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AX3002 - Personal Project: Building on top of Feedback

For Week 16, I received several critiques from my tutors and before the big presentations coming up I wanted to get this more villainous side of COVID on there and actually sell the audience on the fact that COVID in this film is the villain and not my friends.

Original Edit for Context:

Building a Bastard

The takeaway that Mario had from his initial viewing that he felt sorry for COVID. I made him feel sorry about a deadly disease and that's not good at all. So, I had to think of ways to make COVID a lot more dislikeable and what way to make you hate a character more than have them harm people that can't defend themselves!

Scene 1: Targeting a Child

Instead of just bothering no one and casually hanging out. COVID is raiding a child's bag and infecting all the items he finds within, all the while wearing a huge smile!

It felt important to show the ways of which you can get COVID and that COVID would be doing these disgusting acts to people's personal belongings in order to infect them.

Also, to show that COVID is still a threat, it is still a danger and it is still taking lives. My original animatic didn't stress that at all, giving the appearance that at this point now COVID is no longer a threat which just isn't true.

And to top it off, after infecting the innocent, he does a little gremlin laugh before he retreats into the bushes. Thus, when it comes time to give him the beatdown, the viewer doesn't feel sorry for him.

Again, when Mario told me this, it made so much sense and everything lined up perfectly!

Scene 2: The Brawl at the Bar

More of the same here, to be honest. The change was to COVID infecting some drinks left unattended. Another scummy thing some people sometimes do and it fit into the scene I already had made pretty comfortably.

Scene 4: COVID's Demise

As discussed in the previous post, the gun felt too hardcore and conveyed a very dangerous message. So, when breaking down the door, COVID just seethes in anger and attacks Jake to infect him!

Once again, tying back into COVID being a disease and instead of using a deadly weapon it just uses it's deadly ability! Which helps me segue into my next point.

Removing the More Mature Elements

Mario brought up another good point in private and that was if this film will be able to be shown at the Degree Show and if it would be appropriate for children. Which it wasn't. It had swearing, guns, violence and crude humour. To clean some of this up, I've removed the King's Arse with it's replacement being The Royal Rump.

The swearing also needed to go, it was me injecting a bit of my madness in there, but at the end of the day it was really unnecessary and I think going for a slightly more PG tone actually improved the final product at the end of the day! Please take a look!

Conclusion

A little bit of advice goes a long way in the end and I think the critiques really helped shape my project into something greater. Even though it needed changing, piecing it together and seeing this take shape through all of this project has been really enjoyable and it's good to have gotten my groove back with this project!

[jakesmachine]

AX3002 - Personal Project: Building on top of Feedback

For Week 16, I received several critiques from my tutors and before the big presentations coming up I wanted to get this more villainous side of COVID on there and actually sell the audience on the fact that COVID in this film is the villain and not my friends.

Original Edit for Context:

Building a Bastard

The takeaway that Mario had from his initial viewing that he felt sorry for COVID. I made him feel sorry about a deadly disease and that's not good at all. So, I had to think of ways to make COVID a lot more dislikeable.

Scene 1 - Instead of bothering nobody and just casually hanging out. COVID is infecting a child's bag and various items they left behind, all the while wearing a big smile on his face.

It felt important to show the ways of which you can get COVID and that COVID would be doing these disgusting acts to people's personal belongings in order to infect them.

Also, to show that COVID is still a threat, it is still a danger and it is still taking lives. My original animatic didn't stress that at all, almost treating it more like it's not an issue at all.

And to top it all off, he has a little gremlin laugh before he retreats into the bushes.

Thus, when he gets scalding hot coffee kicked into his face, you'd feel less sorry since he was still infecting the innocent.

Scene 2 - Changes

Scene 3 - Changes

Scenes 2 and 3 - Removing the more mature elements

Scene 4 -

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One Minute Film Development: Pepperface

My film has a very basic good vs evil story and so, the characters are blatantly the heroes and the villains. Pepperface here was designed to be the opposite of Hambone who is a proud and stoic type of character, the image of Pepperface had always been a sly, devious former partner to the titular character and as such I designed him to take things from Hambone’s character, but also elements to contrast against Hambone.

For example, Pepperface is much more narcissistic and I originally exaggerated that in his design. Having his initial, “P” all over his design and originally he had allthe letters of his name dangling from his hat. The letters on his hat really captured his personality, however thinking about the hassle that would be to animate the 10 strings individually with complete follow throughs as well was simply too much in too little time. So, this design concept was scratched.

Pepperface’s colour scheme was also designed to purposefully contrast with Hambone. Hambone using the stereotypical heroic colours like red, blue and gold while Pepperface uses darker colours, purples and greens which is typical colour schemes for more villainous characters. The yellow being consistent on both designs. Having a link between the two characters, possibly signifying the core similarities of their personalities. The first character sheet of Pepperface had a much darker colour scheme which didn’t feel right and as you can see doesn’t look all that good. Pepperface is a flamboyant showoff, he wants to appear flashy and catch eyes. He loves himself and giving him a colour scheme which contrasts to the world around it and being rather unconventional for a cowboy makes it stand out much better. So, I made the purple much more vibrant and more consistent throughout the design and added extra splashes of green to make his colours more balance.

Pepperface’s design also features an upside down star on the back of his coat, in contrast to Hambone’s imagery of stars over his design. The upside down star representing how Pepperface’s ideals are the opposite of Hambone’s and how he turned his back on those ideals.

Reflecting on both of my characters, I have to say even though I nailed Hambone the first time in my opinion, Pepperface took several attempts to get him right and I must say that he’s the character I like more. His unconventional design, his personality and his contrast to Hambone really makes me love him. 

Hambone’s character is the typical hero from western oriented media, while his character could be explored in greater detail, Pepperface stands out by being less conventional villain. He’s eye catching, he’s mysterious and he has a confidence about him that makes me route for him more than my hero. From designing Pepperface, I learned about designing characters around duality. That everything must have a balance and displaying it between two characters is a theme I have come to appreciate in media. By featuring duality, you can tie two characters or groups of characters together by the conflicting beliefs and ideologies displayed. I also learned that just having darker colours doesn’t always work in the favour of making a character villainous, villains can have brighter colours reflecting on their characteristics or personality. Non-conventional villains are definitely something I will attempt in my future works.

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Observational Drawing

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One Minute Film: Pepperface Character Design Development

The second picture attached to this post is my initial design for Pepperface, the antagonist in my one minute film project. The first design was a good basis for what I wanted Pepperface to look like, but there are certain aspects of the design that I didn’t like. The design of the boots didn’t sit well and the colour scheme of the gloves felt off to me. 

So, to give Pepperface a design I was satisfied with, I experimented with his original look to see what works and what does not. I altered the colour scheme to make the purple brighter as in my first design it was too dark and you can hardly even tell that it was purple. Purple, green and yellow were always intended for Pepperface’s design to compliment Hambone’s colours which are usually used on the heroic characters. Yellow appears in both colour schemes to give them some sort of visual link, by having small highlights of yellow on their outfits.

The parts of each design which I think work well will be combined into one design for the final product.

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These four drawings were done for a brief where we use a base that splits the drawing into nine squares and the outcome of this was to get a feel for setting up shots, where people or objects of interest.

I’m going to be using this technique much more in the future, but I’ve also used this technique in my animatic without even knowing it.

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Creative Thinking - Ideas

Road Rage?

There’s this man and he has incredibly violent road rage. He can’t stand any other person that drives a car. They’re always going too fast, going too slow, not using their indicators, doing U-turns in a one-way street. He’s sick of it. One day however, he’s getting ready to drive and he’s psyched himself up already to be angry. He gets in the car and sets off to work. The thing is, there are no cars on the road at all. Nobody is driving around like a dick, no one is trailing behind, no one is not using their indicators. Pure peace. But, the man starts to get anxious. He’s angry and he needs something to be angry at, but there’s nothing to be found.

Why’d you do that?

A dog, it’s a Rottweiler, likes to watch their owner make sandwiches and occasionally, the owner gives the dog a sandwich. The dog takes them and loves them, it always stands by without fail watching their owner make the sandwich. One day however, the owner wanted to play a little joke on the dog. They’d seen videos online of dogs reacting to lemons. So, the next time they were making a sandwich, they prepare one for the dog. The dog’s tail starts wagging and they put down the sandwich, the dog starts tucking in instantly. When it takes a bite of the lemon, he recoils back and sneers. Shaking his head. The owner’s laughing while the dog’s tasting the lemon. The dog then looks up at the owner and said, “What did you do to that? Why’d you do that to me?” in a Scottish accent.

These two little stories are stories I came up with by just thinking of two words and how to make these words relevant to each other. “Road Rage?” was created by using the words, “man” and “car”. This also uses some of my personal frustrations when seeing some people drive like absolute nutters, even though I don’t drive myself.

“Why’d you do that?“ was created by using the words, “Dog“ and “Sandwich“. Something I’ve wanted to try was feeding my dog a lemon as there are plenty of videos out there of dogs eating lemons and not liking it. And I began to think of what if the dog could talk back? Like the dog eats the lemon, hates it and looks at the owner like “Why would you do that to me? What’s wrong with you?“ I also went with the breed Rottweiler as I think they have extremely kind faces, so having them appear in this confrontational way is funny to me,

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This was also for my latest brief and these sketches required me to use basic three dimensional shapes to create depth on these rough outlines. The only shapes I could use were spheres, cylinders, cubes and cones.

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My latest brief was to make little characters out of three shapes, squares, circles and triangles. The shapes could be squashed, stretched and altered as long as they retain the basic shape. This sheet was using 2d shapes with no need for any depth in particular.

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Block speak task, the full lip sync animation is too big for Tumblr to upload.

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For the latest animation brief, we were to use a little flour sack character and animate them in three scenarios.

Before starting animating, we had to produce a pose sheet for the flour sack. This was to get a feel on how the sack would move and twist. Many pose sheets exist, so finding references to draw and learn from wasn’t hard. It definitely helped with the animation.

Reflecting on my own work, I think the animations I have produced are fine but could be improved. I think my timing still need some work and make the movements between poses a little more fluent. It was a surprisingly awkward task, especially the pushing animation. It took me several sketching out attempts to produce a walk cycle that was struggling to push a heavy object. From these tasks, I have learned how to produce a walk cycle and was able to apply it to the pushing animation. I have also learned about making characters show their current emotions in their actions by using the minimalistic flour bag.

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Animator Essay Introduction: Edd Gould

Edd Gould was a British animator who’s most famous for his online animated series, “Eddsworld”. Edd started animating in 2002, using a GIF animation program before discovering flash animation in November of 2002. Eddsworld was a series that featured Edd and his friends going on many misadventures, one of them being Thomas Ridgewell, who created the asdfmovie series. The show began in 2003 and Edd animated every episode until his death during the development of “Space Face (Part 1)”. Edd also wrote stories for the show as well as voice his own character.

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One Minute Film Character Concepts - Hambone

This week I have been working on character sketches for the main character in my one minute animation. Although these sketches were not for the brief this week, I’ve decided to add them to the blog as it still is work that is helpful to me and my project.

Currently this character may or may not be retooled as I thought of a newer take on the Hambone story where this character could be some sort of father figure, but I’m not certain on this idea, so there may be changes to this design of Hambone.

The look for Hambone was inspired by some of Clint Eastwood’s outfits from the films he’s been in, the ‘jacket’ was modelled after the one he wears in ‘Fistful of Dollars’. 

The colour scheme was also something very important when I was developing this design as I wanted to use colours that signify his heroic character, but also use colours that integrate with the cowboy aesthetic. The red, blue and yellow is commonly seen on superheros such as DC’s Superman and Marvel’s Thor. The browns had to be darker to create some contrast and make the brighter areas stand out more. I tried to use all of the colours more than once in the design, except for Hambone’s white and brown fur, as I wanted to avoid a massive clump of one colour in one single area.

The mood board was really fun to do as I could transfer his personality into his body language. I wanted him to appear quiet and reserved, but also can loose his cool when the time calls for it. It was also key for Hambone to have a proud figure to connote his heroicness and I feel I captured that a lot in his bulky arms and chest.

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For my model making brief, I had to gather a few bits and pieces to make a robot character puppet. I started with a few things like an old baked beans can and an old valve handle and worked up a character design based off of what I had available.

I found the baked beans can to be a great looking body piece, giving my puppet a more pronounced upper bod. Similarly to Gru from Despicable Me.

The valve handle turned out to be a really strong magnet and it made sense to make this the base of my puppet, especially with it being top heavy it really needs the support to stand up on its own.

I wanted this robot to appear very post-apocalyptic, only being held together by various scraps and anything that it finds. This is why I decided to cut out a jagged scratch onto the front of the body to convey the sense of disarray in the world this robot lives in.

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Demo

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