Final Animation Idea - Robot Animation

This idea appealed to me out of all the other unused animation ideas, this one was created when I tried to draw the little girl in the Golem animation and ended up giving her a Saw for an arm after realising I needed something original. The story was going to be a love story between two robots, one robot that was abandoned after she became self-aware and "human like", she became lonely and with her limited knowledge on robot making, created a friend. When she created this junk robot, she fell in love and took it on dates and the like. This was the girl robots design:

I didn't write a script because I didn't know how I would work with it, I only knew the beginning, the middle and the end was something I couldn't think of. I created a huge backstory in my head and couldn't think of a way to get it through in the animation, because of this the story started getting longer and longer to the point where if I took anything out it would ruin everything. 

I did however create a background in Flash of what I wanted the animation to look like:

I liked the idea of the future, and because of this I was going to tweak the idea slightly. However I then decided the change the idea again to be set in a Retro future using the same characters in a different scenario. This would later be devolved into my final idea; SPACE GIRL 3000.

Final Animation Idea - Golem Animation

As stated in the previous post, I wanted to do something that was beautiful, but short. So I decided to stick to the same Fantasy setting and focus on a little girl finding a Golem. This idea was very under-developed before I changed so this wont be as long. The story is similar to that of the Iron Giant, a girl spots a meteor fall from the sky, she goes to it and it's a giant Golem, she takes it back to her village and adventure happens. 

I scraped the idea quickly when I realised the idea was very similar to my course mate Gary's idea, in which the story revolves around a giant and a girl. Because of this I decided to scrap this idea before I developed it more and focus on something completely different and original.

Here is the only piece of concept art I created:

Final Animation Idea - Adventure Faeries

One of the most developed out of all my unused ideas is Adventure Faeries, an animation about 2 faeries who set off on a quest to reclaim a treasure for the shop they work in. I spent almost all the summer working on preproduction for this idea, however most of the story was in my head, and I couldn't write the script. I did however start on the beginning scene of the animation, aswell as a few animation test and concept art:

ANIMATION TEST

As you can see I did put alot of effort into this scene, though it was originally going to be a test animation. I had began a script which you can read HERE, however I never got past the first scene due to a creative block. As for Music I had even talked to a sound designer about creating a atmospheric track to represent the world, he said he could make me something similar to Concerning Hobbits by Howard Shore, something that would work very well:

The art style would be simple and effective, however the characters would be small and easy to work with:

This animation was going to go on alot of atmosphere, the backgrounds were the main aspect since it is something I want to get into in the future. Because of this I made the characters easy to animate (small with tiny limbs), this meant I could focus mainly on the background art rather than the character animation. This however, I feel would bring down my animation, having lovely backgrounds wouldn't make up for shitty animation. So because of this I decided I should reconsider my options for this animation, I had already started work on it so I wanted to create something in the same area. And so began my final animation idea number three: The Golem Animation

Final Animation Idea - Pango

The first of many ideas; Pango, is a story of a Panda in Western times hunting for his infamous twin brother, a crook wanted for numerous crimes. After being mistaken for his brother he is arrested and told if he didn't prove himself to be who he says he is he'd be hung; so Pango, the sheriff and a young girl venture out to find the wanted criminal. The story had many flaws, as it didn't have an ending, most character's were un-designed and the beginning was unfinished. However I did alot of concept art:

I was going for alot of atmosphere with this animation, I wanted it to be dark and gritty. I was incredibly inspired by the film 'Django' and 'Rango' (Hence the name). Both films show the western era to be a harsh place filled with crooks everywhere, and this is what I wanted to get across. Similar to Rango I wanted the entire cast to be cute animals, set in this rough tough world.

The music I had in mind was bluesy western, almost eerie. A good example of what I wanted it like is a song by The Heavy: Short Change Hero. It isn't western, but has that eerie tone. Another song would be Freedom by Anthony Hamilton and Elayna Boynton:

Ultimately, I scraped the idea as it was leaning towards it being a feature film and not something I feel I could achieve in a year (Or to the quality I want). If I shortened it the story would have suffered and it would more than likely lose all appeal, plus the animation would look horrible rushed. I may carry this on one day, however for now it remains as the first of many unused final year animation projects.

[Personal] The very late Update

Though I have been back at uni for nearly 2 months I have neglected adding to my blog, partially because I have been getting on with my end of year animation preproduction and dissertation. However, I will try and get this place back on track and go through everything I have done thus far.

As you may or may not know this project has had it's ups and downs for me, I have started preproduction for around 3 to 4 different projects then abandoned them to start on a new idea, I will go into more detail in a future post. As of now I have just finished the first draft of my script, after 4 meetings with Ged Haney I have simplified and narrowed down my idea and now I am happy with what I have to work with.

I will explain each of the things I have done in the past few months and keep this up to date afterwards as I am in a nice place to get this place up to speed now that I have a finished draft.

[Drawing Lesson] 02/05/13 to 16/05/13 - The Mural

On the 2nd of May we started on the mural, Tom unravelled the large paper and each team chose their spot to draw. There were two sets of groups, one to draw the female model while the other one drew on the mural. I had enough life drawing to just carry on with the mural, so me and Ant (Aaron came later) began to draw our people in pencil. This is mainly where we planned out what we were going to do next week, once we pencilled everything out we finished up for the day.

The following week we began to ink the pencil, Aaron pencilled in his drawings and me and Ant inked in our drawings. some of the drawings I inked turned out better than others I inked, but over all they turned out really nice;

Here is mine, Ants and Aarons area mid-way through being inked;

Once we finished inking our drawings, the lesson had ended and only a few of us had stayed. We began working on the backgrounds and touching up on peoples drawings, adding faces, blood and weapons ready for inking the following week. I began working on a few backgrounds around the top along with a few others and soon enough the entire mural was inked, we just had to wait for the following week to add chalk to it.

A week had passed and it was time to chalk up the inked mural, we began by spreading chalk scrapings across the paper. We then spread the chalk into the drawing with our hands until the entire drawing was covered black;

Once the entire Mural was covered black we grabbed erasers and started to add shading to the drawings, I began doing the areas I had done, starting with my 5 people. Afterwards I began shading in the backgrounds I had done, once they were complete I started shading anywhere that needed it until the entire thing was shaded, here are the areas fully shaded and drawn by me;

Here are some of the backgrounds i did;

Soon it was fully shaded and completed, it turned out really well in my opinion, we all worked together as a team to create this which brought us all closer together. Some areas turned out better than others shading wise, there were some perspective problems... or rather alot. But that aside, on my part, I am happy with it, I worked together with Ant and Aaron so our 5 drawings could entwine and I think they turned out really well. Something I noticed while doing this is that Shading is not my strongest point, and will try and improve over the holidays, along with everything else! But overall, I am very happy with how it turned out!

[Drawing] The 5 mural drawings

We were told to work in groups and create a section of the mural; me, Anthony and Aaron decided to work together and create a section of the mural. We needed to draw 5 figures to put on the mural each, and all have them reacting to one and other, so when I got home I began working on mine;

^Not very neatly laid out, thanks blogger!

These were the drawings I chose, now I just had to wait for Ant and Aaron to finish theirs, when they came back to me they had all finished, we all uploaded them to each other and we decided to do a practise layout for the characters. Anthony in the end came back with this; 

 We all agreed that this would work, now all we had to do was wait and do the real thing.

--------- EXTRA ---------

Half way through doing this post, someone asked me to do them a drawing, so I thought i'd share the drawing; a Gorilla duel wielding two sawn-off shotguns:

[Drawing Lesson] 25/04/13 - Pre-pairing for the Mural

Today we were doing last minute drawings to prepare for the drawing mural, since we didn't have Steve we had a female model to draw. We mainly did dying, crouching and sitting poses, however there was a few action poses as well. This time around I didn't focus on the face, but rather the body shape. I am really trying to hone my female body drawing techniques, since they were terrible before hand. There are a few I really like here, the main thing I have to remember is the hips and upper body on a female, if I get them right then it'll look like a woman, and not an Amazonian warrior.

[Project: Cleaning] Completed!

The animation has now been completed! I am really happy with the outcome as while animating I was having second thoughts about the animation, I am pleased that I could finally complete it even after the disaster which made me lose my laptop. After completing the animation I threw the file into After Effects and sorted certain scenes out, below are the comparison;

Scene 1: Opening

Scene 4: Kims Skit

Scene 13: Ending Scene

It took me a night to finish up the After Effects, the only other thing I needed to do was to sort the audio out. I asked my good friend Dan, a sound designer at Leeds uni to help me out with the sound and he took it upon himself to sort all the music, SFX and foley. I sat with Dan for 4 nights as we imported the voice clips and music, hunted for SFX and foley and sorted the levels out for a mastered audio. 

After Dan handed me the finished animation with the mastered sound, the animation was fully completed and was ready to hand in. I am overly happy with the entire animation, I showed it to the people I lived with and they loved it, and Dan showed it to the people on his course and they thought it was brilliant. I am waiting for the screening in a week to show the animation to my course mates, though they have laready told me they can't wait to see it, I hope it meets their expectations!

[Drawing Lesson] 18/04/13 - The Last Steve Lesson

We are now starting to gather poses for the Mural we are going to put together, Steve modelled in various battle poses; holding things, being defeated and crouching. I wanted to mainly focus on hands, feet and faces, since they are my weak point. 

I think I now have feet down. feet are becoming a strong point now as I am slowly learning anatomy of the foot better, whereas hands are still a weakness. I have been practising with cartoon hands as you may have noticed in a previous post, however I still either make them too big, or too small. Either than or just make the fingers too big for the hand.

The head shape is improving little by little, however the face itself still needs work, I am either giving them too bigger features making them look cartoony, or they just look incredibly unrealistic.

I do feel like I am improving my drawing style, I am starting to see improvement in my own work thanks to them, as well as my cartoon drawing style.

[Drawing Lesson] 11/04/13 - More Female Model

During today's lesson we were to draw our female model in crouched and sitting positions, as you can see at the top of the paper there is a sequence of drawings, each of these are relatively the same size, and I feel tells a sort of story on how she moves. Below that were 10 minute drawings of the model, I feel like I am getting the female body down now, the only thing I need to work on is the feet and hands. The far right drawing is alot more cartoony than the other drawings, mainly because of the size of the head in my opinion.
























After we had alot longer to draw the model, so I went in to detail on the face, feet and hands. I struggled alot with the hands and feet however I am slowly understanding how they look, I am mainly getting the feet down, however the hands are still a major problem, the fingers are incredibly difficult to draw in my opinion, I will continue practising and hopefully improve over time.

[Personal] Doodles and Drawings

Over the past month or so, I have been trying to hone my drawing style and practise drawing most nights. In a previous post I stated that I have trouble with hands, so they've been a slight focus, along with body shapes, especially female body shapes. So with alot of inspiration from various sources I have produced a few doodles in my sketch book;

[Personal] During my absence of updates

It's been about 2 weeks since I have updated the blog, due to the fact that my laptop broke as you can read in a previous post, having to finish my animation, doing an Essay and a Dissertation proposal. However, I am back and I can list off the things that I have now completed;

• Essay
• Dissertation Proposal
• Animation
• Edited Animation

I have done pretty much everything now apart from the Drawing assignment which I will be working on Thursday and finalizing the Armouries project (The project that I haven't updated on here for a while). I'll go into more detail in future blog posts about each thing that I have been working on and completed in my absence. On another note, I have been doing ALOT of sketches lately, and I will be uploading them in their own posts too, look forward to everything, have a taste of what I have been doing;

[Personal] The Curse of the Broken Laptop

So on 23/04/13 I decided it'd be the greatest idea in the world to pour a pint of Ribena al over my laptop, essentially destroying it. However, a week later and I now have a new laptop with my backed up HDD plugged into the side. I am still yet to know if the Flash files are corrupted, however this is a HUGE set back for me. I already had little time to do this animation, now I have less time and not animated in a week.

It's going to be a huge scrape to get the animation done in time, however if I remember correctly; The Fresh Panda of London Zoo shared a similar experience last year. Last year my file corrupted and I didn't back anything up, which is why it was handed in incomplete. This time however I had numerous flash files, so if one has corrupted it's not the end of the world since I have the other files.

I had originally planned to make it shorter, but since i still have a week or so to finish it off then I think it'd be easier for me to actually follow the script instead of start from scratch. So here's hoping I get it all finished in time, until then have a few doodles:

[Project: Cleaning] A few finished scenes

Scene 1 

(Finished, however requires minor tweaks to characters)

Scene 2

(Completed)

Scene 6

(Completed)

Scene 7

(Finished, however may make some tweaks a scene)

These are the finished scenes, some are more completed than others however pretty much completed. I will make the tweaks them once I have gotten most of the important animation out of the way (By which I mean the whole thing done to a reasonable level). I have just over a month to complete this animation and slap it in After Effects for editing, plus I need to do an Essay along side the animation. So I do not have time to start fiddling with scenes that are completed.

[Drawing Class] 04/04/13 - Return of Steve

Today we were preparing for the big mural of a war scene we are all going to do at the end of the year. This is something we have been working towards since before Christmas, we went to the armouries originally and drew armour, weapons and other battle objects, now we are going to use them in a few week. However first we had to practise drawing the characters in specific battle poses so they wouldn't just be stood there in the battle field.

We also had to focus on specific parts of the body, such as hands, head and feet. This is because there is alot of focus on the hands, the stance and the facial expression that will go into the mural, I did pretty well drawing the hands, better than what I thought, the main problem was the feet. as said in a few posts before, I have a hard time drawing feet, and this is no exception, even when they are right infront of me I struggle to accurately draw a foot. It took me a few attempts to draw one I was finally happy with, and then I left it for a bit. I will defiantly try and improve how I draw feet, because it is one very big flaw that I have when it comes to drawing.