Desk Throw Animatic

For the last animation which is an action of your choice I decided to go with a good ol' desk flip. I didn't sketch any of this out and instead had the idea in my head which I generated into a quick animatic.

The main things I want to include is some angry concentrated typing, followed by an indication that something went wrong, then the character losing it and flipping their desk over.

I explored other ideas such as what sets the character off: either a blue screen of death which is universally recognisable or perhaps a crashing sound. The characters sudden change of mood should be easily associated with something going wrong with the computer (everybody's been there).

Storyboards - Final

These are the final storyboard sheets for my animations. These were taken from the animatics.

Progress Report - Week 12

Thought I'd write a progress report since I've just been getting on with animating and don't have much else work to post.

I've not got 4 out of 5 of my animatics done. I will start considering the last animation soon but would like to do a desk flip animation.

I've done the most amount of animation work on my drunk guy walking into a pole animation. I've animated the part of him stumbling up to the pole and smacking his face against it with a bit of dizzy recoil. The walk cycle was mostly taken straight from the animatic with the large strides and staggered timing. I made sure he wasn't going to anticipate walking into the pole as in his mind he would be near it. The impact with the pole is just a head smack and recoil to the point where his head bends right back (its okay, its a cartoon). I'm pretty happy with it so far. Next I will add arm movements into the recoil as if he was about to fight someone before falling back on himself and falling unconscious.

In the sword swinging animation I've got the character bending down (apparently that's not easy to do but I was happy with the result I got) to pick up the sword. Its slightly than he imagines so he doesn't just pick it up in one action, he sort of retracts and pulls it up a second time with more force from his body. I'm switching the arms from FK (forward kinematics) to IK (inverse kinematics) the moment he makes contact with the sword so that I can move the sword around and his arm follows. Meaning I can animate the sword and the character will be dragged along with it. I've used a parent constraint to bind the sword to the hand controller but I need to figure out how to apply it to the point after he makes contact with the sword.

I will be using Maya 2013 for the spell casting animation in order to use the Mery rig (only works with 2013+) as it has more advanced hand controllers allowing for easier animation when it comes to conjuring the spell itself.

I've also built the scene for the stream crossing animation which I will start this week.

Stream Cross Animatic

Decided to keep this more on the simple side of things compared to my other animations. The character will simply cross the stream by jumping on a rock that's sitting in the stream. They pause to find their balance before jumping across to the other side.

Self Evaluation: Character Design

So I was recently asked by the school my mother works for to design a small character for their campaign against bullying. There were some specifics to its design such as:

• should include the school's logo
• should include the school's colours
• have a similar aesthetic and design to 'Mega Man'

One thing I will note right now is that I am not a character designer, nor am I an illustrator, or even a good 2D artist. But I do love Mega Man and since the school would be pretty much happy with whatever design I gave them there was no pressure for it to be of a high professional standard. However that doesn't mean I didn't try to make it of a high professional standard, its just that this was something out of my expertise so I told them not to get their hopes up (wow, so optimistic).

Anyway, I wanted to turn this into a little self evaluation for this blog. As its more of a mini project itself I wanted to focus on the basic illustration elements of the design.

At first I did some research into Mega Man, the proportions of his body and how he is built as a character. I did a few sketches of Mega Man just so I could understand why his design is good.

From there I just doodled to see what I could come up with.

After some feedback from the school they were happy for me to finalise a design.

So as I said, I'm no character designer, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Sure it may be a little cliché and unoriginal but whatever, the school were happy with it.

I thought I'd turn it into a little self evaluation though. Surely any work is good work towards self improvement so I'll evaluate this mini project with these aims:

• Design
• Pose
• Line Work
• Colour

Design

"Anti-bullying" and Mega Man were the only two things I were given to go on. Being a primary school they are also not bothered what I did with the design. So I made sure to keep it simple, it would've been easy to get carried away with all sorts of robotic elements but keeping a Astroboy/Mega Man superhero look (the cape helps with that) means its easy to identify as a hero or good guy.

I was happy with the design overall and for the time scale I was given (about 2 weeks in spare time amongst other work) I thought it was fine.

Pose

I include this evaluation in here as although part of the design, I think it can be applied to other work if considered separately. I tried a number of different poses and angles for the character. From my visual research of Mega Man (mostly just memory) there's a lot of action shots. This helps give the idea of superhero, action fighter type of character. I think this was where the school wanted the Mega Man influence to be in relation to anti-bullying.

I originally had a stance with a simple thumbs up but from feedback from others I decided to go for a mid-running pose. I'm not so comfortable with making up poses on paper, I can never seem to get the proportions right or the action looking strong enough. This is something I have been actively working on (mostly in Creative Research) in order to improve my animations. As you can see from the sketches there are some dodgy poses. When I brought this over to digital format I was able to correct things like the legs and get them looking more natural. I think this was done satisfactory but there's always room for improvement.

Line Work

My typical 2D digital work often consists of Flash style drawings, mostly with thick lines and not much variation in them. I tried to go for a thinner line than usual which helped to make it a more crisp design but there's still a long way to go.

Something I've recently discovered is using a colour palette just for line work, where it takes a shade of colour from the object, darkens it and uses it for the line, rather than just black all the time. Although this is more of an illustrator based skill to practice, there's no harm from exploring this further at some point.

Colour

I include this skill evaluation mostly to do with the shading and shadows included in the final design. It's actually the first time I've used shadows in a 2D cartoon drawing. I thought I managed to do this reasonably well for a first attempt. They just help to give the character depth and form as opposed to a flat image.

If I were to improve upon this, I would tie the colours in to the line work to just improve the quality of the drawing overall.

Industry Awareness - Continued

From the first week of presentations it became clear to me that a lot of classmates were picking companies who they really had a passion for. Although I admire Studio Distract's work their content never really appealed to me as much as I'd liked. Again, although I have a passion for the work of Pixar and Dreamworks, I didn't particularly want to research them again so I kept exploring other smaller companies.

I decided to change my own presentation to focus on another company called StudioAKA, an animation company based in London. They are relatively small and often work with directors who approach them with ideas, they focus on the journey of the project rather than on the end goal.

They have done work in the advertising industry but have also created their own short films. One project of theirs I admired was 'Lost and Found', based on the children's picture book by Oliver Jeffers. The animation style is soft and emotive, which reflects the tone of the book.


For the section on job requirements and skills I kept the same criteria as on my last presentation which can be viewed previously on this blog.

View my presentation on Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjw6ure3wqjrqvg/CAP%20Presentation2.pptx?dl=0

Pole Walk Animatic

I was eager to start animating and have been doing so already, the frames for this were saved but I just hadn't rendered them out yet. Here is my animatic for the "running into a stationary object" animation, or as I have it: drunk guy walks into pole, fights pole, loses.

Spell Casting Animatic