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:
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.
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.
This has two sections, the list of people whose style helped me get to the new drawing style that I am working on, and a list that Anthony had given me that he thinks I should study to help me figure out what I am trying to achieve.
Peabo is an animator who animates for Weebl's stuff. He has a style that is easily recognisable, he draws each character in different shapes and sizes. He draws his women in a specific style however, similar to older cartoons he gives them hour glass bodies and large heads. He is a fine example of drawing people and not falling for the same face syndrome.
TwistedGrim is someone I have admired only recently after a flash animation he created called Pocketmon. After that he was someone whose artstyle I really admired, it is smooth and appealing. Similar to Peabo he has a really nice way of making his characters look different from each other, one main thing is the colour. The colours he uses are bright and he uses shading really nicely.
This is someone who doesn't animate, however draws people (mainly women) to a professional standard. The Pin-up artist Dominic Marco has a very recognisable style, due to it's increadible shading and near perfect figures, unlike the two artists above he doesn't use block colours for the characters, nor do they have outlines, something I am not interested in, my main interest is the body shapes of the figures he draws.
When I informed Anthony that I needed help with drawing styles, he sent me alot of links to artists that he follows for inspiration. Alot of these are professional cartoonists, artists and animators each with their own individual style. This is the list of artists he gave me:
I was talking to Anthony a few days ago about my characters, we both agreed that (as I believe I may have stated before in a previous post) that my characters suffer from the "same face synrome", in which all the characters have the same face, with minor changes. Anthony suggested that I look at a few more people as inspiration, so he sent me the following video:
This video made me realise something, that my faces start to be constructed correctly, however before I can add a chin or a forehead, I end up drawing the eyes and the hair and leaving the face as a ball. So before I knew it I got my sketch book out and started practising with faces, though I didn't want to lose my drawing style too much so I only made a few changes, however one major change that you may notice in the drawings below is this, they now have noses and eyebrows:
Clearly these are the first drawings I have drawn in the new style, and there is always room for improvement, something I will improve on is noses however, now I have started getting rid of the same face problem, a new same nose problem has arisen. Apart from that I am happy with the changes I have given to these characters, however considering I am half way through animating "Cleaning" I can't add these changes to my characters yet... unfortunately.
Something I will now try to work on along with the faces is the body and limbs, something that always gets me is hands, feet and body shapes. Although I am starting to get women's body down better (I assume help with the life model) I am still struggling getting a male body down, partially I have a habit of of giving them a, what I like to call, Simpsons body (In which it is a series of balls, the belly bigger than the chest ect.) However after Anthony gave me a few links to some artists I have researched into body types, though it is a single drawing here is one full body drawing I made:
This is something you might be thinking to yourself, "Hey Jack, why on earth is she wearing Sarah's clothing?" well, this is actually Sarah! After a night of mixing hair colours and skin colours I decided that I would make Sarah a Hispanic exchange student, still with all the same personalities. However I can't just suddenly change her in the animation so this will be something I will work on if I ever do more things with these characters.
Furthermore, characters aside, the body shape has altered greatly, something I will work on in the future will be the limbs however. Hands and feet are something I will work on last since they are something I will need to spend time on. If you notice, I have gained a habit of giving my characters no feet, this was due to the inspiration of The Bumming Crew, a big inspiration art wise. After trying to animate the characters without any feet during the Cleaning animation, I realise that it is more hassle to give them no feet than it is to give them feet, because if there is a full body shot the drawing looks incomplete. Hands however are a different story, I can't decide if I want my characters to have four fingers or three. Also hand sizes vary alot in my drawings, especially in the Cleaning animation, I will really need to practise to get them down once and for all.
I will continue working on the character designs and style until I am finally happy with what I come out with and can happily draw a character to look like what I imagine.
During today's lesson we were to focus on perspective, or rather, we had to fill an imaginary room up full of the same model turning and interacting with each other. Everyone did this task differently, I however thought i'd make a circle of them, each sat in the chair, however I started in the on the people at the back first, which didn't give me much room to work with since I wanted to make a circle, so instead I spread them about and still tried to make a circle. I really enjoyed this lesson because I could do the model in what ever size I wanted, plus I could make a story out of nothing. Although I wanted to have the models interacting with each other, which I forgot the do until halfway through the task, so I only had a few interacting with each other. Overall it was a fun lesson, I got all 10 drawings completed each in different angles, poses and sizes.
During Today's Lesson we focused mainly on lighting and shading, using a provided light source we were to show light and dark areas of the model. This model was fairly easy to draw, as she was curvy which made the drawings alot easier to work with, unlike someone with a disproportioned stomach or one that didn't look right.
As you can see with the lack of updates for a while, I am hard at work trying to get as much of the animation done as possible, I have progressed quite a bit considering I have a few almost finished scenes, I have done alot of tweaks, music has been added to alot of scenes and more animatics have been made:
As you can see, most of these have more music and sound effects, however I will almost certainly replace alot of them by the end. However I think these are really improving and getting there, tomorrow I am doing a 24 hour animating session with Ant and Arron, hopefully there I will be able to get alot of stuff done.
