Back at Uni

After a long summer I'm back at Falmouth University to start my second year.
First year was a mix of everything in animation, but this year we're finally getting separating in pre- or post-production.
Despite a late semester start, I already got on a 3rd year film project over the summer, which I'm very grateful for. Some 3rd years wanted me on board on their project making a show reel for their final film at university. I'm going to help them out with their storyboard and most likely some concept art later on.

The show reel is going to be five different scenes (underwater, hell, promenade, library, jungle). The jungle scene is the biggest and probably the most complicated one of them, and it’s for this scene I'm going to work on the storyboard. It's going to be a challenge because it's going to be a sort of run/chase scene, very fast paced. I've already looked up some shots from both Disney's Tarzan and The Incredibles to find some inspirations.

Also finding it hard to start a storyboard without a script. Would love to find some books about storyboarding to guide me further, but so far I found watching films and taking notes (most of them mentally) the best way to learn. Which I don't really mind.

Will see how this year is turning out, hopefully developing some skills in storyboarding and other pre-production things, but also want to keep going with some more 3D modeling in Maya. 

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