Looking at my thumbnail drawings for the first 30sec. I liked the general idea but thought it could loose a few frames and an establishing shot. I replaced this with a shot that introduces the character instead.
This is a first draft or the first couple of shots of the storyboard at the moment. I'm hoping to crack on with it tomorrow. It will also be nice when we decide on our final character designs and look of the animation. Till then i'm just going to get the jist of the story and the shots.
In our first meeting we decided to go way do loads of research/references and a few concepts and come back.
so thats what we did.
Today we had a really good meeting bringing all our research and ideas together. Alan came up with the idea of the main character being an animal he thought of a bear. I really liked this so with more brainstorming we decided the animal should be a dog as they are generally linked with the coastguard and then after really listening to the sound and looking at a lot of dog breeds (there are so many god damn breeds) we settled on a bloodhound or a st bernads.
Alan is going to work on the character design tonight then in our meeting tomorrow go through it with us. We talked about adding coastguard clothes etc. We also want dog "tendencies" in the character sniffing, licking etc.
We also decided to mix 2d and 3d together. 2D characters and 3D environments and a 3D lifeboat. Personally I like this as I can learn more about texturing etc as I have never done this before. Another design element we want to use is from my mood boards. Everyone agreed that they like the illustrations with simple colour palettes (2/3 colours) so this will probably also be in the design.
So tonight I will be starting off the storyboarding process and i've already done a few thumbnails from the meeting after we had an in depth discusion of how we are going to tell the story. I like this base idea and I think it has some real potential with more development.
I'm trying to get across the idea that this is his memory coming from his mind as he tells the story So it would animated as If it is coming out of his head
New brief given to me today. I am in a group with two others (alan and callum) we have been given a short clip of sound of a man recalling a story of him being hit by a freak wave and storm. The group is very open to any style of animation at the moment.
My group talked today and decided to go away for a few days do some mood boards, start doing some concept designs, character designs etc. We all agreed that we don't want this animation to be "obvious" so when doing some initial designs I will keep this in mind. I am going to think away from just simply re-telling his story visually.
Tonight I spent sometime looking at illustrators for inspiration. I made a few mood boards and did a few swatch tests with them for future reference when deciding on mood and feel of the animation.
I decided to do this exercise in maya as I need more 3D practise. I started by drawing simple thumbnails of key poses. mainly concentrating on the arch of the back. This was my outcome.
I didn't really understand constraints which led to the ball being animated strangely.
A brief to be done in a week. A way to animate the sea.
I started this project by...well heading down to the sea.
I also took some reference footage.
I then went home and got stuck into some history of art books to see how artists portray the sea in 2d. I chose to look at Turner and Monet. When looking at these artists I liked the idea of animating the sea through washed of painted colour stop motioned.
I also looked at a 2d animated music video I previously saw at Bradford film festival.
I really liked how they showed the water moving through lines and I wanted to incorporate this into my animation.
I then did some tests with paint. different styles, scratching into the paint etc. I used my references for colours.
I decided to paint the sea and then on photoshop draw the lines of the waves over the top. Much like the music video but more stylised. This was the Sea test outcome.
I am pleased with it but feel it needs more frames.
I've been painting this portrait for a good day now in grey scale with oil style paintbrushes.
I really need to work on the whole "speed" thing. But I brought my painting techniques to photoshop again. Rough sketching the portrait out, blocking the highlights and shadows then gradual layering. Definitely a hell of a lot more to learn!
Recently I have become more and more interested into painting in photoshop. Today I have been speed painting a woodland concept. Learning about light and using different brushes in photoshop has been pretty fun. I already have used a lot of photoshop in the passed so it didn't take to long to get the grasp of it. What was hard was transferring my skills I would use when painting to use in a digital painting.
i used 3 different photographs of woodland as research for colour and trees
I also found this interesting article on being a texture artist. I was intrigued what it meant and after reading the article it kind of reminds me of painting a set for the theatre. I think I will look into this further as I really enjoyed making textures e.g rust. In scenic painting.
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