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Children’s show cast silhouette comparisons - 

I examined these shows side by side as they all had memorable characters but the silhouettes in each show had various degrees of effectiveness.

I feel as though the silhouettes present in the show Chowder were the strongest out of the three shows because they very distinct, memorable and revealed a lot about the characters.

I felt like Flapjack was a good comparison to Chowder because they were airing around the same time and had to compete with each other from a design standpoint. I feel as though the silhouettes in Flapjack say a lot less about the characters than the ones in Chowder do but they are very memorable especially partnered with the show’s unique animation style.

From a retrospective angle, I feel that the silhouettes found in Foster’s home for Imaginary’s Friends were pretty ineffective in terms of communicating traits of the characters as well as in terms of memorability. I feel like they’re somewhat easily forgettable.

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Character design - Dynamic posing 

Once again, I used a combination of Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint to complete this illustration. I really wanted to highlight the sort of bratty qualities present in my character despite her overall cheery disposition. I feel as though I captured her personality very well although in retrospect I now feel that her posing could have been a bit more dynamic in this piece. I feel as though that’s my second weak spot artistically. 

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November 5th - 9th - Weekly review

This week was again mainly focused on ironing out loose details in the majority of my animations. I tried one more time to redo a pendulum swing on f12 paper but it really did not work so I decided to stick with my first attempt which I feel wasn’t very effective. I also further worked on dynamic exercise.

While writing my character research essay, I found that my biggest struggle was not going over the word limit. I really struggled to condense all the extra reading that I had doing into one essay and feel as though at times I lost sight of the question of my essay. I did end up having to reword my question a few times. I also encountered an issue with my citations in that I hadn’t been writing down the page number for some of the sources and this meant that I had to go back through them very tediously to find the points I was referring to. 

This week I also worked on completing my character model sheet which showed the front, 3/4, side and back view of my character. I once again used a combination of clip studio paint and Photoshop to complete this. I encountered the same issue that I had when I previously did my cast design sheet in that the text stopped working in Photoshop after I worked on the document in clip studio paint but I resolved it in the same fashion that I did the first time by turning the drawing into a png. 

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I attempted to challenge myself by attempting a forward facing walk cycle. I found it really hard to place the passing frames in this animation and was initially going to do the animation at 24fps but I found that the animation worked better at 12fps. 

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Character Turnaround

here’s a turnaround of my character Maria. I decided to change the colour of her undershirt because that red colour got lost in her dress. I also didn’t shade this turnaround. 

I feel as though my issue with showing a sense of value in my work is very clear in character designs however I feel as though it’s somewhat okay because of the younger demographic my work is tailored too? I feel as though overall I still really need to work on my use of highlights and low lights though.  

I’m honestly not super fond of my character designs and work but sort of feel like it’s too late to turn back now and I have to roll with it?

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First Attempt at character cast 

This was my first attempt at designing my cast for the my character design project. I did most of the rough work in the media lab on Photoshop but then used clip studio paint at home to refine the line-work and colour in the characters. 

I did encounter a minor issue in that mixing the two programs really messed with the text when I reopened them in Photoshop so I just ended up exporting the characters as a png and then placing them on a new blank cast sheet so I could edit the text properly.

The overall tone of this cast is supposed to be one of adventure. I got the idea that Maria (farthest to the left) would have been a sort of ‘city brat’ kind of character who goes to visit her grandmother, Agatha (middle) and gets pulled into an adventure. Maria would server the protagonist role, Agatha would serve the mentor’s role,

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Essay Research

These are various notes that I took while watching the film Princess Mononoke as well as during my research and reading. 

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Character Design - Workshop #3 

We reviewed the expected illustrations and animations that we would need to provide for our character design project and did rough drafts for our cast sheet, dynamic posing sheet, turnaround and a rough outline of a possible walk cycle. 

One of the concerns I had with my chosen protagonist was that her hair puffs had too many lumps and that would be a pain to keep consistent in my animations. So going forward, I decided to limit her puff ball lumps to 6.

Halfway through fleshing this character out more, I realized that her personality and design greatly reminded me of my little sister. I guess I might be a little bit subconsciously homesick. 

I then attempted to play around with some variations of the character to ensure that I didn’t get locked down into one design.

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TV Paint introduction

We familiarized ourselves with the basic functions of tvpaint today and illustrated a walk cycle from a sequence we were given as reference. 

I really liked using tvpaint and found it a lot easier to use and a lot more likeable than photoshop. I feel like it’s a lot easier to maintaint consitency and fluidity while animating digitally as well.

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October 15th - 19th - Weekly Review

This week was mostly centered around more clearly outlining exactly what we’d need to submit for our final evaluation this term.

We also began to explore a lot more of the software that we would be using to complete our projects in the future. I also finally managed to choose that character that I want my essay to be focused on. I feel as though the character research lectures that I attended this week were key in helping to clarify this. 

This week was a fairly busy one but I think it helped clearly outline what I need to do and helped me locate some of my key weak points in my animation.

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Attempt at a Ball Bounce 

I tried to do another ball bounce but I feel as though this time I struggled to keep the ball’s shape consistent and I also spaced my frames very oddly which made the animation flow strangely. I didn’t draw the frames where the ball makes contact with the floor before it squashes and I feel like it’s pretty noticeable.

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October 17th, 2018 - Photoshop induction

We had an introductory lesson in Photoshop and  coloured in a sketch that was given to us.

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October 16th, 2018 - Anthropomorphism discussion

This lecture was particularly theory heavy and explored some of the key reasoning behind why Animators chose to use anthropomorphism animal characters to deliver their messages.  We discussed the fact that a lot of animals already hold expected behaviors that can be used to very easily communicate character behavior across cultural and linguistic barriers, e.g., the sly fox.

We covered quite a few key terms as well: 

Animism - the spiritual/religious belief that animals, plants or inanimate objects may possess a spirit

Anthropomorphism - The attribution of human characteristics, appearance, or behavior to animals, gods and objects

Anthropocentrism - The belief that human beings are the most significant entity in the universe

Apophenia - Seeing patterns in random meaningless data

Pareidolia - Seeing faces in things 

We also watched a few short films that explored the use of this concept: 

The Bear that Wasn’t (1967 - Chuck Jones) Guy’s Dog (1999 - Rory Bresnihan) The Tale of the Fox (1930 - Ladislaw Starewicz)

I found that this lecture opened up a lot of interesting avenues through which to analyze a character and I intend to use these concepts to explore both the characters that I will be designing and the character I will be writing my essay on.

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October 15th - Jump Animation 

I actually managed to get this motion down pretty quickly in the one workshop session that we had. I feel as though I didn’t really maintain the size of the figure consistently though and that they grew in size as the animation progressed but suddenly shrank and the end of the animation because I drew the two contact frames before anything else in the animation.

So, I attempted to smooth out the end of the animation by editing a few frames at a later date. 

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October 8th - 12th - week review

I really enjoyed topics covered this week as much as I struggled with them. We covered a lot of Character theory which provided valuable insight into how we should proceed with tackling our essay questions as well as our character design projects. We also tackled the topic of archetypes vs. stereotypes from an angle of identifying major trends between the two in order to write more fleshed out characters. I will be taking the idea of “drawing from life” forward in both my character design and character research. 

I feel like this week really highlighted that I struggle to be able to clearly see a motion when animating. I feel as though I can’t really do straight ahead animation and I will be sticking more closely to pose to pose animation. I really need to thoroughly think out an action before I try to animate it or I tend to muddle it up really badly. I really like to start out by drawing all the key frames first as well.

I’d say that this week has been pretty insightful overall.