with tape the lights would reveal it and it didn't look very good. Another issue I had, they were difficult to move without them dropping or losing shape so I quickly gave up on this idea.

I then tried out a type of cut out animation, where I cut out holes in paper to create a sequence of patterns and shapes that fit the music I had chosen. I would then shine a light behind the images so it would show through the holes I had cut out. I spent some time getting the timing and shapes planed out so that it fit together, and then proceeded to start cutting the holes into the paper. I made about 2 seconds worth of images and began filming, having to replace each page and take a still image and repeat, The idea worked really well apart from the cutting out and the time it took to film would have taken a very long time and I wouldn't have been able to finish the entire thing.

I finally looked into chalk animation, my first two tests were quite short as I found it difficult to draw on the small board with the chunky pastels that I had, but I bought different pastels that were much easier to draw with, it was a challenge to animate with the chalk board but as I got used to the technique it I learned that could draw the next image on before I rubbed the previous one out or even be careful how I erased the image and it would leave a shadow behind which was an effect I quite liked. 

Here are my test animations and my final outcome. 

BATMETAL by arhyBES on YouTube.

because he's Batman!!!