The BESP: Character Development

As a part of my sketchbook referral I chose to work on one of my characters the BESP. This is a unfinished concept sketch. I have to come back when I have time to complete the pelcvic wings and the rest of the spine.

 

 

 Using the reference material I made a mock up collage of the complete character and its Pelvic wings basic motion. Excuse the penis, I've decided to remove it and to double up the sacrum as one. Which will be Horrible!

 

 

After this I realised I should be focusing on post production so I decided to start modelling this freaky thing.

 

Lumbar Vertibrae

 

Thoracic Vertibrae

 

Cervical Vertibrae

 

The Sacrum/Penis

 

Pelvis/Pelvic Wings

 

 

BESP so far.

 

 

 

 

I wanted to achieve near anatmomical perfection, this very far from that. Very good modelling pratice though. Next will be tweeking the spine so all the vertibrae sit better with each other, which will include making soft discs to fit inbetween each one. Customizing the spine so it has a spined back. Eyes and Brain(not looking forward to this). Then the rigging which is why I wanted to start modelling. I really want to rig the brain so I can get emotion from throbbing cortexes and squishing.

Still work in progress.

Experimental Referral

For the experimental project I had to redo the three experimental pieces that led to the main piece. The first two were redos of my originals which were lost but were still nothing very exciting. The first was pretty limited as I couldnt find my white board pen(which would of helped). The second was using a clay painting technique which I found pretty laborious. The lack of patience and direction are vivid to me. The third experiment was using pixelation to demonstrate what bears do in the woods. The result felt really rushed even using 12fps, I guess this was due to the camera following the bear in a third person angle. However it worked alot better when I used static camera shots which made the movement more clear. A nice day out in the woods and an awful amout of pictures(almost a thousand)!

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.