Experimental

adding a face to my puppet 

before I started doing the animation for my puppet i decided it would be to difficult and time consuming to try and try a lip set to attach to the actual puppets face and felt that it would be a lot easier to creating these in TV paint and motion track them to the puppet. overall I am really pleased with the outcome of this animation as I feel like the puppet looks like a cartoon version of my and motion tracking of the face is fairly good however I do think that sometimes the puppet ( and her face) move a little to fast and you cant its emotions or reactions.

tea project

rotoscoping- Nick 

I have now completed my third person that I had to rotoscope. this one was a lot shorter so it was fairly easy to completed however i also had to create the animation that would be placed on top to make sure it followed the head nicely and didn't look out of place this meant a little bit more work. I am now going to pass this onto the animators so they can finish colouring the hair in

tea project

rotoscoping - lucy 

as i have said in a previous post my group have decided to produce short documentary type animation about what kind of tea the people in Falmouth like. Originally I was going to be rotoscoping 4 people in our video however I have now been asked to rotoscope 5. this is the second person I have completed and the longest one I was given. I think overall it looks really good and is fairly smooth considering how much she moves. I have also made sure to use the same colour scheme as my first person so that they look the same in my finally product. I am now going to finish the other 3 people and create a background that we can use throughout the animation.

Experimental

Experimental introduction 

 I decided that instead of adding a intro page when editing in premiere I could also produce a short animation to introduce my self and my video. I think that this animation flows really nicely and the writing is fairly neat and easy to read however I think I could improve it by holding it for a little longer on the last frame just so the viewer has a enough time to read what it says. I also think I need to produce a second piece of animation like this to introduce the title of my piece "the people in my life" just so the viewer understands full what my animation is about.

experimental

2d animation 

for my experimental project I decided i also wanted to include a couple seconds of traditional 2d animation.

to do this I used one of the light tables that we have available to use in the studio and started to draw numerous layers ready to be photographed and made into an animation.

In the video above you can see a man and a woman this people are meant to represent my mum and dad when they were younger and them falling in love and having a baby ( me). as you can see I have also created a digitally animated heart to appear as I felt this would help the transition of the images (not holding baby to holding baby). I think as this was first try at 2d traditional animation it is pretty good and it is conveys the message I was trying to show the viewer however I also wanted to make sure that the viewer new they were my mum and dad and so decided to add a small animation where my hand comes in and writes mum and dad above there heads. I think I could improve this animation by trying to make it a little longer however doing this as shown me just how time consuming traditional 2d can be   

Stop motion

lip sync

for our next task in stop motion we were asked to create a lip sync to a piece of audio we were given. the first thing I had to do was create the lip set, I decided to do this using paper as I thought this would be the easiest thing to stick onto the puppets. I then took photos of the lips I had made and imported them onto an audio track in dragon along with my chosen audio. after this I had to listen to the audio and try and match the mouth that I felt went with the particular sound. I decided to go this audio as I felt like all the words were said very strongly and thought it would be easier to hear what he was saying. I then had to follow the lip sync I had made whilst animating the puppet. I think this came out quite well as through most of the video you can understand what he is saying and I think in most places it replicates the sound you here however I realised whilst making this animation and this person speaks very fast and found it quite difficult to put mouths on for long enough so that they could be seen. I also found it hard to put inbetweens in and I think that's why the mouth occasionally looks to jumpy.

experimental

Experimental ending 

this video is the ending of my experimental piece as i decided that i wanted to show the viewers what the actually photos are because my main part of the animation ( the puppet) is quite fast. I did not realise that the framing for the this video is slightly off so it cuts off the bottom of the photos and there is loads of space left up at the top so I need to fill that gap with something. I have also decided to add a bit of tv paint 2d animation onto this video as i am adding it to all of the other parts of my film and I want it all to flow nicely 

Experimental

Experimental stop motion 

this week I started to create my experimental video for this module. The brief of this piece was to create a short film (no longer than 90 seconds) about my life so I decided to make it about the people in my life as they are very important to me. for my experimental I have chosen to do a bit of pixelation, a bit of traditional 2d animation and stop motion. the first thing I did was create a puppet for the stop motion part of my video. To do this I used polymorph plastic for the solid areas and aluminium wire for the joints, I then covered the bits of skin that would be shown in plastercine and created a pair of jeans and a top out of some old clothes I had, I also used a yellow t shirt and cut it into strips to give my puppet its blonder hair.

this video is just over 30 seconds long which is a little less than I thought it was going to be however I still have a few things I need to shoot so I reckon my video is going to come to just over 80 seconds.

in this video you can see my puppet picking up and showing photos of me, my friends and my family. I have decided to also put the eyes and mouth on using tv paint 2d animation as I thought it would be less time consuming and look better, Overall I think this video is really good and will look even better with a face however I do think its a little bit to fast and occasionally the movements are not as fluid as they could be (mainly because my puppet kept falling over.)

2D Background project

Animation background

with our 2D background we also need to do three types of research from a list given to us. I decided to do the city environment task, the draw in the style of an artist task and the draw ten animation backgrounds task. 

This is one my animation backgrounds, above you can see the image from the peter pan movie and below you can see my version of the image. I decided to do this drawing using photoshop and I felt like I should improve my skills because photoshop is something we use quite a lot on my course. I also decided to colour my image because I really like the nice shading in the original image and I wanted to try and replicate this (I have also decided to do 4 out of 10 of my drawings in colour).

I really like the way I created the trees and leaves as I feel they portray the original image well, however I think I could possibly improve the background of the image (the sky and foliage) as I feel that these are a bit to rushed and the don't represent the original image in a good way. Finally I think I could also improve my image by using a much less harsh outline colour as I think the black outlines I have done are to strong and it ruins some of the detail in the colouring, I think it would look much better if I was to outline it in a similar but darker colour to what I am outline 

Tea Project

Hippy Nick Rotoscoping

After finishing the rotoscoping of the exchange guy another person in my group showed me the animation design they were thinking about doing on  the part of the video involving Nick (one of our lecturers) that makes him look like a hippy, so I decided to start rotoscoping Nick with the rough image on top so it would fit in well when its finally animated. This part of rotoscoping is about 4 seconds long at it took me roughly7 hours to rotoscope as Nick didn't more around very much. I am now going to start rotoscoping another part of the video. 

3D Enivronment

Old western shop 

I have now started to model some buildings and other objects for my 3D Environment. The first building I have created is an old western shop, its a very small and simple design as I wanted to start of small to develop my Maya skills. I would also like to adds some more details to this building maybe by adding a sign on the front and some objects  to show that its a shop. I made this building 6m width and 4m in depth. My favourite part of the building is the floor, using the extrude tool I was able to create an unlevelled floor affect with different sizes of stripes. I am now going to add in the added details and will then add colour and texture to the image using mudbox. Next in maya I am going to try and make a horse cart and barrel to go in my street to add more detail.

2D Background project

2D Background final design 

This is my final design for my 2D background project as you can see in my image is it much more of a pond than a lake however I really live the way the flows and think that it works really in my design.

As you can see on the left I have included my tree with my bike on it and I still want this to be the pink blossom tree that I had done some directly observed studies of a few weeks ago. I have also included a dog behind the tree looking at the pond, this is in memory of my golden retriever poppy, I am hoping to animated the tail wagging and maybe a tongue poking out of the mouth. In my final 2D background I am hoping that I can just do a simple pan from right to left, however I may add a zoom into it to make it a bit more interesting. I have also decided to get rid of the ground details that are in front of the mountains because I think that the nature around the lake is a bit to much compared to the simple mountains in the background. My background is cut into 4 layers I have the long grass at the front of the screen in layer 1 then the first half of the lake and the tree in layer 2, I then put the second half of the lake in layer 3 and finally put the mountains and sky into the fourth and final layer.

Group Tea project

 Rotoscoping

For our tea project my group decided to create a short film in the style of Aardmans creature comforts.

The first thing we did was create some questions relating to tea and went out and interviewed people asking them these questions, I found this really interesting as we found some really good stories about tea. we then asked our editors of the group to create a live action edit of our video after we all decided which people and what information we wanted to be in it. once this was done we then decided which bits were going to be animated and which bits were going to be rotoscoped. Finally I asked people what they would prefer doing and assigned them tasks that I thought would best fit there skills. I put three people ( Carol, Alice and Maia) to be the animators and background artists of the group so they would be completing the task of animating the peoples stories and putting small animations next to the rotoscoped images. 

I then put three people (Myself, Drew and Jamie) to be the rotoscopers of the group so we would be rotoscoping the parts where people are just saying if they like tea and what they like.

Above I have an example of one of the people I was set to rotoscope (by our head rotoscoper Drew). this was the shortest piece in the film so I thought it would be good to start with him so I could get the hang of rotoscoping. 

I think my first try turned out really good, I definitely need to neaten it up a little but I thinking the shading looks good and I have used the right colours, however I am going to ask for feedback from our lecturer and Drew next week.

Motion Studies

Puppet Designs 

For our final task in stop motion we have to create a short scene of a human and dog talking about a kitten. For this task we are able to use the puppets from the university however we have to make our own dog puppets. 

These are some of the designs and measurements I have created for my dog puppet 

I have decided to create my puppets armature using wire and poly morph plastic. however for the bigger parts of the puppet such as the head and stomach area I am going to use a hard foam and cover it in poly morph so its more lightweight meaning that it will last much longer. My puppet is inspired and based on a Labrador/golden retriever as I used to have a golden retriever and I feel like I know what they look like the most compared to other dogs. I am still not sure what material to use as fur however I am thinking maybe i can just wrap light blonde wool around it ( therefore it will look more like a Labrador), I will need to test this out on my prototype. My dog puppet is called Poppy after my golden retriever. <3

my puppet is going to be about 11.5 cm in height, 10.2 cm in length and 5 cm in width however this may change if my it does not look right on my prototype dog. I am now going to create a prototype to see if these measurements work. 

2D Background project

DOS (Directly Observed Studies)

Also for the 2D background project we had to create some sketches of real life plants and trees that we could possibly but in our final background. These are some of the directly observed studies I created.

This first image is of a pink blossom tree I found when I went home for the weekend in Cardiff. Pink blossom trees have always been some of my favourites as I love the different colour pinks that fill all the branches of the tree. I created this study very quickly using acrylic paint. Its a very rough painting but acrylic is definitely my favourite paint.

The next few images are some studies i created at comeston country park again in my hometown (Penarth) these are just some quick pencil studies of some trees and leaves that i found in the park that I might want to include into my background I really like the the look of the tree I drew on the right and i might try and combine this tree and the pink blossom tree in my final piece (I also added the really rough sketch of the bike in front of it to demonstrate the size of the tree).

Finally at the same country park I created a quick study of the lake thats there. I have always loved this country park and lake and have been going there since I was young so I think it would be really nice to try and incorporate it into my final background.

2D Background project

Tonal studies 

For this task we were asked to go onto a 2D background site and look at the shading in the images. to really look at where the light is in the image and what kind of different tones we could see. for this task I also decided to also use different materials to see how I could look at replicate tones using those materials.

 For the first image I used chalk. I found it really difficult to convey the right tones with the chalk so there are lots of darker colours in the image, however I found it really interesting using this different material and was able to create some really nice neutral grays.

For the second image I used oil pastels, I thought these were easier to use than the chalk however i had the opposite problem as i was able to get a really nice black and white but struggled to get any nice grays to create the different tones that the image needed

For the last two images I decided to used pen as I thought this would be different and an interesting material to work with. As you can see from the images they are more of a linear tones buti think i was able to get a really good tonal range in these images.

sound project

Sound project 

For my sound project I decided to choose the mayfly video because I thought it would be really interesting to try and find all the different sounds that would be involved. For the video I knew that I would need to record some dialogue, record some atmos sounds and would need to create certain sounds using Foley (like the sound of the wings).

The first thing I did was watch the video a couple times to establish what sounds I would need to make this video realistic. This is the list of sounds:

• ·         Dialogue
• ·         Mayfly getting out of water
• ·         Buzzing of the wings
• ·         Mayfly whooshing in air
• ·         Atmosphere birds chirping in distance
• ·         Mayfly sliding down the leaf
• ·         Mayfly picking the leaf
• ·         Other mayfly tapping the ball and hitting ball
• ·         Mayfly hitting the ball back
• ·         Ball hitting the web
• ·         Mayfly juggling
• ·         Atmosphere Sound of stream
• ·         Mayfly on leaf going down the stream
• ·         Two mayflies together
• ·         Mayfly picking flower
• ·         Atmosphere sound of cave (with water in it)
• ·         Lots of mayflies
• ·         Atmosphere almost still water (at the end of the video)
• ·         Atmosphere wind hitting the trees

I then recorded the dialogue so I could put that in the video ready for the sound effects. To record the dialogue I booked out the dubbing theatre and asked a friend if they would say the dialogue for me. I thought that the person speaking should say the dialogue in a calm but enthusiastic way, after a few tries I got a good copy of the dialogue.

I then created a list of possible ways I could make the other sounds in the video:

• ·         Mayfly getting out of water & mayfly on leaf going down the stream 

Ø  Bowl with water to make splashing sounds

• ·         Buzzing of wings & two mayflies together & lots of mayflies

Ø  Rubbing my knuckles together

• ·         Whooshing & mayfly juggling

Ø  Moving a large piece of plastic up and down next to the microphone

• ·         mayfly sliding down the leaf

Ø  Run the hand down the stem of a big leaf

• ·         mayfly picking the leaf & flower

Ø  Snapping a piece of pasta

• ·         other mayfly tapping the ball and hitting ball & mayfly hitting the ball back & Ball hitting the web

Ø  Record an actual ping pong ball

Once I had established my sounds and how I was going to make them I then went into the dubbing theatre with some other students and we took it in turns – someone making the sounds and someone recording them.

For the five atmosphere sounds (the birds chirping, the sound in the cave, the stream, sound of the wind in the trees and the sound of almost still water at the end of the video) I decided to go out and actually find these sounds. This was fairly easy to do as I new there was a stream and park with trees nearby, so I used a shotgun mic and recorder to get some atmos sounds. I then went into premiere and put an echoing effect on the sound of the stream to get the sound of water in a cave.

Finally I found some music for my video just to make it more upbeat. I got my music from freesound.org. However, the only good music I could find was only 36 seconds long so I have had to loop it three times.

I then put all of these sounds together in a premiere file and cut up bits of the sounds I wanted to use in the final video. I wanted to try and make sure that the sounds matched the right points in the video and I found this part of the process to be the most difficult.

I think that my sounds work well together. However, I need to improve some of these sounds by rerecording them as I feel that the levels in some of them are too high or low. I also think I could change some of the pitches of the sounds (buzzing of the wings) in premiere to make them sound more realistic and I could add some more sounds to the more silent parts of the video.

Term 2018 & motion studies

New term 2018 

as we have started a new term we have been given many more tasks to do and as you can see i have been failing to post any of them until now.
this term we have to create:

• a 2d background 
• a 3d environment 
• an experimental film about ourselves 
• motion studies work (stop motion)
• an individual sound project
• a group project about tea 

I am now going to start posting the work i have completed on here to show my progress throughout the next few weeks of this term

Motion Studies stop motion 

Blind animation

Emotion task

The first two tasks we were given in stop motion was to use the puppets to create a blind animation (cover the screen so you cant look at the images you are taking) and an emotion. I completed these tasks a few times and found the blind animation to be the most difficult as I had to trust that the movements I was doing to the puppet looked right without actually looking at the images I had taken.

As you can see from the first video above the animation turned out pretty good its a bit jerky in places and a bit fast however that is something I have always had trouble with and I think its definitely better compared to my animations last term. If I was going to change anything about this animation it would be the amount of frames i held the thinking poses for (when he steps to the left and right) I think I held these poses to long and it kind of looks like he freezes and after showing this to my lecture she told me that its probably best to only hold a pose without any movement for no more than 5 frames so I will try and do this on future tasks.

 After this I did the emotion task which did not need to be a blind animation. For this I decided to do the emotion despair as I felt that i could portray this emotion well. The first thing I did was ask a fellow animator to act out the emotion, to really act like they felt despair. I then used this video for reference when creating my animation. I created this emotion animation on ones so I really had to look at how the body moves and create the smallest movements possible. Again I think this animation is a little fast but my timing is definitely getting better. I have also held certain poses for to many frames (I created this animation before getting the feedback) and I think i need to add slight movements to make the animation look more realistic. 

If I have time I am definitely going to redo these animations and improve them with the feedback I have been given.