Mazed

We have now started a new project called Mazed. “Mazed is a project to collect the myth stories of South East Cornwall ( Caradon) relink them to their places of origin and see them told in many different ways both old and new. - http://mazedtales.org/

We were divided into groups of 5 and all given a Cornish folklore. Our story is about two farmers who are out on the moor (Bodmin Moor) to check on their cattle. They manage to make some piskies angry, and they “mazed” one of the farmers. (see website for full story - Piskie Led)

For this project I’m the director, something I’ve never been before. It’ll be interesting, hopefully it’ll go smoothly. I am also the storyboard artist and at the moment I’m working on the story and doing some rough sketches. Biggest challenge for me is making interesting shots that aren’t too static. This is something I’ve been struggling with my other storyboards.

Our main inspiration for the style we want to go for is Quentin Blake, the artist who did the illustrations for Roald Dahl’s children books. A very sketchy and ‘clean’ style that I personally think suits for both children and adults.   

 

©Quentin Blake

 

©Quentin Blake 

Life Drawing Male Model

E4 Sting

These are the sketches and animatic for a project that I'll be the director of, while another student is doing the animation for it.

Storyboard

Our first storyboard assignment.
We were making a storyboard about two objects, traveling in different speed, meeting at a point. I ended up drawing two cats, one lazy one sleeping on the couch and the other one running, both heading for the food bowl. Giving a minimum of 7 frames and a max of 20 frames.

The main point of this assignment was to illustrate the different speed with just simple pictures. I found out that the best way to show this was with the background. As you can see, the overweight black and white cat almost always have the green couch in the background, showing that he has not really moved that far. While the hyper ginger one running through  sort of "three rooms" to reach the food bowl. There is a very sudden ending, because I ran out of frames to use.

 

  

  

In our second storyboard assignment we were given a script and a three views sketch of a room where the scene was taking place. It is a crime/detective story from the Victorian Era, where an inspector named Sam Small is meeting Lady Caroline to give her some files.
First, a quick character design.

The Pond

Our latest assignment in Flash we were given a random sound clip with different obscure sounds put together. Just the sounds didn't make that much sense, and we didn't have to make a short film that did make sense, as long as it was synchronized with the sound. I chose to try to make a "story" out of it, and ended up with this short film about a fly that gets eaten by a toad at a pond. It is made in Adobe Flash and a mix of frame by frame, motion tweet and cut out symbols.

I am pleased with the result of the story, but the deadline limited my work. This is the result of what I handed in, but I would like to do the final touch on it. There are some stuff, like the toad turning the wrong color for a frame, that I didn't notice before I had handed it in. But beside these tiny details, I'm satisfied with the fact that I was able to make a story out of it, and the how the lip-synch turned out.

Cubey Jumping

At the time we are working on a very simple character called 'Cubey' and have learned about anticipation and overlapping. We were givin this very basic character to work with so that we can concentrate about the overall movement and use the priciples we've learned over the past weeks; timing, weight, stretch and squash, anticipation and overlap. 

Here is my Cubey jumping from point A to B.
(It should have a couple of more frames at the beginning with Cubey just standing there to give it more anticipation)




Adobe Flash Pro, frame by frame.

Animation Principles: Stretch and Squash

Last week we learned some basic animation principles, first out; stretch and squash. This is a very typical feature for cartoon, the exaggerated stretch and squash of a football that's hitting the ground, or any kind of object flying fast through the air, and so on. To make a good stretch and squash effect, it is very important to understand the timing and the weight of the object, and the understanding of the effect gravity has. To demonstrate this, we made a short movie if a football that bounce across the screen, and then a bowling ball. Here are my results.