Gosh how busy I've been

...doing absolutely nothing.

No, this blog hasn't had much added to it over the summer. I had a horrendously bad art block at the beginning of July and it's been an age since I've been able to even think of anything worth painting or drawing. Not even any ideas for animating. I;m hoping I can change that this last month.



The reason for my art block is these two (insert whatever expletive works best here). These would both be page 7 in the first chapter, but as you can see I changed my mind how it ought to be laid out halfway through working on the first. Towards the end fo the second (while running out of copic markers as well) I decided I couldn't think of a way to write the first chapter that wouldn't be horrendously dull and done to death. Coupled with some on the spot designs I'm going to write to at least the fifth chapter before I even start doing pages again. It just goes to show how important planning is. Tip of the day, kiddies.


Towarsd the end of this month,I did start trying to fill out a sketch book with doodles-



Trying some head designs. I like the top left one and the child holding the frog best. I decided I'd try and do something sort of care free using the bottom left style, something having to bother with proportions too much-



...and then I went OCD with the proportions and dropped doing a stylised version completely. The left arm came out pinker than intended because of a lack of flesh tones in my pencil set, leading to orangey-pinky-browny guess work.

Then I got it into my head to do a water colour piece.


Thanks to watching Neo Tokyo Labyrinth I can't get Gymnopedies out of my head. I love this piece of animation, it's so strange. It always reminds me of the sort of nightmare you'd have as a child, where everything is sinister.

Animal Firm finale

Well, it's all done now. As most of the images were completely coloured in the last week, I can post them up now.

The Chameleons are a corporate business that specialise in information trafficking, and help crime syndicates cover up more noticable crimes- for a price. Having such a large amount of information about the syndicates at their disposal, they have the capability of exploiting the gangs for their own personal gain whenever, where ever. They also act as a loan company with a price higher than the money borrowed.
They work in with the Loan Sharks, who are the debt collectors for them.

Benny's night club Lapdogs which is the main scene, really, as this is where the whole Poker game goes very wrong.

The Chameleons at a board meeting, the higher up chameleons have larger horns and a more dominant attitude, like the chameleons in real life.



The line up of the characters, from left to right- Ethan, Benita/Benny, Pasha (the bear), Aleister (the snake), Salma, Hiroshi, Cecilia, Hampton and a Chameleon agent.

I'll only up load these images as I think the three largest ones are probably the best work me and Al did, and the chameleon with a gun is just a favourite of mine. That's not saying that the rest of the work is of a lower standard, just that these are the ones I think we put the most time in to.
Personally I'm very happy with this project. Alberto and I had the main plot and characters decided on in writing a few weeks before the What project, so when we had to animate for the two weeks we seem to end up in the same time frame as other people. The colouring and a few designs were done in the last week, and Alberto finished the whole project in InDesign to make it look pretty professional. I really think we did well with this one.

That's it for the year, isn't it? Only waiting for the grades to come back now, so nail biting time for the next week. I may try doing a summer project over the Holiday just because I can see me becoming endlessly bored otherwise. I have a few ideas, although most are comics, but I suppose I can still post them. It's character design after all.

Reference for Animal Firm

To save me getting reference later, and also to catelogue the images I'm likely to print of for use in my reference book I'm going to post some images up here that I need to use for designing the Koi carp and the High ups in the Chameleons group.

The aftermath and animal firm

I went to the screening yesterday, and really enjoyed the other projects shown. I don't think anybody had an idea that was similar to another groups, so its amazing how differently people can interpret a brief.

The feed back on ours was sort of what I was expecting. When I did the track laying I had a suspicion it was going to come off as being very quiet, and the sounds I had were a variety of mono and stereo so I thought that might affect the audio quality. To be fair though, I did have an hours sleep was working at about 5 in the morning on it, so I probably couldn't hear things normally anyway.

Kathys project is done and dusted, and I managed to not post any images of it up at all. Sorry Kath.

I did photograph a few of them before I handed the book in though.

I do have the original sketches somewhere, but wuth these two images I wanted to work into them more, so here is Alberto in the style of a hieroglyph and Alan in the style of a picasso image.
I'm pretty fond of the Alan one actually. And no, it's not a basket ball.



Alberto and I were pretty far ahead with Animal Firm a few weeks ago so we could devote our time to the group project without suffering too many set backs, but we've now started colouring the characters ready for doing backgrounds and action shots. Here's a coloured Benny for his profile image. We're also hoping to do a character sheet in the style of a police height chart!

Episode Four- Final Week

Wow, this has been a very tiring project. I don't think I've worked this hard on an animation at all this year, and I know everyone else has been working their hardest as well to get everything done for the deadline (I hate deadlines...)



This week I've been continuing to get the animation drawn, which backfired on me this week because I spent last week drawing the easiest ones. I spent most of my time drawing the ending scene, which I then coloured and hated every minute of it for doing it frame by frame.

The animation wasn't finished when I'd hoped it would be. I'm a terrible producer.

But enough provaricating, here is the final thing-

Episode Three- Hardest week

This marks the week that the group have to begin animating the project, ideally completing the animation process before the start of next week (which will be used for post production). I'd much prefer not to be doing these projects on the day of the deadline, so really tonight is the last night I can feel relatively at ease considering the amount of work that needs doing.

The animation is being completed on Flash for the sake of speed and time, as we can correct the timing issues by reordering the key frames around whenever and can exchange the files between one another depending on the roles we have in the process. Everyone is on animating duty, along with colouring, but Alberto and I are working on key frames. With some pieces though, we'll line and do the inbetweens for ourselves.

The style of animation is meant to be very wobbly lines around the characters, rather like Rhubarb and Custard in that the characters never seem to be still. Although the wobbly lines mean that tracing it frame-by-frame will be slightly easier as we wont have to keep rigidly to the guidelines, we'll have to keep an eye on changes to the characters mass.

While we have at least two scenes done, I can only post this one as my laptop doesn't have quicktime, so I can't make another file type that blogger supports (and youtube really dislikes me uploading for some reason) but here's one completed sequence minus the 3d background and colour.

Episode Two- Start the ball rolling

This week was to make up for the previous week, when most of the other groups had begun their pre production work so the group put a lot of effort in to getting the work done in a shorter time frame.

It took a while, and it turned out to have more pages than the Knightrider script, but the storyboard is now completed.

As the other work isn't mine, I'll leave it to the others to post up their work, but this is the WIP Animatic (minus sound) that Nigel made.