Saturday 25 April 2009

Friday 24 April 2009

Everything on the go..

The Hayle Project...

When first hearing about this project I thought it could be pretty interesting and of course the first thing that came to mind was creature comforts. At the moment I'm feeling quite confident and excited about the project. Working with a good group I think we will be able to complete it quite successfully.

I really like the sound we chose and I think there is so much we could do with it especially listening to it with the group and hearing different ideas and input.
So far we've done our own research into ideas and have all drawn/written down ideas for images and the story. Having looked at and discussed them between us I think by combining a mixture we could all create something that works for what we want.
In the last meeting we managed to decide on a few character designs to develop to create our Winnie character, and made a timetable focusing on the pre-production work, spreading it out amongst the group. As the script is pretty much sorted and written out, I will work from this to create a basic storyboard which can be finalised after more group discussions on Monday and then used to create the animatic. By Monday we should then have a script, storyboard and character design that we can discus and finalise, and focus on the styles, concept art and animatic for the rest of the week.


Storyboard project...

I'm really enjoying working on this project. Storyboarding and drawing out ideas is something I love doing. I had some trouble coming up with a half decent story that I could show in a shorter storyboard without making it too long and making way too much work for myself.
The scriptwriting workshop was interesting and definitely taught me more about the structure of scripts and the best way to write an effective storyline. It also showed that it is a necessity for animation as well as live film, even with no speech.
I have drawn out a few different ideas that I could use and I've decided on one that I would like to continue working on and developing as it would give me some really unusual angles and viewpoints to work with. I have also tried out a few different ways of shading them in black and white as I find this much more effective than working in colour for a storyboard.
Hopefully after discussing my work on thursday I will be able to start on the final thing.








2D Character design...

I'm very keen to learn more about 2D animation. I think I did learn a fair bit from the ident project, but obviously there is still loads more I need to work on and learn. So far I've drawn out a few ideas for a character, but I think my squirrel is best so far..but I'll keep drawing ideas for something better...


Tuesday 14 April 2009

Back from the Easter hols...

Well...I can honestly say I didn't do as much over the Easter break as I had planned to. Pretty lazy... but having decided I needed to put a bit more effort into learning the 3D side of things I did start to work my way through a learning Maya book which I found quite handy. I had a go at modelling something from the book, the constructor from Theme Planet (if anyone knows that).I thought this would be a good place to start as I avoided it with the ident and leanrt 2D instead. My attempt is below...



As it was the first time I've really tried modelling anything I am quite pleased with it, however there are obviously quite a few faults and things that need adjusting. For example all the bumps and odd lumps that I managed to create and couldn't get rid of without completely changing something else. There are also quite a few gaps and parts that I'm sure, when animating the model, would just not work. But as a first attempt it's ok. I think I should try modelling something of my own to practise it and get to understand it better without using a book telling me step by step what to do. I'd also like to finish this one off and have a go at texturing and eventually animating it if I can get the modelling a bit more polished.


Also over the holidays I was asked to design a Logo for a comedy company that often performs where I work. They requested a logo similar to the design of the love and hearts tattoos that have script around them with the company name on the script. With this in mind I came up with a few ideas as shown below...






I think I have the right kind of idea with these but they wanted it to look a bit more 'old school'so I thought it perhaps would be more what they wanted if it was hand drawn, or had a lot more detail in it...



...so thats the next one I've sent and I am awaiting feedback now for any changes or improvements they want me to make.