life drawings and continued 'conversations' project

Above are drawing from my sketchbook that I have done for the 'coversations' project. I think I'm getting used to drawing things faster and taking in the action and what is happening in the situation a little more and getting it down on paper. Most of the above drawings are from tv programmes that I was watching and paused quickly to sketch out. I think next it would be a good idea to stop pausing the film and try and get as much information from the scenes down as possible so that the action keeps moving and I can try and draw the images from memory or as it moves.

Doing some acting was quite funny in our lesson and I think some pretty good conversational photos were taken that we can work from. I will therefore also use these to maybe do some more detailed and neater drawings from to improve on drawing situations like these accurately.

The next lot of images are from the last life drawing class I went to. I unfortunately missed the previous two, and this stood out in my first few drawings. I think there is a noticable improvement from the start to the end of the session.

We started out by drawing the figure without looking at the paper to get more of an idea about shape and lines and how to visualise what we are putting down on paper.




We continued to do some really fast poses and a mixture of longer ones. I think I prefer to do the faster ones, trying to get the information down and because you can see the movement between the poses. However when doing this I tend to leave out a lot of detail such as hands, feet and facial features which is probably what I need most practise at.

experimental

Of all the projects we are doing at the moment, I think the experimental animation is one I need to think about a little more. I really want to try sand animation and just mess around with different mediums, maybe combining them and seeing what works. However I'm yet to actually experiment yet.
I have chosen the piece of music that I want to use and I have gone through it and made a kind of dope sheet, just to get a better idea of where the accents in the music lie in relation to the frames. By doing this it means I can hopefully be really free with the sand or medium and know roughly where the beats in the music are to do something more exaggerated within the image.
I had a very quick try at using couscous to animate with yesterday, however had to leave for work so didn't really get a good chance to actually film anything. I would quite like to try animating with different coloured medium that is sand like. Maybe using chalks to change the colour of salt so that I can use a range of colours and add them to the piece with the sound changes. Maybe if I made enough I could build up the mix of colours so that by the end of the piece I had a whole mixture of colours being manipulated in the scene.
I think I really need to get going on this piece and start to try out a lot more and see what works and what ideas develop from experiments.

emotion change animation....

Above is the final of my emotion change animation that I handed in. I started by working my way through really rough sketches of the character and what I wanted him to do and the emotion I wanted him to go through. From this I then built up and did straight through animation with the purple lines and then went over them, filling the character out a bit with the black outlines.

I think the movement I was aiming for and the emotion change is there, but I think it could have been exaggerated even further. For example, my character is moving quite quickly at the beginning of the sequence, however it could have been even more jumpy and excited and really exaggerate the key poses and maybe have had less inbetweens to fasten up the movement. Similarly, when he realises there isn't anything inside, he could be moving even more slowly, and sort of sulk back down into the sitting position, and really emphasise how upset he is by making him move in an extremely gloomy and dissappointed way.

I did go through and draw out the lines of action in the key poses, which I think are quite good and work well, however you don't notice them as much when the piece is playing and eveything is moving and I feel perhaps these too could have been taken even further and really stretched them.

When watching it there appears to be quite a noticable change in the dimensions of the character. I thought having sketched it out and outlined it I would have avoided this or noticed it more when I was drawing the shape of the character. I need to take more care in making the character remain the same size thoughout and I think if I hadn't have gone over him with the black lines there probably wouldn't be a very noticable change in mass.

Having said that, I am pleased with the final outcome and I think the mood change is visable which was the point of the task, even if it could have been exaggerated a little more.

stop motion workshop...

This week I went to the stop motion workshop to have another go creating some puppet animation. I really love the style of stop motion and watching films that were made using it. I find it incredible when you know how it was done and find it really interesting to watch the 'making of' to see how it all works. As a group we tried a little scenario just getting used to the puppets. It was really rough and we were just messing around with them so it wasn't at all acurate or realistic. When Anne gave us a task to do, and with lots of guidance, the puppets moved more smoothly and I learnt a lot more about the way they needed to be moved and the speed in order to carry out a movement in a more natural way. We tried a head turn..which is harder to get looking right then it sounds...



Mine was the middle one. I was quite pleased with it. I think it looks quite natural but I found it tricky getting the puppet to move a very particular distance as they tended to move back slightly or jolt way too far in the direction of movement. This is something I'd really love to get the hang of and have a lot more practice at animating in the future.

cont...

Above is the next stage of my animation. Still quite rough but the timing is working ok, and the piece flows better and quite smoothly. I will continue to change it as I work over and neaten it up a little. Having spoken and looked a lot at the line of action and movement this week, I think that it is really improtant to get this across in my next project. I can see now having watched things like Charlie Chaplin, animations, silent films and even dances such as ballets that tell a story, just how important it is to get the movement across and to exaggerate it. The audience need to be able to understand the movement simply through the actions and the way the characters are moving. It is therefore very important to make the movements as clear as possible so that it is easy for the audience to recognise and understand them. I will make sure that I put this into my characters emotion change by working through the sequence and drawing in the lines in every key frame to make sure they are working.

changing emotions....

After my attempt at doing a heavy lift in 2D I spoke to Andy for advice on how to make my 2D work better. I found that I was making the drawings very neat and basically started with the finished versions rather then doing roughs to make sure all the timing was accurate and the sequence was working well before adding any detail. So for this 'changing emotions' project I started it in a very different way. I did sketch out initial drawings just to get ideas of what I wanted to do. I decided I wanted to do it in Flash so I began to sketch out the timing just so I roughly knew where each movement needed to be...

morph...

As I've tried both 2D and 3D I thought I may as well have a go at stop-motion. This isn't great as I did it at home with a DIY morph, stills camera and window ledge...but it kinda works...