Stop-Motion Workshop

This was a workshop to pratice stop-motion technique. I was the only one in this class apart from lecturer. I was the one animating the left armature doll thing. Certainly ain't my style of stop-motion armature, bah heck! Now I said that I need to go into the summer and remake all my character armatures to demonstrate this point.

Cinematography

This was a group project from last term, where we had to produce a 1 minute silent film. The film had to demonstrate good composition and filming technique. Our group decided on doing a film noir. There was an award ceremony and everything! It was like being at the Oscars! lol Because our group won.

Voila....

Sketchbook Bloggable Selectables

End Of Year One!

It was quite stressful by the end of the term but its almost over (basically is). There will be a few more updates with work I've completely neglected to upload this year e.g. my sketchbook and cinematography. But other than that its going to be my own projects that I will be cracking on with over the summer, in and around a job hopefully.

I really just wanted to leave a reminder for myself for what will drastically improve my work standard.

TIME MANAGEMENT!!!

Next year I will keep on top of everything as soon as I get it, even though it probably won't eradicate the whole end of term/year rush but..it will definitely help. Same thing for my blog, keep it updated while its fresh in my mind.

Motion Studies: End of term Showreel!

Here is a compilation of everything I've done in motion studies this term.

Motion Studies: 11 Second Club Performance

This final piece for motion studies was all about the performance, We had to concentrate on solely the body language and expression.
Here is the final piece....

This to me is quite a good attempt for a days works. Not out of bone idleness, but once again I experienced major problems with Maya's character sets and this was my third attempt. The first attempt was almost finished just literally the smoothing out of the animation to do using the graph editor when I needed to stop and sleep. The next day all the animation I had done had gone! MAYA! The second attempt was pretty similar but I thought I had solved the problem, I was wrong. The third attempt was key framing everything my self, and I still managed to get it looking alright. I just wanted to avoid using flash again, until I get a lovely Wacom Tablet. 

Ident Project

This project was quite brief, it was based on using our experimental animation footage to produce a 10 second ident for the university, which had to include the uni's logo and the words 'Digital Animation', using the software After Effects. I have to admit that I felt a bit stumped! How could I use a kitten having its intestines pulled out of its bum? So I decided to avoid that bit and use just the fingers. I then proceeded to luma key out the kitten and the background leaving just the fingers, which were then layered up to produce a trippy finger tunnel using the black and white theme of the logo. This then en cured a few problems of trying to make the logo stand out over the top. I achieved this differently to how I wanted.

Anywho.... Heres the final ident....

Cornish Stories

This was a ongoing group project from the beginning of this term where we had to produce a 45 second animation based on one of three stained glass windows to accompany a sound file which links directly to Cornish heritage. The choice was either fishing, mining or St Piran, each one had a small selection of Cornish people telling relevant stories. We chose the fishing window and the fish and the screwdriver story to accompany it, as it had the most potential to be humorous.
The animation style that we planned was a Monty Python esque  cut-out animation using a similar style to the window.
Here is the end result...

My part in this production; was to asses the audio then produce a script, clean up the audio and do the sound effects after production, make one of the assets for animation (the screwdriver) and also to animate one scene.

This was a generally very last minute animation, as we were not animating until the very last week before the hand in. This could of been improved drastically if we all pulled our fingers out way before it actually happened. It got completed (almost) though.

I was a bit annoyed that I didn't have more time to get the sound effects perfect and I didn't get a chance to use the audio that I cleaned up to near perfection as my external hard drive kept corrupting files I put on there. Something else I've got to replace.

The original window.

 

Screwdriver.

3D Enviroment Creation Project

Here is the final piece for creating a 3d environment using camera projection techniques. Included is the original photo, "Matte painting" and a wire frame version.

 The end result wasn't as good as I hoped, I think this was mainly to do with the matte painting I created was very shabby. Also when it came down to the final render I had animated a physical sun and sky which moved from over head to behind the engine house as the camera moved, which didn't come out in the final render even though I tried a few solutions. It wasn't having any of it!
To improve this further I would  actually model the foreground and trees to rid the 2d effect and redo the matte painting.
In hind sight I would of changed the scene to having the mine in a fish tank, which was my original idea that I completely forgot about until afterwards. I might redo this over the summer.
Also the final production was really jerky, maybe this was something to do with me messing up the assembling in Premiere. This is quite likely. 

2D Background Project

This was where we had to take scenes from our story board project from the previous term to the next level in development. We had to do 3 final pieces. The first was a animation background layout. The second was an interior, which in my storyboard there was none. it had to have a single light source. Lastly the third was a exterior.

1st: Background layout. Not as clear as the real thing unfortunately.

2nd; The interior. It's not an interior, but I enclosed the scene with more trees and kept the sun for the light source. In hind sight I should of enclosed the front of the image more and if i was made aware that I could of changed the scene entirely. This was my first digital painting using a Wacom Tablet, which was lovely as it was quite forgiving.

3rd: The exterior. I would of liked to of done this in digital paint as well but wasn't possible. This was painted in watercolours like a infant school child would. I'm not happy with this at all.

Supporting sketchbook work....

Meadow and foliage practice for the layout

More foliage and types of gates for layout.

Top: Rolling hills for layout. Bottom: Lighting practice for interior.

More lighting practice

More lighting practice. I really liked the left hand one.

More lighting practice on the left. Monochromatic water colour test on right.Should of done more colour tests for the exterior background.