Backgrounds - Initial Layouts

These images are the basic sketches of the exterior designs.

The first outline is for the painted exterior - which I think I'll attempt to paint using a monochromatic colour scheme due to my lack of experience with water colour paints. I added the detail of a moon/sun as to give a light source in the frame enabling me to create strong shadows across the canyons, giving a sense of depth. I need to experiment with using water colour paints in this design & also explore the way the light hits the areas of the frame.

The second outline is the basic outline for the pencil exterior. Drawn on 12 field paper I've attempted to create a sense of depth with the use of perspectives along the length of the road & the canyons surrounding it.

Background - Canyon Sketches

The background project is based on the Knight Rider storyboard from last term. The exterior design will be a frame of a desert canyon as described in the script.

I've begun to look at references of images of the desert to give me some indication of how to create a sense of depth & how the lighting reacts with the details of the canyon. I drew some simplistic, quick sketches in blue pencil to create rough outlines & the basic areas of shadow.

One of the exteriors is required to be a simplistic pencil sketch creating a sense of depth with minimal use of tone. The second exterior is a
painted frame of the canyon with a specific colour scheme, attempting to draw the viewer's eye to an area of the scene - possibly where character animation could take place.

Lighting - Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez

I did this quick sketch of one of Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez's pieces (in my previous posts) to explore the idea of lighting & shadow.

I attempted to capture the main details of shadow as opposed to all the details within the design - such as the blades of grass - as my main concern was looking at the use of lighting.

My favourite detail of the image is the use of shadow reflecting the wheel across the ground adding a sense of a light source to the image.

Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez

I discovered Manuel Rodriquez Sanchez whilst browsing for illustrators who designed interesting background designs which could possibly be adapted as an animation background.

I find his work particularly interesting due his use of scale, for example the houses placed inside the flowers as if they were grown & the houses hanging from the ferris wheel.

What also attracted me to his work is his use of lighting, his monochromatic colour schemes with a hint of blue tones creates a menacing but seemingly calm atmosphere within the scenes.

Experimental Animation - with music

In taking the original test of the ripped up pieces of paper further, I planned to create more morphs within the animation. So as opposed to just morphing from fire to bird, moving from fire to tree to bird to ‘fish’ to flowers to animal, attempting to make the animation more fast paced in accordance with the music & therefore more visually interesting. However this was more of a struggle than anticipated, after planning out the frames & frame rate I had an idea of the timings in which they need to be creating in yet I didn’t quite anticipate how difficult it would be to in fact create these shapes & make them more. However I think the slightly looser style of the forms is interesting & it enabled me to make the animation appear slightly more abstract in its style.

Although I had some basic ideas of the timings from listening to the track, I wasn’t as accurate as I had hoped in imagining how long each frame needed to be seen for. There is a layering of beats which also made it slightly more difficult. Some areas of the animation fit with the music nicely, such as the movement of the fish & the pieces coming down to the floor, but I think it does need to be tighter in some areas.

Also made in error in the first few frames in that you can see the background that the animation was created on, which I hadn’t realized until upon capturing all the images & due to the time scale I was unable to go back & correct as I would have had to redo the entire set of images in order for them to morph correctly, so this was a slight disappointment.