Career Zone project - concept art

The Career Zone at the university were looking for some animation students to help design and animate a short informative video.

I applied for it and ended up thumb nailing out a couple of ideas and drawing up some concept art.

I don't know if they'll choose it yet but here are some of the concept drawings
I did for them.

I wanted to go for a simple graphic style that would be easy to visually understand in seconds and perhaps simplify the characters to make them more anonymous. 

Personal fravourites

I really liked this last one we did.

We just had to draw the person opposite us drawing us and we could compose it anyway we wanted to.

Last but not least, Sponge Bob's creepy uncle.

Portrait session

I really enjoyed today's life drawing.

The model sadly couldn't make it so we had to take turns being the model.

Couldn't have worked out better I think.

Look how many different faces and angels we got to draw.

Strangely, after seeing so many faces, I realised how limiting my character designs have been so far.

For example I completely forgot that different necks can completely change someone.

11secondclub journey

This was the clip I ended up posting to the 11 Second Club page.

It wasn't anywhere close to being finished but I decided it couldn't hurt to upload it anyway.

I did mention I had only been able to work on it for three days.

Here is the final finished animation.

With better sound quality too which makes all the difference.

I ended up making quite a few changes from my initial rough key frames and went to a lot of people to get different opinions. My tutor also gave me a lot of good advice, especially in trying to make my shots more interesting.

I initially had shadow figures in the bar to try and fill it out but a lot of people agree that it wasn't necessary.

So I just left the two of them.

Maybe it's closing hour.

Thumbnailing and my wonderful layout sheets

I've been doing a lot of thumb nailing lately for different projects and have been mainly sketching them out in my book.

Doing this I found my boxes weren't really the right sizes for 1920 x 1080 and threw portions out a bit.

So I made these wonderful A4 sheets!

They aren't perfect but so far they've made life a lot easier.

I can either draw on them in a digital format or by hand.

Especially since I've been favouring drawing out the thumbnails by hand at the moment.

I just find it a lot easier to show it to the director and get their feedback right away.

If they don't like something, they can just physically cross it out or make notes there and then. This also means I can go back and either cut out the boxes to 'edit' them or redraw them quickly again.

Note: I am pretty surprised how well I took it when some of my drawings were physically crossed out (my idea) and ditched. Even if some of them took hours to figure out and draw, it was okay. I was okay.  

11 second club - Finishing touches

So I started animating the sound clip for the September 11 second club just 3 days before the final deadline on the website. I couldn't finish animating on time so ended up uploading whatever I had, key frames and all.

For our module though, I decided to keep going with the September file and finish what I had started.

The animating did not take as long as I expected it would. 

Although I did decide to make quite a few changes in the camera positioning and some of the main key poses.

Look at all those twos and threes (and fours!).

With a couple of weeks left until the end of the month I finally coloured in my last frames and gave my background some final touches.

Didn't go too wild on the background but then again we were meant to be looking at how characters interact and how we 'talk' with our bodies.

I really enjoyed this assignment.

I think if I have time I wouldn't mind trying next months 11 second club too.

Let the storyboarding begin!

All the portraits and all the lines!

The first drawing of the day. We were asked to just draw like we would and he would go from there.

This time I managed to get some quick sketches in my sketchbook too.

We learnt the basic portions of the human head and to observe how everything works together.

I found that I started to over think about the measurements and forgot to think about the person I was drawing.

None of the drawings above look like the real model and I was starting to get a bit frustrated.

I just wanted to draw the woman in-front of me right the first time but realized that these things need practice.

Accepting the fact that I wasn't going to get her spot on made me relax a lot more and her likeness slowly started to come out a little.

I think out of all of them this one, the last one I did, is the most like the real woman.

Still is not her but I'm really happy with the progress.

PICKN'MIX: Thumbnailing

After working out a rough script for the comedy series we were then told to put everything together to make a storyboard and an animatic.

So I decided to stick with the introduction or the beginning of the first episode, to introduce how the main characters are going to interact. I'm trying to apply what I learnt about storyboarding so far but still will go to get a second opinion.

Here are a couple of the thumbnails I've done for part of the 'pilot' episode.

Forecast for today: Major brainstorm in the living room

Please excuse the atrocious handwriting and numeral spelling mistakes.

This is what it looks like when I write as fast as I think.

Like my literature teacher once said, it looks like a drunken spider ran across the page.

Making marks and shapes

Fast warm-up 2 min drawings

This session was mainly about observing the negative and positive spaces more carefully.

I can tell if I was just tired or maybe my glasses should have been cleaned better but I found it hard to focus on the different spaces this time.

Quick 2 min gesture drawing.

Really really wishes we had more of an opportunity to do more gesture drawings.

Especially if we had to capture a story or moment of the pose quickly.

Maybe bring in some props? 

5 min drawing

NOTE: I shouldn't wait around really. It is university and we should be learning a lot more independently. I might message some acting students or dance students on the campus. 

Who knows right? They might let me pop in for a rehearsal.

A pastor, middle age village, comedy series and George Hammond Steel

I've mentioned this briefly in a previous post but one of our latest projects, which I'm really enjoying, is called PICK'N MIX.

We were all given four cards at random.

One card for main character, one for setting, one for style and the last for genre.

Our job is to put all the elements together to make a possible animation.

Luckily my cards somehow fit together really well although I still find it rather hard trying to make a comedy series using George Hammond's style.

Wasn't sure if the beautiful layered style would distract from the humour of the series??

But then I did think of MirrorMask (2005) which did have an beautiful and elaborate design yet still managed to contain and even emphasis the characters witty humour.

Anywho and anyhow, here is some of my developmental work so far.

As my show is set in the middle ages, I did some research on the architecture back then. I also looked at painting and drawings depicting old medieval villages.
This one is by Giovanni Antonio Canal.

A background experimental drawing of mine, trying to combine medieval architecture and Hammond's style.

Early character designs