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Pixilation challenge

my version of my teams pixilation challenge. I keep having issues with audio disappearing so im not sure if it will post in this.

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Props And Outfits

We started off making a list and breakdown of props and outfits/clothes needed at the start of this project, you can see these in previous posts. This was definitely the easy part

Once we had this list, the hard part begun of having to find and source our props and outfits. From here, we knew where to start and what props we would have to make. Some examples of the props we found were guitars and a lamp. Some stuff we had to make included the camera, globe, and graduation cap. James helped make most of the props we needed while I helped with a few others and brought in props that existed already, such as guitars.

Most of the group brought in clothes for outfits we needed after going through the list and seeing what we would have in our closets.

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Our Reality Bites trailer re make

I edited and colour corrected our full trailer I had some challenges in syncing clips and animating some effects such as flare and transitions, I hoped to add some fade in and outs but couldn’t figure it out in time lol.

Special thanks to,

Dylan Sweeney @k00282801 (and his steed Pauline)

Luke Sweeney @k00282818

Ronan Chin @k00282432

Liam Keary @k00285513

Jules Graystone @k00283773

Robyn O’Rahilly @k00281598

Adam Nash @k00285326

And Group 3

James Kearney @k00285376

Aodhan Brady @k00283394

Austeja Sidorenko @k00282830

Saoirse Campbell @k00285035

Daria Grzeszkowiak @k00286993

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Props

For the guitar gig scene I was responsible for bringing in the props such as the guitars and shirts. I also helped out with the lighting, holding up some additional flashlights as it was very dark.

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Reality Bites trailer remake

Here is a section of the trailer remake I worked on. We all worked on some parts to put them together.

I now need to fix the colors and format.

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Reality bites trailer recreation

I've been helping out with props and assisting in filming for my group.

Today we filmed a few scenes including a car scene

I unfortunately have a bad habit of not taking photos and recording our process on here unfortunately.

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Reality bites storyboard

My group and I split the trailer down into 28seconds each to make into a storyboard.

Here you can see my storyboard of 1:18 to 1:44

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Reality bites trailer remake

I broke down the scenes into lists of props needed and laid them out to help us know what we need to find or make along with ideas of how we could make them if needed.

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Fota wildlife park- photos

Today we went to fota wildlife park to observe and draw animals. Below are photos I took, I will make a separate post for my drawings.

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Artist (Henry Emerson Tuttle)

I stumbled across this post and it caught my eye after having just watched videos about drawing animals. I looked more into henry emerson tuttle and saw that he appears to be someone who likes drawing birds using etching (dry point). His attention to detail is what catches my attention.

Portrait: Snowy Owl, Henry Emerson Tuttle, 1934

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Prep for Fota

Aaron Blaise

Stuart Sumida

In preparation for heading to Fota tomorrow, @ysweeneylsad sent us a couple of videos to watch about studying and drawing live animals.

Aaron Blaise

The first one was by Aaron Blaise whos also known as "creature art teacher" online. In this video he explains how he prefers to draw animals in person out in the wild as you get to study them better than you would from photos and a better feel for how they're structured and proportioned. He seems to mostly draw gestures in pen, specifically ball point pens and brush pens. He talks about how sometimes (especially on that trip) he went to a farm/zoo to sketch and got chances to draw a variety of animals; from leopards to wolves and bears. He talks about how good it is to have as many rough sketches for future reference and ideas rather than focusing on a few high quality detailed works.

He really encourages everyone to go out and draw animals from their habitats in this video.

In this next video he talks about "essentials of animal drawing" which consists of stuff such as anatomy and how to draw animals from your head.

He mentions our "visual library" often, this is a term I've heard from people at college so its a familiar word. He talks about how its good to know what animals you will be drawing because that allows you to brush up on your animal anatomy. This is similar to something I have tried to do, especially knowing that I struggle with drawing animals.

You can see in one of my previous posts my attempt at practicing sketching animal shapes and seeing if I could figure out how their body is structured underneath. He talks about how rather than memorizing each animal specifically, he memorizes each of their heads, legs, bodies and such in terms of shapes as you can usually mix and match, for example all four legged animals seem to have similar shapes and I also noticed that I had spotted this in my past animal study.

In his study below he shows how legs on these animals work in similar ways; "scapula to shoulder into elbow to the wrist and rest of the feet."

He mentions how seeing these animals live and drawing them from a live reference, you often see these anatomies/bones in motion and working.

Tonight I plan to do some studies on big cats especially before my trip to Fota because I know I always enjoy watching those move around in any zoo. I might also see if I can work on looking at kangaroo anatomies and comparing those to the anatomy of a wallaby. Im curious if theres much of a difference as I have seen them roaming around fota.

In the next part of this video we see Aaron out at a farm and we see his drawing process of drawing a donkey but he talks us through his thought process no matter the animal.

He talks about how important it is to not start drawing immediately and to just observe the animal for a while, studying their form and how they move. He mentions how basic anatomy knowledge is very helpful for when the animal moves and you have started drawing an animal in a specific pose.

He tells us that observing is better than getting an amazing drawer as its important to get information. I feel like this will be something I will struggle to do as I often am a perfectionist when I can be so tomorrow I plan to try keeping to quick observational drawings rather than focusing on a perfect drawing. I might try to sketch mostly in pen as this has helped me keep a more observational study sketch going instead of constantly erasing and redrawing a particular part.

He talks about how handy it is to have animals that move around for study sketches and that being at a farm is interesting because you get to see a couple different animals come and go.

In one part of the video he completely leaves the sketch as the donkey gets close again and instead starts a detail sketch of the donkeys eye as this isnt something he gets to observe in detail all the time.

These are his finished donkey sketches before he moved onto drawing goats.

He talks about his supplies to help prevent any back pains and allow him to sketch for longer, such as a chair and the board for the sketchbook.

He again reinforces studying animal anatomies before going to draw them when you know what you will draw. This to me shows that he thinks this is a very important tip that has helped him draw and study animals. "its not about getting great drawings, its about gathering information" is something he also kept repeating.

Stuart Sumida

Stuart Sumida is an anatomy consultant and a professor of biology / a paleontologist. This talk was conducted through an online call, this talk was titled "why being a generalist is not a bad thing". He talks about how as a paleontologist he teaches human anatomy to doctors and animal anatomy to vets and so on. His talk is inspired by a book called "range: why generalists triumph in a specialized world" where he talks about how scientists have known this for a while.

I feel like this also stands for artists in a sense of needing to know how to draw a lot of different subjects and themes. This is confirmed by him telling students that they often hear that you often have to work your way up the ladder in the industry and you have to start anywhere you can and then work towards the position you want.

Below you can see 5 rules Stuart Sumida likes to follow in the industry.

He talks about how they broke down the animals in lion king into smaller groups to teach the staff in a more generalized way rather than focusing on each specific animal.

He talks about how animals differ based on what they eat / whether they are carnivores, herbivores or omnivores as seen in this example of a horse (herbivore) vs a cheetah (carnivore) running/galloping.

He talks about how skeletons and muscles are very important for drawing animals and followed it with these sketches of realistic dogs and a cartoon one.

A handy website he shares is DigiMorph.org which has 3d animal skulls and skeletons.

Overall

watching these videos helped me feel more prepared for tomorrows trip to Fota and it made me realize there is so much that I have yet to learn about drawing animals. I plan to use some of the mentioned techniques tomorrow if possible while drawing live animals.

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Pixilation research

In preparation for mondays pixilation challenge, I looked into the two following pixilation short films that we were sent and did some research on other examples I could find.

Neighbours - 1952 - Norman McLaren

I found the way that they used both pixilation and regular videos for this pretty interesting, using video for things like walking but then for things like the flower growing or when the two characters were examining the flower they used the pixilation technique. I also really like the simple sounds they used for this animation, a simple couple of sounds that increase in frequency and pitch or decrease based on whats happening; the more happening, the more sounds or things moving backwards such as the fence being removed had a lower pitched sound.

When the characters were jumping/flying around it reminded me of a tiktok trend that was around for a while. I will attach that example to the end of this post.

Luminaris  - 2011 - Juan Pablo Zaramella 

Luminaris was a very interesting short film to watch, I can only imagine how long it took to make simply because of the way the characters seem to move with the light, especially at the start with all the scenes of people following the light to work. I am however curious as to how they shot the shots of the lightbulb rising the lightbulb hot air balloon shots and if theres a way my team could mess around and achieve a similar affect somehow.

Pixelation short film

On my own dive into youtube after watching the assigned videos I found this one that caught my attention. Its done by gabril bach, sereina kessler, katarina stefanovic and eva wolf according to the description. What caught my eye about it was the combination of using a human and sticky notes to make characters. These characters would then chase the human, a few examples were packman and snake. I plan on mentioning the sticky note idea to my pixilation group.

TikTok compilation

When we first learnt of the pixilation challenge and what it is, I immediately thought of the trend that this compilation features.

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Artist research- Expressions

Jin Kim

Jin Kims art really caught my attention with how many expressions he draws for his character designs. Having learnt about phonemes this week, I noticed that from some of these sketches you can almost hear what sounds the sketches are making/saying.

For example, in this sketch you can tell hes making an "ooo" sound

and maybe something like an "a" sound in this one

I like how he seems to be copying the voice actors mouth movements for these sketches to get the phoneme drawings right.

Here are a few other sketches I found interesting.

Lipsync class

Today Paul also showed us how to do a lipsync using animate and using groups for the mouth. We were also shown how to cut out mouths we made using Photoshop.

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practice/study

Knowing that animals are a weak point of me, I decided to do a brief sketch study of the shapes of some animals in preparation for the Fota trip. I noted the common shapes that the animals seem to be made up of

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Tuesday- MiniMe build and ice breakers

Today we started the day off with ice breakers where we got to talk to other people in the class and share stories along with come up with what we need in a team.

We then got started on our MiniMes.

We were instructed to keep the mouths blank as we will be switching these out for lipsynching and the shoot.

here you can see a photo from in the process, the current mouths I have planned and my finished MiniMe

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Introduction to lipsync mini me

Today we got introduced to our MiniMe project and what info we need for lipsyncing our animations. For this we were introduced into the idea of lipsyncing sounds rather than every word/letter. Here is a couple of phoneme sheets for this process.

I did some research looking at a couple animated short films.

"T" sound v

"M" sound v

these are just a couple. I noticed that they dont seem to lipsync every sound either but instead they focus on the main sounds. For example in the screen shots she was saying "Nature" and for the sounds with similar mouth shapes they didnt change it that much.

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"sundown" was another animation short film I looked at. I noticed that a good few times that people talk that their mouths seem off screen. I also noticed that the way they talk sometimes, for example, when theyre annoyed the characters talk through their teeth.

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Movement Brief Reflection

For this project brief, I explored movement through the idea of concerts and live music. I did this through my 3 chosen electives; print, animation and sculpture. I unfortunately missed a couple of days from sculpture so I never got to properly complete pieces through it however i enjoyed the research and process of starting sculpture pieces. I tried to spend an equal amount of time on each of my electives although I definitely think I gravitated a bit more towards animation, this was the discipline I enjoyed the most.

print

I really enjoyed this and wish I got to spend more time in the workshop prints and regret leaving the 2nd week of print to the last week. This cut my time somewhat short as I was trying to hop between the electives to try finish stuff off. That being said I think that my prints turned out really well and I enjoyed the screen printing the most. I also worked on a lino piece of a polaroid like print showing the stage set of my animation character.

I enjoy this elective thoroughly and the print lecturers/mentors were amazing with helping come up with ideas.

sculpture & combined media

Unfortunately I didnt quite enjoy this elective, the lecturers/mentors were really lovely however i struggled to come up with many ideas for it and I learned I really prefered 2d and digital works far more. I do wish I tried harder to explore this elective and get tutorials instead of shying away from it and focusing more on ideas for my other 2 electives.

animation

This was my favorite elective although I mightve been somewhat biased as this was something I already thoroughly enjoyed before I even came into first year at lsad. I enjoyed how helpful and easy to approach yvonne and paul were when I had any concerns.

I really enjoyed the tasks that we got for this elective as it gave us a bit more structure while still allowing us complete creative freedom. I think this couldve been useful in other electives too. I think the tasks really helped come up with ideas and any research needed. I also thoroughly enjoyed learning about different stages of preproduction, production and post production. I think my favorite was preproduction where all of the planning stuff was taking place.

Conclusion

I got to learn more about these 3 electives and learnt that while Im still interested in animation, print is now something Im also considering. I think I need to talk with the print and animation lecturers to see which is best. Ultimately it'll be a case of fine art vs design and which I would prefer a career or experience in.