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   Here is my finished showreel, full of all my work from this year! The song I chose is dogsitting by Louie Zong, and I like it because it’s got a nice beat but it’s still bubbly and cutesy, which I think suits my personality pretty well.   I’ve tried my best to match all the clips to the beats of the music so that it flows nicely. I also decided against using labels/subtitles, so I hope that the clips speak for themselves well enough. Overall I’m really proud of this, and all of the work I’ve done this year in general too!

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showreel analysis #4

   This animation showreel is work from the University of Hertfordshire. It’s quite long, but since it’s University work rather than an individuals showreel then that’s more acceptable, as the goal is to show all of their student’s work.

Although it’s a little bit loud, the music works well with the clips.

Each clip has a nice length, and there’s no one shot that lingers too long

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   Part of the fantastical creatures brief involves compositing our finished models into some live action shots. I compiled these in photoshop. I didn’t know how to rig my model, so he’s T-posing in his natural habitat!

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   Here’s the turnaround of my finished Capritus model. It took a long time to render, and you can see from how fluffly this boy is! As mentioned before I couldn’t put it through substance painter, so the pink/fleshy parts of the model look a little bit plain, which is kind of dissapointing. But grooming the fur was actually quite fun, and one of my favourite parts of modelling this.

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   This is how my finished Lip Sync animation turned out! I really like how this turned out. The main thing I struggled with is the chin movements, as it’s something I haven’t tried doing before. I wish I had the time to colour it, but it’s nice as it is now. After this project I feel a lot more comfortable with tvpaint.

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   Here is my finished render of my Mystery Box sequence. I decided to add a little jump to the box itself, which I think helps to carry the scene a lot smoother. The audience now kind of knows why max reacted in such a frightened way.

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Cast Model Sheet

   Part of the fantastical creatures brief is to create a cast sheet with our classmates. The group I was with for the very first briefing/brainstorming session are the one’s I’ve made a cast sheet with. In order, there’s mine, Noah, Sam and August’s creature designs. 

Here’s the digital drawing by itself:

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Weekly Summary #16 (post-easter)

Mystery Box

   I have completely finished splining and cleaning up my mystery box sequence. From now I just need to find some time in the media labs to render it. I think I will re-animate the last run cycle, because it shouldn’t take long. This was a tiresome but ultimately enjoyable project. It had less of a learning curve than the character modelling stuff, so it didn’t stress me out that much.

Lip Sync

   I’m in the home stretch now in terms of finishing my lip sync, and I’m pretty sure that I can get it done. I’m kind of in the monotonous part of the process now, just re-drawing the face and mouth every frame. I’m not saying I disliked this project, it was a nice change amongst all of the 3D stuff we’re doing alongside it and I already know I’m gonna like how this turns out.

Character Modelling

   I’ve definitly hit a few hurdles in this project, and it took me longer than I thought it would. I really would like to do some work in substance painter, but now I think I won’t have the time considering the hand-in date is next week. Besides, I already know that my model has a lot of flaws (random traingles, filled in holes with messy meshes) so I don’t think I’d have the time to fix all of that anyway.

Showreel

   I’ve started editing my showreel together with what I have finished. Once I have everything rendered I’ll be able to finish it. Not much to say about it really, I’m not having any problems because I’m already pretty familiar with premiere. If I have a few spare minutes I’m going to make a cute little title card.

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   Here’s a quick playblast of the splined version of my Mystery box. It’s not the smoothest animation ever, but it’s to a point that I’m happy with. My main gripes are with the walk and run cycles at the beginning and end. I might re-animate the last second or two, just because the stiffness of the run is annoying me. But really the only thing left to do is add some light sources and render it.

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   Here’s another wip of my model. This is pretty much the final version that I’m happy with, minus some extra meshes for the chest, mane and beard. From this point, I’m going to colour all the meshes, then add some fur on top. If I have some time, I might try to run the model through mudbox or substance painter and give the hairless parts like the legs, hands, tail ect a little bit more of a fleshy texture.

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showreel analysis #3

   This is a showreel by Ben Ozeri on vimeo. Whilst the animation itself is good, the showreel just isn’t that engagaing

There’s no music. A little bit of consistent background music would’ve made the watching a little more bareable, and also help all the clips hold together

There’s little gaps between each shot, which creates a jarring cut to black between each clip. This isn’t really necessary, and it probably would’ve looked better if the clips were played one right after the other

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   This is the mouth chart that I’m using as a guide for my lip sync task. It’s a little bit basic, but since I’m not a fan of the custom brush tool in tvpaint i’m just using this for reference. My style is cartoony, so the ‘bean’ mouth shape works well with my work. I’ve done a bit of lip syncing before, so this wasn’t completely unfamiliar to me. I practised my expressions a bit beforehand as well, because I really wanted to carry the emotion through in the audio:

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   02/05/19

   Here is our finished presentation. I’ll just post the link instead of posting every single slide to prevent my blog being messy. The slides have a small amount of words, but we mainly talked about what we wanted to say. I’m really happy with how ours turned out, and whilst we could have been more prepared I think we performed well with what we had.

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Industry contact

   For our media roles presentation, I contacted Arthur tien as shown in a previous post. I did actually get a response from him! He was very polite about it.

First of all, how many iterations of the designs did you go through? Did you know what kind of characters the team were looking for and what kind of design choices didn’t make the final cut?

“The overall style was just the style I was most comfortable with. I was sought out for my style specifically so I didn’t really adjust anything regarding that. As for each individual character, most characters only took one or two iterations, whilst a couple require a bit more back and forth from the client. Generally this would only happen if the client had a specific image already in mind, otherwise I was pretty much deciding the visual representation myself.”

How were you selected for the job/hired by Beautiful     Glitch? Did you have connections to any of the developers beforehand or     were you contacted especially because of your previous illustration work?

"I was actually randomly contacted by Julian (game director) on tumblr out of the blue for a smaller project of his, an art book. My tumblr had nothing but my recreational art (ie fanart). He then later contacted me again asking if I’d like to do some art for a game he was working on. It was a rather quick and coincidental meeting.”

Do you have any advice for amateur artists/animators     such as us for getting work and entering the industry?

“I mostly just fell into my job. My style was often too unique for artist jobs at bigger companies. Applying was relatively unfruitful for me, with only freelance jobs from smaller developers. Having a unique style is a bit of a double edged sword; it can deter you from employment if you can’t prove you can follow a style, but if you somehow manage to get out there, it can stand out much more against the usual norm. Decide what you value from your work and keep on drawing.”

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Media Roles Presentation - Research

   As mentioned before, for my group’s presentation I’m going to be talking about Concept Art as a job role. Here’s all my research complied into a post.

   Concept art is a form of illustration used to convey an idea or a concept before it’s used in the final production. Often multiple designs of something are made before the final design is complete. Concept art can be used for world building, e.g. setting, but also used for characters and part of the production’s story. Concept art is not only good for aiding visual development, but also showing the project’s progress to clients and investors. Concept artists will often be hands-on during the research and development stage, as they need a good idea on the kind of real-world inspirations the directors intend to implement.

(Brave concept art by Steve Pilcher vs a similarshot from the finished film)

   Different artists will specialise in different mediums. Some may do digital paintings in Photoshop, others may prefer traditional such as pencil or watercolour, while some even do 3D mock-ups. Concept artists work close with their superiors in the visual development team, and receive constant feedback in the form of notes or draw-overs.

   Concept artists may also specialise in one particular subject. For example, the human form, animals, architecture, scenery, robot/mech parts, etc. It’s good to have a wide portfolio for entering a job as a concept artist, but those specialities could be sought after depending on the wants of the director.

(Moana concept art – Ryan Lang)

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Weekly Summay #15

Character Modelling

   Over this week I finished my maquette and have been slowly building up my 3D model. I really like how my maquette came out, and although it doesn’t perfectly match up my original design, I’m proud of my sculpting skills. I did a small amount of sculpture work for A Level art, and it’s something I find really fun, so making the maquette was a really enjoyable task. In terms of my 3D model, I’m slowly working on it and creating the hands and facial details separate to the body. I haven’t run into too many hurdles yet so I hope it keeps going well

Mystery Box 

   Using the live action reference I have recorded, I have finished doing all of the stepped keyframes and have tidied up the graph editor, deleting keyframes that didn’t matter to the animation. Over easter I will turn all the keyframes into splines and really polish it. I’m pretty sure I can get this done in the time I have. I’m a little bit worried about how this will go, but hopefully I can polish it to a place I’m happy with.

Lip Sync

   I’ve been slowly working on my lip sync, and since the animatic post I have started cleaning it up and adding the inbetweens. Once I have that, I will then be doing the expression and then the mouth on their own layers. This should be simple to do, and it’s just a case of continuing to work. I do not have TVpaint at home however, so I will have to finish it after the easter break.

Showreel

   I have not started editing my showreel yet, since I haven’t finished a lot of what I intend to include in it. However I do have a good idea about what kind of music I will use, and how everything will pace out. I look forward to seeing the finished product!

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showreel analysis #2

   This is another showreel, this time its by GiraffePenguin on Youtube. I consider this a pretty poor showreel. This is because:

The clips are very long. Each animation shot often repeats itself, which isn’t really need it since the audience usually understand what’s happening in the first viewing. The long, drawn out shots could make the viewer lose interest.

The different music cuts are very jarring, and it doesn’t help with the flow of the video. It maybe could have worked better if the levels were ajusted, so the music faded into each other.

The whole showreel is two minutes long, which is a little bit too long. As mentioned in the first point, a lot of the clips are repeated, so I’m pretty sure that this could be cut in half. Another key part that’s missing is contact information. Despite having opening title slides, there’s no contact information such as an email, which is important if you’re using your showreel to look for work.