Silhouette's

Exhibition

The last three weeks have been assigned to producing an exciting exhibition to show off our first year work.  The idea is to cover the walls with silhouette's of famous animated characters.  Each silhouette would have the characters themselves blacked out, and the background to be washed out and faded, colour could be used do help the characters stand out.  Highlights can be added to them if they had a signature feature that needed to be read.  Characters or other parts are intended to be brought out in front of the display, as if in 3d, the viewer could move around the image.  I have completed three of these images, using The Flintstones, Toy Story and Shrek.  

The readability of these were important and so i had to choose poses or images that could easily be understood.  The Flintsones' i felt had to include their car, but found an image where they were side on, the others, as silhouettes were just a black mass.  I simply put different parts of several images together within Photoshop, traced round the characters in different layers, and filled in the shapes.  I then just used their rocky environment as inspiration to draw some mountains in the background, i chose the original colours to fill that in.  Toy Story i had a bit of trouble with character poses, Woody was miss-shaped and his body shape could not be understood.  I found another pose of his, which seems to work better as they now stand as mirrored poses.  The background I'm still not sure about and think it needs fading, but it includes the original colours of the scene they were in.  I think this will help the viewer identify with the image.  Shrek was easy to do, after making two i knew what  i was doing.  I gathered symbolic poses of the main characters, and placed them over the top of an image of the layout i liked.  After tracing, filling and arranging them i traced the outline of the buildings behind, and used different shades of the Shrek logo to fill the background. 

After finishing these three, and not having much else to do, and seeing as Bugs Bunny had not been done, i did it myself.  I wanted this one to be the best out of my lot, and chose to do a modern version of Bugs' environment for the background. 

Shop Keeps Happy Run

The shopkeep now needed to get from his post as posing a manakin, and run over to grab Baldy when her enters the shop. John gave me the shopkeep opening his eyes, so i then copied the first part of the walk, and began to fill in how he would turn, and very basic key frames of a run. As it was so quick, i added more frames to slow it down a bit, i read better, as it was slow enough for the audeince to know he ran quickly. John, added the shop keep grabbing baldy through the door. Makes me laugh everytime. 

Paint Slap!

This one took a long time, i needed to have the shop keeper get angry, slap the Baldies face with paint, and the put a helmet on him. Baldy would then need a reaction, and a turn to be in the same direction to fit the logo. I chose to animate the shop keeper first and used Baldy still to place what needed to go where. I found it easier through this process to use key frames, and draw the main poses, although i found i had to re-draw them to exaggerate line of action. First off all, the shop keeper gets angry at baldy not liking his wigs. So first i animated his facial expression, the his shoulders fitting into this. John wanted him to grab the brush as if it were under the desk, the paint Baldies face as he brings it back down again. He would then have dropped the brush and grabbed the helmet and shoved it on Baldies head. I animated Baldies reaction roughly then handed it to John as he was happy with the shop keep and he then went on to clean it up and improve the turn of baldy.

WIG STING walk

Even though the Maze sting was still ongoing, we had agreed to spent two weeks on each, and so decide to move on. John's idea was probably the quirkiest, and i really looked forward to trying to get across his ideas. I could understand how he wanted his characters to come across and could imagine their personalities, this was mainly helped by John's character break-downs, what they looked like with expressions and at certain points. Without any background i began blocking out key frames for the walk across the shop, after the assistant grabs the guest. I found this just as difficult as the runs for the maze, but enjoyed having to add reaction to it. The guest in the shop(Baldy) needed to feel awkward, and as he was being dragged in, i wanted him to look as though his feet were kind of dragging, as the shop keep was holding him up with excitement. The disturbed look on his face shows he doesn't get many customers, but i like how it's so freaky. This one did take a while, but after discussions and asking opinions, i handed this over to John, where he cleaned it up, coloured it in and scaled it to fit the basic background which had been done by then.

CCTV

My next job was to use Katie's original colour boards, and turn them into backgrounds. This one inparticular was for Johns bit of animation of a CCTV camera view. Katie did want a simplistic look, as not to distract the veiwer from the character, and it was set at night, and so the colour's would be desaturated, i stuck with what she asked for, and i kept the colours consistent with other shot.

This hedge was for shot 2 whislt the man is running along this background would repeat. Both were made in Photoshop.

1st Art shot complete

I then took the 1st shot of animation, the running legs. I added the hedge and ground moving, and added pebbles after Neil suggested it would help clarify to the audeince that the charcter was running forward. He was right and it looked great.

A_MAZE_STING

This sting seemed the most complicated, so we took this on first while we were still eager to work on these stings. We divided the shots up, and tackled them in chronological order, it made sense. This was a run cycle from behind the bottom legs, hedges and floor would be moving. While Katie approached the movements, i was researching the colours that she wanted, looking over storyboards and started cut 5 for her. This was an up-shot of the top half of the character whilst running. I approached this by drawing out key frames, and then copying them into ToonBoom, running it on 'twos' showed me the basic movement, and i was then able to easily in-between the key frames. I was able to hand this to her then next day. She had finished her shot, so we swapped. I think it was at this point we had input from Neil, who guided us on improving both shots, mentioning where i had made the characters arms stiff, and i agreed, and we improved it by making the hand move in more of an 8 shape.

TEAM COOL

Team C, consisting of myself, Katie Vasili and John Bowen. We spent time talking through issues with each other's storyboards, and devised a cunning plan:


A_MAZE_STING (Katie's idea)
Animation: Katie
Art: Myself
Compositing: John



WIG SHOP (John's idea)
Animation: John
Art: Katie
Compositing: Myself



MOVIE STAR (mine)
Animation: Myself
Art: John
Compositing: Katie


These are also in order of production, although we were all intent on working as a team and taking on any role needed to get the job done. We didn't totally stick to these roles and have nearly all done a little bit of everything on each sting, something which I'm proud of my team for.

Crit my work

We had a crit session for storyboards with Paul, and discussions were made about breaking the 180 degree rule, where the character walks off the right of the screen and enters left in the next scene. Then, again when he moves right, then appears walking over to the cement. Suggestions were made that the character should look as though he was heading over to the crowd at the cement, and would flow better. The character also originally fell into the cement from the same view as when he walks over, but was advised we needed to see him from the audience point of view, which i do think works better. After we later decided the order of stings, we decided to resolve my issues when making my idea.

Animatic

I tried to do this to show how long each shot would be for and see roughly if the character moved well in the eviroment. I didnt take into consideration properly the timing of poses and movement, so each storyboard picture was held for the same amount of frames, which didnt help much more. Rough sounds were added.

Storyboard pt.3

Storyboard pt.1

Storyboard pt.2

New Assignment

The task was to each have a short idea, which needed to included the University Of Lincoln's logo of Minerva for the third years' degree show. The original time restriction was 10 seconds, and would therefore act as 'Stings' which will be inserted between each film. We had various workshops to help us come up with ideas and where to find inspiration. Few were written down and fewer were considered useable.

My story outline:

Set outside the Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood (Hands and Feet ceremony)

Celebrity/Movie star male character gets out of his limo, walks down his red carpet posing. He moves over to where the cement is ready for him to set his palms in stone. As he walks over, too busy showing off, he trips over his feet and falls in the cement, face first. The camera would then pull out to see him lift his face out to reveal his imprint, which would resemble the logo.