"There's quite a lot of people in that lecture theatre!"

Yesterday, I spoke for about 5 -10  minutes in front of the whole of the General Foundation course at Duncan of Jordanstone - that's a LOT of people!! A huge lecture theatre full of people!!

One of my tutors was doing a presentation to the General Foundation students about the animation course and brought along 5 animation students to talk about their own experiences with the course. I was one of them. It was a rather scary experience but I'm so glad I did it! Maybe it will make future talks and presentations seem less daunting... maybe.

Anyway, as I spent a bit of time putting this presentation together, I thought I would post it here. It's actually been good looking back at my journey through uni to 4th year. And I've never posted some of my 2nd year animations onto this blog either, including the finished rendered version of 'Jurassic Jess', so here it is :)

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The route I took onto the course was through General Foundation. I decided I wanted to go into animation after trying it out in the last weeks of the course. I’d never done animation before but found that I absolutely loved it, there’s something pretty cool about seeing your drawing comes to life on the screen! So I really only had one piece of animation in my portfolio for applying to the animation course, the rest of it was made up of paintings and life drawing. I think showing an interest in animation, character, story and showing good drawing skills is a plus for your portfolio of work.

In Level 2 animation we learned the basic animation principles through the practice of 2D animation; through projects with bouncing balls, walk cycles, the flour sack, and character performance. There were also lectures on the history of animation. We also had workshops to learn about the 3D computer program MAYA, the compositing and animation program After Effects and general skills with Photoshop and Flash. I think 2^nd year was really good for learning the key principles of animating. And learning these key principles through 2D animation allows you to apply them to any kind of animation, including 3D.

 

In the first Semester of 3rd Year, we worked in groups to produce a fully finished 1 minute film. I was the Director of my project ‘Jurassic Jess’ and I had a team of 5 people.  It was a story about a little girl, by the name of ‘Jess’ who loves dinosaurs and exploring museums and comes across a T-Rex skeleton in a restricted storage area of a museum. It was a 3D project, none of us had had a lot of experience with 3D before and it was quite an ambitious project for the timescale we had. We managed to finish the main bulk of it that semester and took an extra week to render and composite it together, there’s still some things we would have changed, improved, fix some glitches, looking back on it now, but we’re still quite pleased with what we managed to achieve and was so valuable in learning the process for making a short animated film, as there are so many different parts that go into making a film. Even if it is just 1 minute long!

 

In Semester 2 of 3^rd Year we got to work on the pre-production of our final year films. Including character and environment designs, and developing the script and the storyboard. I’m now the Production Manager of a team of 3 for the 3D film ‘Krokodi’. It will be approx 2 minutes in length and is about an arrogant Crocodile Hunter looking for the legendary ‘Krokodi’ swamp creature of Louisiana, to hunt down. This swamp creature turns out to be ‘Dee’ who works in her burger van during the day in the Town of New Orleans, (even a swamp goddess needs to earn her living) and returns to the swamp at night to revert back to her crocodilian self. ‘Dee’ and the Hunter meet and comedic chaos ensues!

Now in 4^th year, ‘Krokodi’ is in production and the 3D modelling of characters and environments are underway. In 4^th year we have to choose 2 skills to specialize in that we will mainly be accessed on at the end of the year. I’ve picked character animation and rigging. Rigging is where you add the skeleton and controls to a 3D character to enable the character to be animated. I’m looking towards a career in character animation, and having a good knowledge of rigging can be very appealing to potential employers because of its close links with animation. It’s also good at helping improve your own animation skills as you get a better understanding of how a character moves and is controlled. Part of being on the Animation course is having good communication skills and working as part of a team. Not only are we working on our main projects but we’re helping out on at least one other. This allows you to expand your skills and experience through working on a different project and with different people. Also as 4^th years, who always have soooo much to do, with such ambitious projects, we try to recruit helpers from 3^rd year and 2^nd year to do some little pieces of work for us. This not only helps us but allows them to get a good insight and experience into how 4^th year works and the production pipeline of working on a film so that when it’s their turn, they already have a bit more knowledge about it all.

 

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I really hope that there were some people in the audience that were inspired by all of our presentations, to investigate animation further or to try it out themselves - because after all - animation is the best! Not biased or anything :p

A virtual drive around New Orleans...

I've been looking at the town environment for a bit, for our 4th year film 'Krokodi'. First I tried to gather information that would help me do some designs for it. The first half of our film is set in New Orleans. We agreed at the start of the project that we liked the French Quarter architecture. Decided to go for a virtual drive around New Orleans (courtesy of Google Street View!) The first picture is a photo of a page from my sketchbook, with some screenshots from Google streetview, with my added notes of environment props that kept appearing everywhere, including the same style of street lamps, bins, water hydrants and balconies:

 Sketches of compositions based from 'Krokodi' animatics, and adding details of buildings on top based on research and paintings of New Orleans environment:

Some small-sized acrylic paintings, quite liked the angles of the building in the middle painting and the different bright colours of the buildings in the last one:

 A bigger acrylic painting with coloured pencil:

The thing I was most happy with in this digital painting was how I painted the sky, rather pleased with it :) Maybe I might possibly do some Matte paintings for our film?...

Added some digital paint to a sketch I had done in my sketchbook. Tried to used a variety a bright colours. Quite like making all the buildings a variety of colours:

Started to use red pencil and pen to sketch out some scenes based on camera angles from the animatic and sources of inspiration. Tried to make the angles and lines not perfect and a bit more stylized for the sort of style we are going for:

I then added some digital paint to block out some possible colours, and add in the characters and burger van to see how they fitted in with the environment:

It's not long until our deadline for this semester so I'm cracking on with the production bible work and organising my team to make sure we stay on schedule, it's all go-go-go! Here's the link to our group blog which features all the pre-production work so far: http://krokodi.blogspot.co.uk/

P.S. 'Jurassic Jess' is scheduled to go back into production as soon as this semester is finished - Jess has most definitely not been forgotten! :D

http://jurassic-jess.blogspot.co.uk/

Final Jurassic Jess playblasts for deadline

As I am about to start semester 2 of 3rd year tomorrow, I thought I'd better update this blog.

Here is a playblast of shot 4 from Jurassic Jess that I animated. Jess has just discovered a tooth on the ground in an old museum storage room, then looked up to find a giant T.rex skeleton! She grrr's at it then suddenly it comes to life!

The next shot that I animated was Shot 6 where the T.rex moves down to sniff Jess, and ends up sneezing!

Here's our final film that we submitted for our deadline. This is the playblasted version and we plan to do a proper rendered out version with some of the animation fixed. I am very proud of what my team has achieved in a short time scale with limited support. This is the first 3d film I have ever been involved with making and directing - I hope that you like it :)

This is definately not the end of Jurassic Jess! It's still an ongoing project - here is the link to the blog specifically for Jurassic Jess: http://jurassic-jess.blogspot.com/

Updates on projects!

It's been a bit quiet on my own blog recentlty but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy! I found that i was posting the exact same things on this blog as i was on the 'Jurassic Jess' blog and repeating myself. So all the project work I am doing for Jurassic Jess can be found here: http://jurassic-jess.blogspot.com/

So do check it out! I have just finished texturing all the props that i modelled and will be rigging or doing blendshapes for our Jess character. We aim to start animating next week, which i'm really looking forward to! And have waited a while for! We have fallen behind schedule but we still have enough time to get everything finished, and it WILL be finished!

We were given out the brief for the Visual Effects Module on Thursday 27th October. And the brief is to composite a 3D object into live action footage. It must be between 15 to 30 seconds long and there must be a minimum of 2 shots with 15 seconds of visual effects. We are working in pairs, so I have teamed up with Sarah Rettie. We got some ideas down on paper straight after the briefing and both came up with lots of different ideas. I then thought of the penguin statues on the wall just outside the Overgate centre and thought it would be really fun if one of the penguins came alive!



Here are some rough sketches of the "Penguin" idea:

So we wasted no time and went straight over to the overgate with Sarah's camcorder to do some test filming of the location and penguin statues in the afternoon:

1. Walking towards penguins

2. Walking around penguins

3. Shot of back of penguins, nearest penguin comes alive, stretches wings

4. Sarah's boots representing penguin as it waddles off, and camera follows

Here's the rough storyboard that I sketched out last Thursday (3rd November) to help explain our idea to our tutor, who liked the idea very much and gave us some good advice for when it comes to filming the final footage that'll we'll be using:





Jurassic Jess update

Layout drawings for the environment from my sketchbook for 'Jurassic Jess' and also some drawings to show the placement of background props within the environment.

Prop designs for Eygptian Canopic Jars (done in watercolour and coloured pencil):

Concept artwork for the light streaming through the window onto the T-Rex skeleton (done using digital paint):

As a group we are currently finalising designs and are getting on with the storyboard. We aim to have an animatic by the end of next week. :)

Environment and colour concepts

The two pictures below are environment and colour concepts done with watercolour, coloured pencils and digital paint. The first is cold light (like it's overcast outside - dull) and dark room to represent when the T-Rex is sad, lonely and broken. The second is warm sunlight and a lighter room to show the T-Rex in a happier mood once he has been fixed and has "warmed" to the girl:

Character and Prop Designs

Here is a turnaround of the character Jess that I drew:

And here is an expressions sheet I drew up, i think the last two - 'grrrr...' and 'laughing' are very much Jess's personality:



This is a colour block concept to see what colour combinations work best:

And here's a quick sketch of Jess in the T-Rex's jaw (the end of the story):

Now onto Prop design! Here are some random objects i thought you might find in a forgotten museum storage room: