End of the Course

Well it's the day after, and everything has been handed in on time. The website is made (and still in progress, as I imagine everyone will be), the show reel is uploaded (on youtube, because gmail hates me trying to get my password back for Vimeo) and everything written was printed and bound.

Here's the current website- http://pionponpon.moonfruit.com/#/home/4564317252

The showreel is visible on the first page, but I'll repost it here anyway-

• It features animation from: 
• The What Project Old Man Fight(1st year)
•  Experimental Brief completed with Chloe (2nd Year)
•  11 Second Club (2nd Year)
•  Pre-Production Brief The Comedian (2nd Year)
•  Lining, colouring and a loop animation for Inbetween a Fable (2nd Year)
•  Rotoscoping for the music video Lets Blame Dahmer by Kaideka (2nd Year)
• Animation and concept art from h0le (3rd Year)
•  A walk cycle of a Pwobbel, that clown-penguin creature, that my sister designed.

The song is also called The Ludovico Technique by Anitek, that I got from the Jamendo site which licences music under the Creative Commons act. The show reel will be adjusted to include the artists name.

Compiling it was a pain because looking at the work I'd produced there were lots of issues with having not made the videos in a particularly good quality, or in the case of the What Project not having the video file at all and having to use a low quality version.

One of the biggest things was seeing the animation on h0le compared to that of the 11 second club and just cringing. Not that h0le is by any means my magnum opus, but the lining, the coluoring, the facial expressions are all so different from the 11 second one, which looks like a mess. Trying to put this together left me with a feeling of wanting to go back and redo some of the animation, make it better now with more experience under my belt, but I'm probably better off introducing fresh animation in there instead. Like the website, I see the show reel as an ongoing process for at least a few more months before I call it quits for the year and put the rest of the animation on to the next years show reel.

I'm also going to get around to changing the look of this blog, finally.

Speaking of h0le, yes. That.

The project that was submitted for marking is pretty far off of being completed with the shots we have. I've been debating whether to finish it as after all the stress of the project, completing the film after the submission deadline feels very pointless.

However, I'd rather it not be the one film this year to not get a proper showing because of that, so I'm hoping to keep working on it before the end of term for the graduate showing.

Not for another few days though, I'd really like a break!

Blog updates

Haven't had a look at this one for a while...

I'm splitting my time between these two blogs now. The h0le blog is going to be specifically used for h0le and h0le only. It is still primarily a reference blog for myself and other animators, but I'll start uploading more information about the general progress of the film in the last few weeks. Maybe being confronted with the timelines visually will give me more of a kick start.

This blog I want to use for the other remaining projects, like the website and showreel, so it will be getting a redesign at some point to differentiate it.

Heads up

Anyone following this blog who's working on the h0le project, there's a specific blog set up for it now and I'll be uploading any updates to that one for people to use as reference. Should be easier than trawling through this one at any rate.

You can find it here.

h0le: animatic

After getting some a second opinion from Kathy and Derek, I redrew the middle section of the animatic to try and change the pacing slightly. Mainly I sped it up as much as possible to make it seem a little more frenetic.
Apart from that, I removed a fade early on to keep it closer to a 3 act structure and tried to emphasise the part where he nearly falls off to make it more serious. I added in a reaction to his hand injuries as well after I realised that from the animatic he doesn't have much of a variety of facial expressions beyond slightly bored to terrified, so a depressed one seemed necessary.

h0le: subject research

h0le was, surprisingly to me, picked as one of the 16 animations to go forward to the next stage of evaluation, based on storyboards, pre-production and an animatic with completed scratch track. I say surprising, I was so nervous pitching the idea I'd forgotten most of the experience and peoples reactions before the day was out.

So currently I'm re-doing the rough script I wrote up before I start any storyboard roughs and I'm trying to decide on what the blue words should say and I've encountered a problem.

As this is a heavy-handed metaphor, what helps a person out of their depression?

The basis of the blue words is that they symbolise that the white creature (should I name him and the black thing? It's getting tiring writing "white creature/black blob" all the time)is not alone at the bottom of the hole, despite how he may feel, so the words need to be encouraging.

But is this enough? Certainly, for any amount of time a person spends depressed words become relatively meaningless. I suppose in the context of an animation, they're more of a kick-start to the white creatures determination to already leave the situation he's in.

So the words are more of an assistance, shown in the way they become hand holds in the climb up. Unfortunately deciding what types of words should be used is more of a problem because its difficult to come up with phrases that feel genuine, rather than theatrical. Having the inside of the hole looking like a collection of fortune cookie sayings would be terrible.

I've decided against making a blog for h0le, yet. It's early days and I'd rather the project made it through to the next stage before I start making official looking things.

Heres a quick animation I made. I'm badly out of practice and still trying to decide on which software to settle on, this was TVP.

h0le: Pitch

Alright, here are most of the images I'll be using in my pitch. Now if i can sort out the talking parts I'll be good to go.

h0le: additional research

Trying to find some kind of pose reference was strangely difficult today, couldn't find the right things anywhere. However, Derek got me looking into an artist called Saul Steinberg to get a different perspective on using symbols and marks instead of actual words for the abuse (and nicer things) being hurled into the hole. Here's some of the works that I thought were relevant to the theme.





I found more images here but I'm prevented from sharing them, so you'll have to check them out here yourselves. Sorry about that.

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Another artist I found completely by accident today is Beksinski, a polish artist whose work reminds me of a mixture of Francis Bacon, Giger and a dollop of surrealism.

(click for full size)
I saw this piece-



-and the skinny, stretched limbs really struck me, so I looked for similar pieces he'd made.




I don't intend to make my animation in this style because that would be bonkers, but I'm tempted to do a piece of concept art on a similar style to make it look as grim as possible.