Don't go out!- Walter

The animation festival in bradford was a great opportunity to see the kind of animations that get made world wide and the standard at proffesional level, although personally I preferred the student animations which seemed a lot fresher in terms of ideas. A lot of the animations felt a little too pretentious for me personally, even if they did have a good visual style, which goes to show that a strong narrative or idea is as important as the look of an animation itself.
Of the ones I saw though, Mary and Max, Ink, Coraline, Simon's Cat, A Traditional Christmas at Small Birds Singing, Tom and the Slice of Bread with Strawberry Jam and Honey ( for a slightly different reason) and Melody Gone were the ones that stood out for me, and even then I had to look some of those names up.
And, obviously, Up.
Being an animation festival there isn't much you can really take photographs of currently showing, but here are a few photographs from the museum-

While in Bradford, I did some sketches for the life drawing brief but as that's been handed in there's nothing to show for it. Alternatively, I did get to practice some character designs, although they are incomplete.

This is a rough of Kushi, a vixen for my manga-styled anthropomorphic comic Fox fire. I've had some problems designing her trying to get the look of her right and I think this version comes pretty close, although her tail needs something to mirror her hair bands. Getting the position of the legs is something that always troubles me on this comic seeing as digitigrade legs are awkward to get the correct weight distribution on. I think this drawing woud be good for a colour test (themed around red).

This is costume reference from a joint web comic I help on, although considering my update spped I'm probably going to get kicked off of it fairly soon. The web comic is based in and around north mythology, and this character here is one of the ones I originally designed ( we both have our own "set" of characters we write part of the scripts for and draw the comics for) named Ka Agnor. He's a demon/dragon half breed, who spends most of his time in his human form and is tasked with tracking down the escaped Fenir. I like writing for him because he really couldn't care less what people thinks of him considering he could punch them through a wall. That and he's technically insane. There are other drawings of him in other costumes but I hadn't finished them. If I get these two inked and coloured I'll pop them up here.

"This Blog...theres...something wrong with it..."

I would have posted this earlier, but I thought I'd lost my flash drive when I actually had it on me. Fun times.

The main thing I'm happy with producing this week seeing as we weren't set any topics) is the cutout animation. I started making this thing sometime before the day, as I only really wanted to practice the movement for a better one (which, providing I can get it made, will also be posted).

I was really surprised by how much I actually liked the look of this animation, and I think it's down to the fact cut-out animations seem to make up a large percentage of the old-fashioned animations I used to watch when I was a kid (Mr Ben, Monty Python and er, South Park, which I probably shouldn't have watched). I think cutout animations seem to come across as being particularly antiquated which I suppose could be a bad thing but I personally like how close they can get to zoetropes and silhouettes in terms of aesthetic appearance without losing something in the transistion to a digital medium.

Here's the longer one I only just completed (although I was kicked out of the studio,so it isn't completely done). There were going to be more things in it, but it really needs to wait until I get back from bradford before I can start putting the pauses and the like in it so it's a bit jumpy currently. I did start when the bird tries to jump up.

The look of this was based heavily on Okami, which is one of my favourite games, and is specifically where I copied the cloud design from. I certainly want to try animating in this style again, although if I could put sound to it I'd be much happier.

I'll reedit this post at another date and put all the pretty reference images in and everything, but not right now as it's very very late and my brain might possibly asplode.

I have also been producing little pixel people, short two frame animated GIFs that don't take much in the way of skill, so I've been doing as many as possible. here's an exapmple of one, although I suspect it won't move. If it doesn't then I need to upload the lot of them on to DA.

It worked! Here's another one-

Finally, for a proper bit of art, here's a picture I was sketching out in Photoshop ( I practice this character every so often to try and improve drawing human faces. It's still in a manga style I'm afraid).

"In my restless dreams I see that Blog..."

"You told me you'd update it again one day, but you never did."

I'm going to have to stop with the quotes soon, it's getting hard to think of new ones. Time for a new theme me thinks.

The 2d task this week was regarding anticipation and overshot, trying to create the most organic and natural ways of capturing motion in a movement. For this task again we used the illustrious Cubey and his friend Slightly-bigger-cubey. The idea was that small Cubey gets ready to jump (showing the anticipation of building up the energy to leap), makes the jump and lands by the larger Cube (leaning forwards as it absorbs the impact, being the overshot before it straightens itself out), the larger cube looks down and the smaller cube reacts in some way.

One thing I found with this task is that the number of frames were significantly higher this time round than before. Mine totalled at about 38, which is miniscual compared to the more adventurous animators.

You know I very nearly named this "companion cube"?

Making this one, I was halfway through the jump when I realised the cube was travelling far too fast for it to slow down enough to stop in front of the other cube, so I had it crash into the bigger one. The FAIL was added afterwards, although I'm terrible at typography so I'd be better off using a PC.

All my 2D animations seem to be extremely malleable. Whether this is good or not I dont know, it might be a problem trying to animate anything that isn't a cartoon character.

There are too many frames in the jump, making it oo slow, and Andy told me that thenother cube needs to stop moving so much so people can focus on one character. i suppose I like the animations to look busy but he is right, it's distracting. I will learn from this AND BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Onto 3D, Cubey gets another friend to play with in the form of a ball. I'm getting slightly more accustomed to the program, although I still don't enjoy the tasks that much. I'm going to try more experimental and interesting anrratives in my 3D stuff because I've been taking the easy route with most of these to get them completed on time, but theres no reason I shouldn't actually learn how to use the program properly.

Nothing espeically interesting here, although I made Cubey slide rather than step so I could get a little overshot in there. Hopefully that actually shows.

Other than that, there isn't much else I've done. Rejection Girl is slowly being made, so it may be up eventually. Before christmas at least. I do have several ideas for the cut out animation fof this week though, so I'll be linking to several different sources for that.