k00271829 - Tumblr blog

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Front view walk

I lead with my right leg as my right arm is also my dominant arm. I also have to wear a mask as we are unsure if I caught covid. Once again I walk pretty steady and rigid with little bounce, I look quite stiff when I walk and there isn’t much or exaggerated swaying in my arms on either side.

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Walk cycle / my walk

I found that I walk with a fairly steady posture, my walk doesn’t bounce up and down as much as I thought it would. Maybe the fact that filming myself walking was also pretty awkward that I didn’t walk as fluid and lively as I usually would.

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~ Sketchbook ~

Excuse my rambling and awkward, shaky voice, currently sick with a 39 degree fever :)

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I am still not confident with colour in digital art but I am diligently practicing my greyscale and monotone drawings. This is a scene from Bangchan x Hyunjin song ‘ Red Lights’ (K-pop group Stray Kids) . I spent approx 16 hours drawing this from reference. Getting the layout and proportions right was the biggest struggle but once the outline was drawn I filled out the drawing by object and then Bangchan himself I split into sections (hair, back, left leg etc.) and slowly finished the piece. I am proud of how this turned out. Also, I recommend the group and song to everyone :)

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ANIMATION MODULE STATEMENT

I found this semester to have been pretty brief and think it passed extremely quick as each and every week was filled with new and exciting briefs and challenges.

Upon receiving my place in this module as an official animation and motion design student I remember initially fearing whether I will be capable of upholding my usual high standard as many things where brand new to me. Using the adobe suite seemed like such an inexplicably impossible hurdle but with each workshop and day spent in the lab I found myself learning, questioning, and understanding all the programs more and more, gaining confidence with each completed project. I found being thrown into each brief very overwhelming, but I learned that my classmates are my team members and that asking questions is not just an option but sometimes a must. Therefore whenever I was confused I’d reach out to a peer who understood the tasks at hand more proficiently than myself and patiently listened to their advice. This way I was able to complete all my briefs and and even though they initially would cause me much stress, the pride in finishing each project and knowing I’m capable of everything this course has so far thrown at me, made me love animation this much more and reaffirmed me in my choice, that this is the path and hopefully career for me.

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A quick sketch and phoneme practice. Hello is such a basic and short word but uses 5 different phonetic symbols which makes it a good yet simple practice for phoneme animations.

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~ Fota Wildlife sketches ~

On Tuesday our animation class went on a trip to Fota to observe and sketch the wildlife there. This was supposed to help us practice drawing animals in motion. I always loved drawing and sketching animals but I struggle to draw quickly, this was definitely a good exercise, I learned that for now it’s easier for me to capture things quickly with brush liners rather than pencils. I’d like to improve capturing things in motion, I am planning to revisit Fota with friends during the summer holidays and practice again.

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-Legally Blonde Phoneme Animation-

Using adobe animate, Paul taught us how creating an animation to any audio by lip-syncing phonemes. We lip synced the right sounds made by each symbol by attaching them to the symbol and if done correctly, the mouth movements align themselves to any audio of your choosing. I chose the iconic argument used by Vivian in the occult movie 'Legally Blonde'

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-Motion Tween Two Scenes-

Today we learned how to add scenes to an object/ symbol in additional scenes which allow for two separate movements/actions to happen simultaneously eg. Move across screen, twist, turn and resize, all at once. We were also shown how to make this action repeat itself a number of times in the given amount of second/frames.

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~ Phoneme Stop-motion ~

My short little phoneme stop motion. It’s not perfect but it’s cute and a little awkward and I enjoyed playing around with the concept of this sassy little lamp character drinking her coffee then saying ‘hello’.

I felt awkward recording my own voice so I added in some more sound effects as a distraction from the awkward silence leading up to that moment.

I printed out the mouths that I drew digitally, cut and laid them out in order to get a better view of what the movement will look like.

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~ Phoneme stop motion character planing/design~

Before jumping to putting together a bust formed from random household items and appliances, I decided to come up with a very rough base idea of who my character will be and how I want them to look like. When I was practicing the mouth shapes (using the phoneme mouth charts below), the big lips just kind of happened as I sketched and I thought they’d look nice with a tongue piercing. When I looked at that combo I saw a quite sassy or bad girl vibe character so the rest of my choices such as hoop earrings, coffee cup and long hair where based off of that idea.

I am still debating as to whether I should put her heart pupil eyes under the sunglasses or glue her eyes and lashes on top of them. Eyebrows could be added if I see fit, potentially using more paper cut outs or bobby pins?

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-Combining 2D and 3D Animation-

Also known as 'hybrid animation'. The usual process of mixing 2D and 3D animations involves preparing the 3D scene in one software and the 2D one in another. This method has been used a good amount of times to varying degrees, often for stylistic choice. It is a method that is very time consuming (as is anything requiring 2D hand drawn/frame-by-frame animation). A good example would be Arcane which is a 2D & 3D animated show, which took 5 years to produce only 9 episodes. Two other incredibly famous examples of hybrid animation are :

The Iron Giant

Created in 1999, this Warner Bros. Sci-Fi animation has become a bit of a cult classic today. Based on a 60s novel by the same name, it is a charming tale of the friendship between a boy and a giant metal robot of sorts. Another great example of visual storytelling can be seen where the Iron Giant takes the exact opposite approach to Spirit. Here, the backgrounds are rendered in 2D while the main characters are all three-dimensional.

Spirit

This 2002 DreamWorks animation was set in the American Wild West in the 19th century and follows the adventures of the character, Spirit, a Mustang colt whose inner monologue is voiced by Matt Damon. It tells a story of immense leadership, courage, and friendship, as its themes. The film was nominated for an Oscar for best animation and is an absolute visual treat. Spirit uses lush, colourful 3D backgrounds, but the primary characters are all hand-drawn in traditional 2D style. This film is extremely important and nostalgic to my childhood and we do not talk about the new sequel. As the saying goes "There is no war in Ba-sing-se" - Avatar the last airbender.

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Riot Games Animation Studio Research

-League of Legends Music Video Research -

As my time-lapse was of the Arcane poster I thought it's only fair for me to look more in depth into Leagues overall animation achievements and studio. Fortiche Production is a French Animation Studio best known for creating Animations and Cinematics for Riot Games Inc. After the release of Arcane, Riot acquired a non-controlling stake in the company. Many new fans came flooding to YouTube and social media to obsess over Arcane music, animation and discuss it's revolutionary success, but there was an equally large amount of fans, many coming from the actual game 'League of Legends' itself, who for years watched and appreciated the unique, high quality animation present in all of LOL's music videos. Fortiche studios has always produced incredible animations for the gaming company. Above is their latest music video for the 2022 World Championship.

The League of Legends World Championship is the annual professional League of Legends world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games and is the culmination of each season. Teams compete for the champion title, the 32kg Summoner's Cup, and a multi-million-dollar championship prize. In 2018, the final was watched by 99.6 million people, breaking 2017's final's viewer record. The tournament has been praised for its ceremonial performances, while receiving attention worldwide due to its dramatic and emotional nature.

Seeing as the popularity of the world championships is so vast, the annual music videos promoting it are just as grand and gather a perplexing number of views online each time. The above MV 'Rise' garnered a whopping 299 million views on YouTube since it's release. Often their music is made by their own virtual kpop group K/DA who are represented in their music videos by four LOL characters.

The above video shows all the Worlds Championship MV's starting from 2014. I watched it multiple times and recommend anyone to check it out in their free time. Some music videos use similar methods to Arcanes animation, blending 2D and 3D, the animators from French studio Fortiche make you feel as if you're watching a three-dimensional oil painting. Others remind you of Japanese animes just much more high quality. Sometimes the animation is intertwined with real life video footage. Fortiche studio is a top animation studio of this generation which only keeps climbing it's ranks with it's always unique and polished works.

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-Final Deconstruction/erasing Animation-

I chose the Arcane poster for my image to deconstruct and animate. The poster drew my attention as it is very clean with clear parts and sections to it, the background, middle and foreground. To animate this I used photoshop and frame by frame erased away the image using various patterns for effect. I especially like the pattern created on Vi's face. Then the frames where brought into the timeline and reversed. I fell in love with Arcane upon watching it, in my opinion any animator out there has to have some respect for this series even if they somehow didn't find the actual show and storyline enjoyable. I have re-watched it 3 times since it came out and I'm in tears and impressed every single time, the soundtrack is also incredible.

I added the instrumental from 'Enemy' by Imagine Dragons , which was used as a soundtrack for the show and even the music video had an incredible animation specifically for it.

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-Motion Guide and Easing Workshop-

In todays workshop with Paul, we learned how to attach images to a path/guide we created and how to control their movement along the way. This method is very quick and effective and has many potential uses. It is quite simple as far as you somewhat understand the basics.

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- Finished pixelation -

I posted my pixelation on both YT and Vimeo. Our pixelation ended up consisting of over 400 frames but we really enjoyed shooting it as a team. Our three actors ; Jason, Rebecca and Bee did a wonderful job co-operating and it was great seeing everyone including them chip in ideas as we went along. Our camera operator ; Emilia understood the directors visions with ease and shot the video very well. Lastly the directors; Aisling and myself. We came up with most of the ideas and changes as we started shooting as well as co-operated with the actors to help move them in ways that suited the frame and idea.

We came up with a race for our idea, honestly because of the two caps we wanted to use to distinguish teams and I saw a red chair in the room and thought it’d be perfect to further split the teams and it was either racing cars or horse riding in my head. We brainstormed the main body , the crash, countdown, sunglasses being put on dramatically, but the best ideas came up when we went out into the hallways and physically begun shooting.

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- Kiki's Delivery Service Ver 2 -

The birds in my first poster moved randomly and kind of against the laws of nature so with Pauls' advice I edited another version with a softer, gliding pattern.