Thursday, 24 January 2013

First Semester Showreel


This is my first semester showreel illustrating the projects I've created over the past few months.

I think that my favourite of the animations to create so far were the pushing and picking up of boxes, as it enabled me to explore the rig of Eleven as the range of poses created in the keyframes were more complicated due to the range of motion required. However I think I need to concentrate on the making the movements of the characters smoother in Maya as some appear slightly robotic and lacking in fluidity.

Over the next semester I intend to tighten up my work within Maya and attempt to experiment more with creating movements, in particularly human characters walking as when making Burt walk it didn't have to appear life like. I'd also to experiment more with lip syncing as I found this interesting due to how the eye sees sounds and movements and how this can be transited into animation.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

Knight Rider Animatic


As part of the storyboard project I was required to create an animatic in order to time how long each frame would take within the scene and therefore how long the scene would take. The main part of creating the animatic is adding the voices to the frames, as the timing is more accurate due to knowing the length of recordings. The rest of the frames are estimated by me imagining the scenes and in other cases attempting to recreate them with toy cars to get more accurate timings whilst making car like noises. Due to the car chase and the nature of the racing scene, some of the frames are relatively quick being a second in length to imply speed. The voice recordings were adding in Adobe Premiere Pro to the timed frames, in addition to the sound effects adding a sense of atmosphere to the animatic.

Friday, 18 January 2013

Kley Project - Final Pieces




These are the three final pieces created for the Kley sketchbook project. After looking in detail at skulls, bones and butterfly wings as the smaller and differently scaled objects, I combined them with the figures of the women (referencing Guido Argentini's photography collection).
The idea of scale is played with in the combination of the female character and the butterfly wings, questioning whether the figure is small with 'normal' sized butterfly wings, or the female is 'normal' sized with oversized wings. 
I've drawn the female figures within the inside of the skulls landscape, attempting to fit the poses into the different shaped crevices and holes within the formations of the bone. Some minor changes were made to skull formations in order to fit the females into the shapes, as amending the poses would be more difficult in this instance due to a lack of reference to work from.
I used the style of cross hatching I'd experimented with previously for both the figures and the skulls, creating strong definition but also looking at the details of imperfections in the bone.
My favourite of the three pieces is the centre image with the female lying down. I think this drawing captures the pose particularly well as well as the emotions portrayed, showing a sense of wanting to hide herself and also sadness. Because of the less detail background of the skull I also think the figure and the pose is the main focus, whereas in the other images I think the figures get slightly lost within the skulls.

Saturday, 12 January 2013

Butterfly Wings


To look at the idea of size in a slightly different way as to the skulls, I created a variety of simplistic pencil drawings looking at the details of different butterflies wings to combine with the female figures. Ignoring the colour schemes I concentrated on looking at the shapes and lines created by the main changes in colour. Some shapes required an element of shading in order to imply a transparency of colour.

I chose to use the set of wings that I'd consider the most easily recognisable as butterfly wings, as I wanted to make this detail clear in order to play with the idea of scale more clearly. Using another Argentini pose as a reference I added the detail of the wings to her back, using cross hatching to create shading and more definition the difference the shapes in the wings.

Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Skulls - Looking At Detail



As part of the Kley sketchbook project, in order to look at the idea of sizing and the details of a smaller world.

I started by drawing simplistic line observational drawings directly from a variety of animal skulls, such as elephant skulls, lemur skulls and alligator skulls. As they were relatively quick drawings, I looked mainly at lines and shapes created as opposed to shadows.

Looking at photographs of rams skulls (bottom image) I had taken previously, I began to look in further detail at the shadows created within the skulls in addition to the marks which had formed from weathering and ageing of the bone. I attempted to use the style of cross hatching to create and develop shadow in fitting and inspired by Kley's style.