The first run of ideas fearured a series of windows in an apartment where the blinds would come down as a cat walks past and the letters are printed on the blinds, also a reel of film from a projector. We eventually settled on turning the logo into 4 seperate characters which we developed along with some background ideas. i wanted to try somthing abstract and looked at Picasso and Miro for inspiration for some reason the ocean kept poping up as a theme.
The animatic was produced and it became clear that our original idea was'nt going to work in the time alloted. it was scrapped and we went for somthing a lot simpler that works as just as well.
I thought it would be good to try a bit of stop motion regarding the characters but this was a little over ambitious, as the project developed the simplest designs prevailed and seemed to work best against the busy backdrop.
The sound track was recorded by my freind rob, an amazing gargeling talent and Rosie did her thing in bringing in the other audio and making it all fit in to place, All the animated elements are their but many were not used in the final as it becomes really crowded. amazing how fast ten seconds seems when your not thinking about it.
we kept elements to a bare minimum and had enough time to sort out the pre production side of things. I have posted a few concepts of the characters above which were rejected in favour of simpler designs soon to be posted!

Ok... well in to the OSTN ident and just thought Id post a few images to show a train of thought, wanted to keep it very simple and our original plans and story have been discarded, they just didnt work in the alloted time frame of 10 seconds.
the look is inspired by the art of joan Miro the spanish artist and trys to evoke a n abstract underwater feel that will hopefully set of the characters.

New year begins

Well into the new year now and i've been upto my neck in essay's , walk cycles and character turn arounds. The essay took a big chunk out of other stuff i'd rather be doing but no matter. After testing the walk cycle I realised there was not much anticipation so have been trying to address that problem, I will try and post the results if I can. Still dissapointed with the Maya assignment we were given.The problems I kept coming up involved cleaning up models for subdivision and we didnt really cover how to overcome these. Frustrating but perhaps it'll be in the next session. Finally Helvis is done. given him a bit of a 70s cartoon look. This "style" might be a bit clean and derivitive but its simple and quick and allows me to get on with the animation side of things. The juimpsuits I researched were somthing else...I settled on the Aloha with american Eagle, or should I say Heloha. Now on to lip-sync..."Ahoy there shipmates, I like Biscuits!".

Bradford Animation Festival

Bradford animation festival proved to be a mixed bag of nuts really.
Films and exhibitions that stood out for me.(what i can remember)
"Purple and Brown " for pure juvenile humour and character observation.
"Shaun the sheep" and"Frankensteins cat" for great scripts and voices.
Other films I enjoyed~
"Off Beat",
"The Simpsons movie",
"Beowulf",
"Fishing with Spinoza".
Most of the 3D computer animation fell flat and was fairly uninspiring, the look tends to be flat and plastic while the animation is slow and floaty.

The 2d stuff was much better and interesting top watch. not a big fan of most of the personal peices but of those that seemed to have an audience in mind "the pearce sisters", "the beard collecter" more then a few nods to 60s style toons were made by some films whose titles I cant remember but there was a great observational peice from Korea,"Bab Mook Ja " that was amazing in pace, style and movement.
Also met Alan Gilby and Barry Purves, both showed an interest in coming down to falmouth and lending their expertise to us fledgling animators!

I was disapointed by the lack of info on tickets for the game development talks as this is one area where a lot of animators will be looking for work but the one event I did manage to catch was really inspirational "samorost2" had some fantastic concept design using photos of rusted machinery and natural organic objects. check it out!
http://www.amanitadesign.com/

The retrospective of God Bobfrey (God to his friends!) was interesting and the talk from Nick Park offered a little insight into his realm, his post war world of nostalgia doesnt exist in reality-
he revealed that he was brought up on Tintin and the Beano, similar in many ways , safe worlds where nothing bad really happens. I dont think he really wanted to be there, perhaps he was tempted on stage with cheese and crackers!
Did manage to see some puppets and sets for stop motion films in the gallery up-stairs which was extremely useful, just to get an idea of scale and the level of detail required.
And so back to School...

the blog entry that time forgot

This should have been posted last week but had problems with the internet!
The next few animation excercises were about conveying mood and emotion through body language and the relasionships between characters. I tried the pose to pose approach and produced some rough thumnails of the key action poses which I then proceeded to ignore as I began drawing! harder then it looks. however the end result wasnt as bad as all that, if I can boil a few of the poses and slow it all down it could be a lot better. I find it very difficult working on two characters on the same paper as well as redrawing the same background over and over again, am I just a lazy ****?, is this what animation is about? I would like to try with multiple layers so that one character can be boiled while the other goes ahead an does its thing.
My walk cycle is coming on, pretty much got it down except for a few inbetweens, once I had broken the character down into its basic primitive shapes it became a lot easier, I will add detail after Im happy with the flow of the animation.
I have recently found a book of stills from the Buster Keaton films which is really useful for understanding what he is doing to convey the characters emotions and drive the story.
Wonkey films gave a lipsync workshop which was very interesting and gave me a few ideas in producing some animations using modified gloves. I have been told that this idea has been developed by some other animators so will have to investigate.

Hmmmmmm!

OK...................The first attempt at animating using postcards and inky scratchy film were tricky due to the size limitations but I managed some flowy active loops that I wasnt too dissatisfied with, the peg and lightbox stuff was a lot harder then i thought .....I think the problem may have been whats refered to as "straight ahead" animation - just start drawing and see what happens! things start to shrink or enlarge,- next time ill try a more planned approach "pose to pose" animation using key drawings and working back from them, apparently the results can be choppy and unnatural , lacking flow but we'll see.
Overall quite happy but need more practice. I have tried some experiments with the Helvis character but need to simplify the shapes and not get bogged down with the detail at this stage.
Ill clean him up later...The experiments continue,...