Sunday 7 December 2014

Human Landscape Project

Our Final Film...

This was the second collaborative project that I was given, in which I worked with Performance Costume and  Film and TV first year students like myself. The project itself was called "The Human Landscape" in which we were given the task of creating a film that involves or has something to do with the human body. As you can tell this is a very open project brief and meant that it was very difficult to come up with our final idea. 


Firstly, as a group we sat down and had a think about what direction we wanted our film to go in. Because the options and possibilities for the film were entirely open, we found that this lead to a wide range of suggested ideas being proposed, of which created the problem of choosing the one we all most liked and wanted to do. This took us a couple of days to think about as we would agree on an idea and then go away and realise that we were not happy with it, for reasons such as it being too long, too difficult to do e.c.t.


We played with a few ideas and finally decided on projecting images of the human life cycle onto the skin for example birth, childhood, adulthood, old age and death. We liked the idea and decided to stick with it and this lead us to (as a form of research) ask people what images came into their minds when we said each of these stages of the life cycle, this surprisingly lead to people very enthusiastically conveying some personal memories and things about themselves in relation to the stages we asked them about, we were very surprised by this and actually quite liked the involvement of people’s ideas and personality’s.

We realised that the way we wanted to create the film (Projecting animations and film onto skin) was technically too difficult and so we went back to the drawing board. We knew that we wanted to introduce the idea of asking members of the public a question that would make them show their personalities, but in a simple and easy way to execute. And so for our final idea we thought about asking what part of their body do they perceive themselves as doing this in a documentary style, we knew there would be the risk of not getting the answers we were looking for but we had confidence that would could get some good answers.

And as a group we went out and filmed around 43 people in total, with Mollie (Film and TV student)  operating the camera, Charlotte (Performance Costume student) interviewing and myself being in charge of sound and animation (when it came to making it). We ended up getting really quite funny reactions and answers and a large amount of content to edit for our film. We firstly wanted to get a basic edit done with all the people we would have in the film first which would allow me to go off and animate the parts of the body people suggested. We all did this as a group with Mollie editing the actual film and Charlotte and myself helping decide what edits needed to be made. We had a few problems with pacing and adding the animation but these were resolved once we reconfigured the film.

Overall I feel that the other members in my group did pull their own weights and I feel it was very much a shared effort when it came to making the film. I actually really enjoyed the project and was really glad with how every member in the group performed.

 

Edinburgh Project



In this project we were told to go out a choose a street in Edinburgh that we could tell a story within, this project brief was quite open ended and so our group opted for the Grass Market. Our first original idea was to have a set place in the grass market which we would time travel through showing the many things that happened in the grass market, from hangings to bombs being dropped e.c.t.
However we thought that this idea was very boring and un-original so we came up with the idea of filling the grass market entirely with grass. An idea that we all got behind and were generally excited about.


To achieve this effect we firstly wanted to make it seem like you were actually moving through the grass market from one end to the other. We came up with the idea of capturing a video of the camera literally traveling through the market, which we would then rotoscope on Dragon Frame, allowing us to animate over the footage which was quite a neat idea! We also knew that we wanted to use paper cut outs to animate with as it would give the grass, characters and objects a nice contrast to the surrounding video.



We used the rostrum camera to do our animating, this is a machine that allows you to animate on a flat plane, that can be moved left to right, while the camera is rigged above and this can also be adjusted up or down for easier animating, its a pretty cool set up and I really did enjoy using it! 

Once animating was done however, it was time to move onto editing, this was were the problems started...  One of the problems we encountered was when animating we used just a plain white background for animating onto which actually caused a lot of problems as we the color of the grass was so light it made keying the white out very difficult and made the process twice as long, a lesson learned there!




Another problem was our time management, coming up with our new idea a week into the project meant that we were down on time and didn't really help either. I think what held us back was spending a large chunk of time animating and leaving not much time for editing.
Finally editing was were everything went bad, as we encountered meany problems with Adobe After Effects, meany of which could have been avoided but others were things like, the software crashing constantly, problems with it doing what its told and adding sound. Overall not a very fun time!
This final version of the film (above) is a very heavily edited version as the original had a lot of problems caused by the many technical problems in our editing stage.





















As a whole I thought the project was not the best project I have worked on since my recent ones but I enjoyed working with my fellow animators all the same. I thought it was great practice for building confidence, working in a team and working on a shared project. And also on the plus side I have learned many valuable lessons and skills that I can use in future projects.

Walk Cycle Project

For this project we were given the task of animating a convincing walk cycle. With in it we were given the chance to try doing this in other forms of animation such as stop-motion  and 3D (Maya) animation not just hand drawn like in our bouncing ball project.
To get us going, we firstly learned the basics of a walk cycle, learning about key frames, extremes and in-betweens which are the basic fundamentals of any forms of animation. For reference we looked at how people in the public walked sketching there movements and walk styles as they went past. Also looking at Richard Williams Animation Survival Kit book looking at his explanations and examples of walk cycles (as seen bellow-).
 
 
To try to get to grips with these techniques we firstly did hand drawn animations of which we created a simple character that we would animate key frames for and then get into pairs and our partners would animate our in-betweens and vice versa. 
 
 
For this I wanted to keep my character simple, my partner Zoe animated the in-betweens, something of which for the first time is actually really difficult to do, but however I think she did a great job! Don't u think?
 
In my next hand drawn animation I wanted to try doing it on my own to see if I could correctly pull off a convincing walk.

 
 
In this one I originally tried animating the arms of the character but I found it confusing so decided just to animate the legs for now. Overall however I am really happy with the characters leg movement and felt for my next one I could move on to animating arms as well.
 
 
 
For this one I just used the previous walk cycles body and animated the arms over top. Something which I think made animating a bit more difficult as I feel that the arms kind of look disconnected from the body in a way, looking like there slightly out of sync. Colouring the hands I feel distracts the eye from following the movement of the arms and makes the point were they pass the body not right, something of which I overall was not happy with.
 
I moved on from this, determined to make a better arm swing using my square character I created as my next guinea pig.
 
 
This was finally the point were I felt I achieved a decent arm swing, basically by keeping the arm motion simple. In the end I was happy with this little characters walk cycle and felt that finally I was getting somewhere.
 
We then moved onto animating in the form of stop-motion, something which we needed to create our own models for. The model making process was surprisingly very eye opening and fun to do as at this point we were only creating a basic wire frame character of which would animate on top of a board filled with holes. These holes were for screws that would go into the feet of our wire frame models making the more secure for when it came time to animate. This was the result of my first attempt...
 
Did you see the magical appearing drill?
 
While making this animation I encountered a lot of problems with the model itself as the putty we used to keep the nut on the feet secure was still sticky and had not set yet (of which I believe was due to the putty not being mixed properly) which meant that the character would not stand up right and became hard and annoying to animate. Overall though I thought my walk turned out ok and had potential but the problems put me off a bit.  
 
Not being a quitter, I wanted to give it another go once the feet on the model had set a bit more as I knew I could make the walk better. I also added some masking tape round the frame to beef the character out a bit more and made him more visually appealing and easier to see.
 
 
 
 
This time I was much happier with the way the way the character moved, besides the pictures exposure making it a little harder to see I felt that this was definitely an improvement over the previous stop-motion.
 
The third area of animation we tried was 3D animation, in which we used the software Maya to make a pre-rendered model (Norman) walk. We got taught the basics of the software how to create shapes and edit parts of them also how to move and edit Norman himself, using FK and IK. FK being a mode in which if you moved one part of Norman, say his foot the rest of the leg would follow, and IK being the mode in which you have to move every individual part of him. Overall I found myself more prone to using IK as I felt it gives you more control over the characters movements. Anyway we also learnt how to animate models using again key frames, but this time Maya renders the in-betweens automatically so it is relatively quick to animate once you have a grasp of how to work Maya.
 
Here was my first attempt...
 

 
 
And my second...
 

 
 
In this one I wanted to give Norman a bit of character making him into a happy chappy which I think I successfully managed to achieve.
 
I quite enjoyed working in all of these different mediums of animation, overall being quite happy doing all of them, though the stop-motion element was weaker but this was just because of the model itself. In the end I felt I have managed to create some convincing walk cycles, something which I feel I will ultimately and definitely be using in my future animating endeavours.
 
I also did a Christmas themed walk cycle, the Christmas pudding character you might be seeing in the future...
 
 
 
 


Sunday 9 November 2014

Saturday 8 November 2014

Life Drawing: Semester 1

Week 1: 30th of October 








Week 2: 6th of November







Week 3:13th of November  

                                                   








Week 4: 20th of November

                                                   




                                             

Week 5: 27th of November

Life drawing was cancelled on this day. 

Tuesday 4 November 2014

Bouncing Ball Project

The bouncing ball project can be simply put as the first and most basic step in learning animation. It helps to convey fundamental techniques such as spacing- where the more space the ball has the faster it will be and the more space there is the slower the ball will be. It also makes us aware of the techniques squash and stretch, the principle that when the ball (has to be a soft ball) makes contact with a surface it squashes, and when it leaves the ground it stretches and reverts back to its original shape in mid-air (As seen below).



This can then be applied to other objects and characters that are being animated, giving them a life like appearance.

And so I tried this out for myself...


As you can see I thought it went pretty well, in total taking about 30 drawings (frames) to complete. I actually really enjoyed the process, it took me a while to figure out the spacing and getting the pacing right so it could effectively convey the speed and elasticity of the ball. I think overall I have conveyed that this is a bouncy ball pretty well, not bad for a first try eh?

Then I wanted to try out a heaver ball, so I looked at a bowling ball being dropped because I wanted to see how it bounced.


Surprisingly being the heavy ball that it is, bounces a little before stopping and so I wanted to recreate this for myself using the video for reference. And this was my result...


Overall I feel that this looks ok for a first try, but I thought it didn't look heavy or smooth enough. I realised to fix this problem I would need to take out a frame before the first bounce the ball makes and show the balls heavy weight more by slowly making it role further at the end. I also wanted to pen the next one in to make it stand out more.



In the end I am happy with how it has turned out. I think the slow roll at the end really helps to convey the balls heavy weight and I think outlining the ball in black really helps to draw attention to this. Also the frame being taken out before its first bounce has definitely made it much smoother and again I am pleased at this result!

Then I wanted to give my next bouncing ball some personality, and what better way to do it than this...



I thought that a great way to achieve this would be turning the ball into something humorous... like a tiny whale. I really enjoyed creating this little simplified character and animating it, at first the animation seemed a little clunky but once I went through and added more frames to it, it was much smoother.

Then I went on to animate a ball bouncing off surfaces to see how it would react.


This did not take long to animate as I firstly plotted the balls path and then added in the key frames in the places where the ball would bounce and hit of the squares. I did not want to have to keep re-drawing the squares over and over so I drew them on acetate which overall made the whole process easier.

My first Blog Post!


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