Reflective Blog

Wire Sculpture
stop motion

I wanted to create an Animation with narrative. I started off with just one character, a wire man. I made it by making a basic stick man frame, I then spiralled wire round a pencil keeping it all even. Whilst animating I found a frame with only the spiral man on a white background was fairly dull. Because of this I added in an additional character, the drawing mannequin, I felt this gave the wireman something to interactive with making the story better.    

Above is the first draft of the Animation, this version had no soundtrack which and after watching it a few times I had to go back alter this. I looks at a few options mostly from film soundtracks and finale made the decision to put a track from super 8 on it. The music really need to set up this sad story of a lonely man, so the soundtrack was perfect as it has this soft echoing effect which I feel worked really well with the clip. 

A Glitch in Nine saves time 
The Portrait

For this task I chose to try out rotoscoping after coming across the method in Richard Williams guide to animation. This method works by tracing over footage creating frames later placed together to make an animation. For me animating free hand is still a work in progress and something i need to practice at more in order to make it fluid. Above you can see the original footage along side the animated, I feel confident with how this first part of the task turned out and will be  

3 in 1
Creature

I decided to made a few designs of possible characters for the creature brief. This is based on the Kapre, a mythical spanish creature also presented as a tree demon. 

I took the basic descriptions of the Kapre such as the height  and some of the more up to date stories which present it in a less darker and scarier way. I began by scanning a drawing into the computer and then digitally drawing over it. I then coloured it in using the airbrush tool in order to get an even tone. After that I went around the edges with the rubber and smoothed it out using the smudge tool. Its a different style to what I would usually come up with but after reviewing some contemporary animations especially gravity falls I was inspired to try something a little more simple. 

Although I was happy with how my first design turned out i decided to try another but on the more darker side of the Kapre. I went through the same process, scanning a drawing in and then colouring. Although the Kapre is male i wanted to design a female one as the facial features of a woman in an animation (e.g. fuller lips, big eyes and pointed eyebrows) tend to be more striking. After colouring it in i felt it was still fairly dull looking and decided to put a transparent layer over the top giving it texture. Over the face i put a wood layer to make her look less human and more like a creature. The layer was more of just an experiment as I would go into more detail, making the wood follow the curves of the face if I chose to follow through with the design. After this I made a background of a leave to contrast with the face as it was looking fairly dull on a white background.   


A Glitch in Nine saves time

Character Tutorial

DSLR Tutorial