Friday 16 October 2009

Making a Blog ain't such a big deal...




I'm posting this a day earlier than I usually would, purely because I'm away tomorrow, but anyhoo...



The projects this week revolved around BALLS (ahem) and animating them using stretch and squash principles and giving them the illusion of weight. I'd tried to use a little bit of stretch and squash on the egg transformation to give the egg circle a bit of bounce, so I was quite happy animating the 2D part of it.







The other 2D project was getting Cubey the Cube to bounce up and down. I used the same amount of frames for both animations (6) before reversing it to get the bounce effect, but I think the ball was more effective. There's something wrong with the way cubey hits the floor, I think it needs more frames.




The other two projects were both using the program Maya, which I've found myself to be rather unproficient with. What's worse is seeing recent CGI movies such as Up and recalling the two animations I eventually managed to churn out, but here they are anyway.









I'm not especially pleased with either of these but his is the very first time I've used 3D software, so theoretically I can only improve. I hope.


On the Life drawing front, I've been trying to get a little more movement into the figures I've been drawing as I only ever seem to catch people lying down or sitting. here's a few examples pf the more recent ones I've done.











The last one is my favourite purely because it reminds me of the double-sword wielding android "Kuma" in the anime 'Afro Samurai' which may get further mention on this page purely because stylistically it's very bleak and unique in appearance.




You can see him here! ------------------------------>









One of the other life drawing examples I mentioned last time were the skulls, and the one based on a certain skull that seemed to have a lot of personality.






The main reason I like practicing skull drawings is because it reminds of a creature I designed for one of my Web comics, called a Sheepish.


http://www.drunkduck.com/Andantino/index.php?p=346835


That's a nice inked example, and here's a coloured one-http://www.drunkduck.com/Randomology/index.php?p=290342


Basically (when I eventually write it) the premise of the story is that Andantino, the title character, is mourning the death of his wife and lamenting his inability to do anything during her illness and missing her final words to him. A strange celestial creature appears and tells him of a gate souls pass through on the way to the after life. As the souls pass through the gate, their final thoughts are seared on to the walls, and encourages Andantino to travel there to ease his guilt.


The rest of the story is still very much in progress, but I'm mentioning this because I always had the intention of making Andantino an animation before I considered it becoming a web comic. The story is based on a piece of classical music by Debussy, which had such a long name I lazily shortened it to "Andantino". If I can find a link to the piece I will post it at a later date, but while listening the song reminded me of a poor, sad man, crying over his wife...


If I did turn Andantino into an animation, then I do already have a soundtrack for it! Working to a piece of music is something I'm quite interested in because of the choice of either applying the song post production or making something that responds to the tempo and rhythm visually, which Andantino would. Visually the style would be very much like the comic (black and white), so when I watched Fears of The Dark, a French animated film, one of the segments had a particularly eerie charcoal like style-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijZK_0wZ-0s&feature=related


The story ended pretty abruptly and poorly in my opinion, but the visual style was intriguing.


I realise that this is an enormous post considering it hasn't felt like I've done much this week, but finally I've made some designs for Rejection Girl and I will hopefully have a very short animation of her up in a few weeks. Here she is, looking mopey (colours are not final).



And that's it hopefully, the end of whittering for this week.

No comments:

Post a Comment