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.