Maya - Burt walking

14/11/11 We were given the character Burt and were to make him walk however we wanted, including also making him blink and adding facial expressions if wished. I gave Burt a bit of a fast paced walk while switching the weight between his hips to give him a more natural movement. To improve this piece of animation I could have tried altering Burt's facial expression more through his eyes instead of just having him blink. This character I may use again in experimentation of how I could make him walk, skip or run.

Maya - Squishy

24/10/11 Similar to the previous weeks task in Maya we were to make the ball entitled Squishy to bounce around some objects in an environment, using the rigging set up on Squishy to not only use stretch and squash but to potentially give it a personality.
I kept the environment which Squishy was in very simple, he was to bounce between two walls to get back into his garden. There was no set paint feature for brick walls so I left them coloured the way they were as I had some difficulty trying to add colour to them as we have not yet been taught how to, although I may try experimenting with some of the texture effects on Maya and watch some tutorials online on how to use them.

Maya - Bouncing Balls

17/10/11 This was the first ever time I had used the software programme Maya. The task was to have two same sized balls bouncing across the screen, but the balls were to have different weights, shown by the way in which they were animated.

Cubey vs. Heels

28/10/11 This week Cubey was to stand in the middle of the scene in which an object would suddenly fall and land next to him and he would react to it.
I chose my high heeled shoes as my object and filmed my roommate throwing them out the doorway of our room into the hall. Using quicktime I broke down the frames so I could draw out each one. This took a long time due to the shading of the shoes. The difference in styles between the basic Cubey character and more detailed shoes reminded me of the clash of real life actors and cartoon animation in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), though obviously not to such an extreme level.
This was an experiment of using layers of paper, with Cubey on one piece of paper and the shoes on another. When put under the line tester I realised it was extremely difficult to see Cubey, even once outlined in black fine liner. I had the shoe layer on top of the Cubey layer, as you couldn't see the shoes at all if the order of layers was reversed. The outcome makes Cubey look like a ghost, which could be interpreted into why someone is throwing their shoes into the hallway, in terror from this strange,little ghost.
The last couple of frames should have been repeated to make Cubey's expression of anger last longer so that the audience could pick it up as most of the attention goes onto the shoes, which turned out very well despite my initial fear of them being unrecognisable in the individual frames of them being thrown as they become blurred from the movement. I may try line testing this again with a light lit underneath the paper to make the layers show up together better.

Cubey Jump

I've been very bad at remembering to update my blog so each time I publish a new post I will try to include the date of when the work was produced.

14/10/11 This weeks task was to create a cube character who had no legs, just a body, head and arms, and make him jump from point A to point B using the principles of anticipation: stretch and squash, timing, overlap, body language and emotion. The emotion of joy I think was clearly portrayed in Cubey's dance at the end of the jump. One criticism is that I think I should have held the first frame a little longer as the jump is so quick you may have to watch it more than once to understand what is happening. If the first frame was held more then this would give the audience more time to process what they think is about to happen.

Bunny vs Bullet

A mini storyboard of 15 images depicting the collision of two objects travelling at different speeds.

Class Collaboration

'Google' was the theme given to me in our class collaboration project, where everyone was to produce a 5 to 10 second animation clip involving their given theme. Our names were ordered on a list, the last frame of the person before us on the list would be our first frame, and our last frame would be the first frame for the person after us on the list. This was so that everyones work would flow together to create one overall animation.
My inspiration for this task came from a stupid rumour I heard when I was in primary school, which was that if you type google into google and click search the computer will crash. The 3D silver surfer model used as a cursor was thanks to my flatmate's monopoly surfer edition set, which I borrowed, as I found it amusing to see a surfer surf the web. The breakdown of google and appearance of a black widow represents a viral threat that then turns out to be minor, or from another viewpoint, difficult to detect.
I've never before produced such a high amount of drawings for one project in such a short space of time (10days). I will most likely get used to this over time as I intend to create longer animation pieces in the future, but for now I am pleased with what I have managed to accomplish.

Bouncing Tennis Ball

You can't do an animation course without learning how to create the illusion of a bouncing ball. This was my first attempt of using the technique 'stretch and squash'.

Simple Circle

First piece of animation created using a line tester. 12 frames per second. Aim was to transform a circle into anything we wished and then reverse it back again.

The Soul Thief

For my final major project at college I created my own fairytale that expressed within it commonly themed immoral concepts that occur within the original fairytales of Europe. This was my first ever attempt at producing an animated outcome using the style of stop motion. Unfortunately I am unable to show the final outcome due to using an old version of Windows Movie Maker which makes it run exceedingly slow and jerky. I hope that in the future I will be able to produce much higher qualitiy stop motion pieces of work, but I am very proud of what I managed to achieve within my final project and how professional it looked within our college exhibition at the end of the year.