Gathering Images

When our group had our first meeting,  I had brought images with me that I had suggested gathering in the blog.  Although the others had not gathered they're own, they seem to like them and started to recognise how collection of images immediately generates a mood and so they were more encouraged to do the same.

 I was mainly trying to get an idea of potential colours textures and themes for our animation to share with the others, that way we might come to some  mutual agreements over stylisation and possibly start generating ideas

My first load of images happened to reference rain, as I was mainly looking for washes of colours, but then I started thinking of rain as a theme for our film.

These are images from my presentation and I managed to gather enough rain images to categorise them into mood boards that help generate a particular feel, they can readily be referenced for concept art.

I also gathered images of interesting camera angles along with images that apply the rule of thirds. I am quite new to these conventions of image and film making and hope to familiarise myself with them so I can apply them to my own work and also try to challenge there principles.

Here are some screen shots from animated films such as Pixar's Up and '9' that seem to demonstrate rules to their compositions - their layouts are clear and easily read with a variety of dark, light and mid tones. It is important to me that I understand how I can apply this kind of clarity when planning my own  story-board layouts.

These concepts from finding Nemo and Wall-E demonstrate how simple drawings and layouts can help plan more finished compositions.

While these character sketches for the animated series 'the boon docks' can be found in frames of various episodes.

Here is a plan for assigning textures to a scene from '9'

Concept art clearly generate a feel for a scene

I've selected these characters because they all convey a completely different side to themselves in particular situations - I think its what helps to strengthen there appearances in the films.

These human/character comparisons aren't directly related but it suggest the idea that they were inspired by real people, which is perhaps a good thing to exercise when developing a new character.

Ren and Stimpy are perhaps my all time favourite animated characters - They are eccentric, exaggerated and the animation itself seems to cleverly find a balance between highly rendered drawings with depth and detail and conventional 2d line animation, which is worth noting.

These detailed drawings were usually presented as still images on screen as part of an episodes story telling, but they were often so graphic and descriptive that it wouldn't matter if they weren't moving; eventually I found myself looking forward to seeing them in each episode.

References

Here are a number of references that I have shared with the group so far. 


I was very intrigued by the talks given at the Phoenix during the AnimateExeter trip last week and so I decided to reiterate a number of the topics addressed by Heather Wright  (Executive producer/head of commercials and branded content at Aardman) and also film maker Joanna Quinn.


Heather described how they generate ideas for advertising to tackle short turn arounds for potential clients, according to a set brief. They almost have to bid for the jobs, so they gather images that reflect the feel of the advert they'd propose to create as oppose to churning out designs for a job they might not get. They generally source these from their own archive but mainly because it is so big.


Heather had chosen a case study of one of Aardman's pitches, which was an advert for Swedbank. It was interesting to see how it had all come together.

This is where I had suggested to gather images ourselves in a similar way, but instead, to source them from anywhere. 


In Joanna's talk on her work, she shared several of her working methods for her animation. I thought her most interesting points were how she dealt with character designs and story-boarding. She claimed to do both initially in her sketchbook, doing drawings of her characters over and over again and placing them in scene from various angles. She preferred not to draw her panels in a box, but instead she would do a drawing of a interesting angle or scenario and then drawing her box lines around it afterward. This way she wouldn't feel limited by the constraints of box before starting.

Pages from Joanna's sketchbook

This method seem to help generate some of the most interesting angles for her animations,  this is immediately event in her showreel.

Joanna also tries to keep her drawings interesting when animating too, as she describe the way she goes about it in this video of her animating.

I too hope to break out of the conventions of flat animation so I can create more interesting animations containing scenes with depth. I think one of the most challenging things is for 2d animation to keep up with how cinematic 3D animation can be when compared to live action. Perhaps this is why 3d animation dominates mainstream cinema today.

This Marvel comics story-boarding tutorial also shows a few examples of how they achieve more striking panels for their readers . After all, comics have to grab you attention with still images so it helps if the angles used for their pannels are as interesting as possible.

Week 1 - Open minds

Week one of the new module and there have been some complications with forming all the groups but as it stands, my group consists of Anna, Amy and Bev. As our first group presentation is to be as soon as the following Monday, I figured that it was important that we get communicating as soon as possible, which is a little difficult since Anna, Bev and myself are all part-time and have different commitments.

I therefore decided to set up a group blog/message on facebook, so we can all share our thoughts as well as research, work, videos, links and content etc. I've used it before to work with others and it has proven very effective - you receive a personal notification when ever the blog is updated.

Unfortunately Anna had to leave this week to see family in Cyprus and wasn't able to attend the meeting we had on Friday, she also won't be here for our presentation either and is returning on Tuesday.

Although the group blog has proven effective so far and we have been able to share thoughts and ideas, it's perhaps not as effective or as progressive as holding an actual group meeting, but does provide food for thought. In our meeting we were able to have a more reflective conversation and properly discuss the topics in our blog.

Blog topics

The main issue has been deciding whether to work from an existing proposal/script or to create a new narrative for the animation exercises listed in the brief. Both Anna and Amy have suggested working from a script as they thought it would be a more interesting exercise. Anna had suggested doing a documentary on a conspiracy theory on climate engineering, with the intention of possibly entering the BBC's creative climate competition with it. 

However, in our meeting on Friday, it became a group concern that there isn't yet a script to work from and so developing a new script for a documentary would require a lot of research and development, which might possibly jeopardise time management for making the animation. Anna had also said that she didn't want to be overly ambitious for the sake of time management, and in light of this, in our meeting we agreed that it would have perhaps been easier to pursue Anna's idea if she had already developed it into a proposal during our time off.

Since Amy is the only one of us that did the script writing module,  she shared her animatics with us on the blog despite feeling that they weren't strong enough. During our meeting we agreed that her bee animatic was probably the strongest but we weren't sure about using if we wouldn't have users rights to the music she used for it.

As nothing had been decided yet, I thought it would be worth making a start on gathering visual references, similar to the 50 images exercise in the taxonomies module. Except I hoped to gather images that reflect our individual tastes in aesthetics, rather than our thought process. These images could be anything from sourcing characters we like, pallets of colours or textures, scenes that set moods, themes or a time of day. This was proposed as a way of keeping things open minded and loose since we're not sure which we'll be working on yet.