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Animation Week 4 - 31/03/2025

And so we're back in class. This time updating the tumblr. I really should've done this on Friday when we did our presentations to the entire class but well, I kind of forgot.

Ella finished up her script on Thursday of last week and I came along and just formatted/optimized it. All of this was done Thursday except I didn't really know if I should put up photos of it here so I asked the following day and was told that yes that is actually okay and well here we now are

The ending is a tad iffy but it should still work out. Might need some more direction, but it doesn't really need any more explanation.

Following this we got Ella's storyboard. We'll go ahead and make an animatic to see how long our runtime ends up being and we'll go from there

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Animation Week 3 - 27/03/2025

I didn't come in today. I was sick and feeling off all day and didn't want to do the trip just to cough my lungs or puke my guts out in class so I stayed home working on the script. Now I don't know if I should post the script here or what so I won't yet. I'll ask and do another whole post for it. But it's done. Not much to say since I wasn't in but this is our wall.

My team has done such a good job

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Animation Week 3 - 25/03/2025

Today we came in to work on the script and subsequently the storyboard. As well as get actual character designs set in place and all those good aesthetics.

We ended presenting what we had done since yesterday to Paul and what he correctly surmised is that the entire animation had no real plot of its own. It was just a series of shots with no real story or movement to it and just plain boring. He suggested changing location since everything else was pretty compelling, and so that's what we did. Now we've decided on doing it still about a group of friends, but now they're on a trip to a music festival and everything that happens before the 'Trip' comes back and feeds into it. With this added plot we had to give them names, they're as follows

Derek - Dog

Zac - Cat

Sebastian - Spoon

Krystall - Cow

Felicity - Fork

With each of us having designed our own characters (and Kiran setting them up in their own artstyle) we were basically to work of the script

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Animation Week 3 - 24/03/2025

I should have done this last night but a few things came up and I kinda fell asleep. Anywhos, today we started the actual several-week-long brief properly. The name of the brief is Re-invention in Storytelling, essentially what we'll be doing for the next 3 weeks is we'll be taking a Nursery Rhyme, a genre and a time period and as a group we'll make an animation based on that.

As a team we got the Nursey Rhyme 'Hey Diddle Diddle' and it's going to be a comedy set in the Internet Age (1990-Present)

After doing some research we found that it's origins are unknown and the meaning of it is fairly nonsensical so we took this to heart and applied it to our animation's plot.

What the group ended up deciding to work on was a more Adult Swim type comedy, we want it to have a crude sitcom-y feel to it with most of the comedy coming from how nonsensical the plot. Speaking of the plot we were thinking about having it set inside a pub/club during the mid 2000s to early 2010s. It will have the characters of the nursery rhyme show up and be a part of the main character's (the dog) drug trip. The cat would be a musician playing a fiddle, the cow a random person, the fork and spoon would be a couple being a bit too affectionate.

After some some deliberation (and Paul's advice) we made some changes to the plot, centering this time around a friend group who would meet the vague archetypes for the characters and when the Dog started tripping they would turn into the animals.

On top of this, as a group we had a talk about everyone's strengths and what they all felt most comfortable with. This is what we came up with.

Lory - Color

Ella - Sketching/Digital/Storyboard

Amy - Camera work/ Shot setup

Kiran - Character design

Gabriel - Digital illustration/Values

Going forward we will be using this as a reference to who will take care of what part of the project. Of course we will still maintain a rotation so that everyone does a little bit of everything and practices things they're not used to doing.

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Selected Discipline: Animation

Tuesday we just filmed and edited the animation. There were some improvements done to the storyboard early in the day.

Filming began at the park and took a relatively short amount of time, only a couple hours. We got feedback then went back out to the park to apply said feedback and finish it up.

After lunch we sat down and worked on editing the clip into something cohesive and well, given the nature of the plot itself I personally felt like it lended itself quite well to what the kids nowadays refer to as brainrot.

Let me just say that it came out amazing.

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Selected Discipline: Animation

And so it begins, with this the grueling path towards getting a degree in animation has officially started and I for one cannot be happier. It quite literally is what the last 6 years have amounted to for me. It's crazy, but well first day being a Thursday meant that we get a little bit more time to work and be properly introduced to the discipline and the brief that we will be doing for the next, I don't know how many weeks until the year ends.

Today we got divided into groups drawn out of what very well could have been a fish bowl and just started making a list of pros and cons of teamwork. My team ended consisting out of Ella Cubbin, Lory Perez, Kiran Soo, Amy Curry and myself. We came to the conclusion that there are some decent benefits to teamwork, but it has severe disadvantages (especially if work ethic is something that's lacking.)

After this we got to work on the project for the first week of the rest of the year. Pixellation. We watched examples and got together as a group to create a storyboard for the animation itself.

We ended up deciding on the actor (Me) walking into frame, finding an ENTIRE rotisserie chicken on the floor, eating it and subsequently dying. Only to then be laughed at by someone else.

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Week 6: Painting

I'm gonna go ahead and say that I could have definitely done more this week. I just needed to put brush and paint to canvas and seen where that would take me. But I didn't and I'm sad about that. A lot of time has just gone right by for me. Time either half-spent updating this god-forsaken blog or sketching or thinking and then before I know it the entire day has gone. I am seeing what I can do to alleviate this and just help out with some other issues I have. But enough about that.

Life painting was surpisingly fun. I didn't have much in the way of hope for it, because again I'm not the best at painting and then the fact that it was a nude and then with the whole 'last week' jitters. I thought I would stress out and not get much done (only half of that actually happened). I liked it, it was fun mixing the paints playing around with the values and yeah I needed more time and definitely a smaller brush but I'm happy and proud with what I achieved and learned.

I'll definitely try some more painting on my own. I have the materials and I do need to stop being a digital art one trick pony.

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Life drawing

This was just great. I haven't done life drawing in AGES and I've never done it with charcoal so having the opportunity to actually do it. It was so much fun and it was so enjoyable.

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Painting Week 5

This week I finally went ahead and did painting, the safe choice for me. Why safe choice? Because I know I'll enjoy it. It's only my second choice because I absolutely LOVE animation. And I was correct. I am a week and a few days into painting and honestly it has been so fun and a time I have enjoyed. Both Eoin and Sylvia have been such great help in getting me started on working and just bouncing ideas around.

I decided to go back to the whole 'skinwalker transformation gone wrong' with foxes on the first day. Next day I didn't do anything other than some sketching because I didn't go into class.

But on Thursday I actually went ahead and worked, quite a bit at that.

I attempted to mix some fungal imagery with a fox to show that there is a sort of symbiosis, a point in which they're both functioning fine. I feel like I did a less than stellar job with the actual paint. I'm not the best at it but I do like how it all turned out

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Research

Something that has been missing throughout the entirety of this project, and that is research. I never did speak to many lecturers or did do much research on my own up until now. The most I've had is some information on Francis Bacon.

Something that really captivated me about his work is just how weird and haunting it is. For example, we got 'Three Studies of the Human Head' (1953). They're horrible. I hate them so much, and yet they're so good.

A big part of what I like about his work is the Hellish feel that they exude, it's a mixture of the expressions themselves as well as the discoloration and ultimate distortion of the human body. It just gives off vibes of 'demons inside a meat suit exposed to some sort of holy object'. Then you also have the entirety of the 'Head' series. In this case I wanna talk a bit about 'Head VI'

Starting with the entire series where this piece comes from. "Variations on 'Portrait Of Pope Innocent X' by Velazquez". As the name suggests, they're a bunch of variations of the portrait of Pope Innocent X with the Bacon twist. They're horrifying and he's distorted and in general they all convey this deep anguish, compounded by the expression and the darkness that forms a part of the model. There's so much I can say but it all comes down to, it's horrible, I love it and I don't want to experience whatever is making him scream.

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Sculpture: A retrospective

It wasn't that bad. It really wasn't, still won't ever really be my first choice but I enjoyed what it was and there isn't much I can say about it.

All throughout the past two weeks I have been beating myself over sculpture, over leaving things half-done and just giving up. I don't like it, but that's a very real part of me and it's something I'm working on. I am proud with this second wind and renewed sense of interest in the project but it's still tainted with the time constraint caused by my earlier decisions

Not sure how to end this

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Mask Making 2: Electric Boogalo

I'm kind of cheating here because none of this happened chronologically until last week (from date of post) but it's related to sculpture (and I am still bad at keeping up with updating tumblr) so here it goes.

I spoke with Mike Fox again and got ideas on how to achieve the creation of the skeletal mask that I wanted to work with. He showed me a pretty dope albeit a bit macabre, fox skull missing only its lower jaw.

With his help and guidance I came to a plan. Basically just take the building blocks of the skull and apply those to the cranium-balloon using newspaper and tape and on top of that use more torn paper and pva to form the mask/helmet.

I used cardboard to create some more stability in the whole structure as well as providing a place for the paper to stick to and hold up.

And that's that. The helmet/skull/mask is still drying atop my dinner table. I will provide more updates as they happen

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Mask Making

There is something to be said about sculpture and 3D in real life. It's a pain, I'm gonna be honest it's a pain and I genuinely do not enjoy it, I have come to realize I'm definitely geared towards 2D whether that is because my brain simply works better in 2D situations rather than 3D or simply because having stuff on my hands gives me a sensory overload, I don't know.

I mention this because I kind of gave up during the second half of the second week of sculpture. I don't have a big visual library or even experience to help guide me when problems arise. This just led me into procrastinating and eventually basically dropping the project but here is what I did that second week.

I got a balloon, pva and brown paper torn into smaller pieces and just put those on it. I don't know what else to say. it really is just that. That same day I took it down to dry and then it turned out like this.

It didn't turn out too bad, definitely needed more layers of brown paper and needs those layers to be spread evenly. It's good, it works for what it's meant to be. This is where problems began to arise. Starting with the actual design of the mask, which is more like a Kamen Rider helmet.

Some changes to the design had to be made, but even then it didn't really work because since I was using cardboard and hot glue, the angle at which I glued the things caused too much stress on the glue and it just didn't work.

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Sculpture continued

The rest of the week was slow and frankly I didn't do much. It was a shorter week due to the bank holiday and I did need some more guidance.

I kind of scrapped the idea of making a whole fox with rope and wire and some other materials to simulate a transformation, or failed transformation in this care.

It would've taken too long and I just wasn't fully bought into the idea.

So I went back to the drawing board and ended up playing around with the idea of a possible helmet. Is this because I like Power Rangers Dino Fury? Yes, yes it is.

I need to do more research on helmets, because right now I am just thinking about doing very defined planes and working off of that, because it's just easier to work with. I was thinking about doing a sort of frame with the 3 wire 1 rope, but it didn't work. It's still too flimsy and won't hold up the entire weight of it.

I spoke with Mike Fox who always delivers. Every time I have spoken to him I have just gotten such good advice and it has moved my projet forward. It's been amazing. What he told me or suggested was twofold. First, get a balloon, some brown paper and some pva and just layer the pva coated brown paper on the balloon to form a cranial structure, off of which i'd keep building up on in order to create the mask/helmet. Second, once that previous part is done and I'm adding the other materials to better create the silhoutte and everything else, add bone to truly display that mid-transformation effect that I'm seeking.

So that's where I'm at. I have balloons and some design ideas that I frankly cannot wait to start working on.

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Movement Week 3 Sculpture Week 1

I'm going to be honest I didn't have that many hopes for sculpture. It was just the decent third option. That said, I have been thoroughly surprised and I've been enjoying myself. First day we just focused on playing around with materials, seeing what things worked what didn't; I ended up focusing on wire and rope and string.

I tried a couple iterations of rope + wire as shown below. I ended up liking 1 rope + 3 wire the most out of all the ones I tried, it felt as sturdy as a mixture of rope and wire ever could be.

Following this, I was able to take some photos of the dessicated cat that is in campus. It's weirdly cool and a fair bit macabre if I'm being honest, but it help to have some up close view on what can essentially be a mummified cat (even though I'm mainly working around with foxes) which in turn helped me with what I worked on last for the day (a wire + rope fox paw, mostly anatomically accurate)

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Time issues

So due to a bunch of things (work, moving ) I haven't had much time available to actually do more work. Friday was crazy, I was going to work at home but a lot of things happened and moving started. Saturday was moving day so no luck there, Sunday as well. It's only today monday that I've got some time.

This is what I've got to show for progress. I wish I had more but I spent some time revising and re-doing the earlier parts of the story board and then. Well I work slowly, very slowly so that doesn't quite help.

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Movement Week 2 Animatic

This is an animatic. I don't know what else to say. I did find it okay, working with Premiere Pro I mean. I had used it previously but well it never has sat high on my preferred video editing tools. Still it does the job and it does it well.