Inspiration and plans

When I want to look for some inspiration or tips, I take a look at this tumblr site

http://grizandnorm.tumblr.com/


These two are some amazing animation artists (or visual development artist and storyboard artist) and they post so many good tips for all kind of animation stuff (mostly pre production). 

Looking at what they do, it has given me some thoughts about what I want to do. As written earlier, I want to go into 3D pre production. Doing backgrounds and character design is really fun, and I find it challenging and learning new stuff all the time. I've also discovered a new talent I didn't know I had, storyboarding. Or talent may be a little too exaggerated; I enjoy it and apparently do a good job at it. But I feel I have so much more to learn about storyboarding. More interesting angles, what they mean, how to not make it too boring and straight on shots, and so on. Griz and Norm post every now and then some notes about storyboarding, but I definitely need to go deeper into this. 

After doing some reading in different books about animation and looking at blogs, I realize how important life drawing is for animation and understand why our lecturers are trying to make us see how important it actually is. I really want to become good at life drawing, this was my first time doing it this year, so I'm planning on taking a semester or maybe a year with just life drawing after university.  I think this would approve my drawings a lot. As well as it's fun.

Now it's summer, and I'm brining my sketchbook on my interrail trip around Europe, hopefully finding some inspiration for my 3rd year project (in 2015/2016) or maybe just some random fun sketches..   

Animation backgrounds

 

These are some animation backgrounds for a background/layout project we did. Most of them are copies from animation films (Cinderella, Hercules, Beauty and the Beast, Brother Bear, and Lilo and Stitch) Even thought they're copies, I learned so much from this project. I see colours and colouring a whole different way now. Like the jungle picture from Lilo and Stitch, how they've used purple as shadow and a more pink/ nude colour on the tree, and not just brown, as most trees are. 

I found this project so much fun, and I really enjoyed doing these backgrounds. I feel that next semester I want to do more backgrounds, so pre-production here I come. 

3D environment final

This is the end result. If you know animation, you won't be too disappointed that it was 'only' 4 seconds long. I was so pleased with this end results that it made up my mind about doing 2D or 3D next semester. 



Definitely 3D. 

3D environment

When it comes to animation, I want to do 3D instead of 2D. 3D gives you so much more opportunities with creating something in 360 degrees. As well as we can't deny that it's the future of animation. Even thought 3D programs are so complicated that my head always hurt after a lecture, and I'm left as a big question mark, I feel it's worth it when I found out that I'm actually capable to make stuff. Not just stuff, but actually descent stuff!

It all started with a picture from my vacation in Cambodia last year...

 I thought this would be a good environment since there could be done some sortcuts with copy pasting figures, as well as the picture is in such high resolution that I could just use that for texturing at the end. But first some sketches to make it fit the 1920x1080 size.

Then the modeling in Maya started. I didn't keep track of how long this took me to model, but with the texturing it took about over a week, working from 10 to 10.

Motion Studies

These are sadly not looped, because I forgot to save them on my external hard drive. Note to myself for next year; Save everything on your external hard drive. 


PS: I somehow don't manage to post more than one video per post, so sorry for seperate posts with the videos.

Throwing hammer

Skipping

Skipping again

Mazed Characters

© Quentin Blake

As I posted earlier, our main inspiration for the characters for the project Mazed was the illustrator for Roald Dahls children books, Quentin Blake. I really like his style, the sketchy and loose pencil that suits perfectly for children, but adults as well, because it's quite realistic at the same time. 

I thought this would be perfect for Piskey Led since this is animation is going to be on a tourist app for Cornwall, the audience would be both children and adults. The only thing with this style that would be a problem is that it's too sketchy, and would look a bit messy in an animation. We needed cleaner lines to make it work with the timespan we had to animate. 

This is how William and John ended up as. I tried to keep them simple, with organic shapes. Beside Quentin Blake as inspiration we googled ‘Bristish farmer’ to find the stereotypical farmer look. We wanted them to be typical farmers, as well as typical British. As I'm 'foreign' here in England, I know how the stereotypical British person for us 'foreigner' look like, and one of the most typical things is red hair. That's why they both got red hair, as well as it has the movie a wider colour pallet. We chose to make them the common comical duo; one short overweight one and the other tall and skinny. 

Experimental Animation

This is my final video for the experimental animation project. I did this with iron filings on a piece of paper with magnets underneath the table to move it around.
It was really hard to move the filings around, since the magnets were so strong that they pulled big chunks instead of just some of the filings, as I intended it work. But that's the point of the experimental project, you're going to explore new techniques. 
This was totally outside my comfort zone. I'm not a very artsy person. Don't take me wrong, I love art, but I'm more a realistic art person. Abstract stuff has never been my thing, that's why this project, and especially what I ended up with at the end, liberating but at the same time frustrating because it didn't need to look 'perfect'. 

I did three other experimental animation short films before this one, but Youtube isn't collaborating at the moment and won't let me upload them. I'll try to fix this later on.
   

Background work

Second semester we started having animation backgrounds and layout lectures. We learned different techniques with both colours and black and white, what different effects it can have and simple rules to make the best backgrounds.

The first picture is an exterior layout of a castle, drawn with charcoal. Here the challange was to deside where the light source was, and use as few tones as possible. 
The second picture is an interior background with one light source, drawn with pastils. I'm pretty pleased with this one, and had a lot of fun with it. I like how I didn't need to draw the whole chair, just highlight where the light would hit the surface, but you can still see that it's a chair. 

These lectures give me a lot inspiration to do more backgrounds and explore more with colours and different combination.   

Illustration work

Couple of moths ago a high school friend of mine asked if I could do an illustration for her university magazine in Oslo, called 'Føniks' and it's a feminist magazine. The illustration was for this article about a Swedish well-known blogger (Isabella Löwengrip) who seem like an anti feminist. They wanted a comical caricature of the blogger being chased by an exaggerated extreme feminist holding a penis. 

Its been a while since I've done illustrations, I used to illustrate for the news paper in Drammen, so it was fun to do it again. I wasn't really good at using a wacome tablet before I started at university, but now I finally started to get the hang of it. Next step is exploring more different brushes and textures in Photoshop to give my illustration more depth and a personal touch.