Lost and found :)

I'm so excited about this so i thought i'd do a wee blog post. On christmas eve channel 4 are going to be showing an animated adaption of Oliver Jeffers childrens book 'Lost and Found' and it looks as though it will be just as beautiful as the book :D

http://www.studioaka.co.uk/go/lostandfound/



Should be well worth taking half an hour out for :)
Merry christmas! x

Flip fest part 2- Ninja theory :)

After listening to how pixar's pipeline works, it was very interesting to hear the processes that 'Ninja theory' went through for game design as they explained their pipeline at the Flip fest. The group had designed a game called 'Heavenly sword' which was beautifully done and they also made some pre-game release films, which again i was quite impressed by.
Granted, for me Prince of Persia would of made my day, and i haven't played 'Heavenly Sword' so i was not as apprehensive or excited as i could of been, but non-the-less i persevered with listening and faining interest and here is what i found out...Designing games is damn hard!



So, the people we had talking to us were: Guy Midgley - lead animator, Stuart Adcock- Technical art director and Nina Kristensen - Co-funder.
And to be completely honest here the only one that made any sense was Guy, but that is irrelevant to the pipeline isn't it. This blog is NOT a bitch fest.
So first of all, what would need to be done are;
Style tests - these are a series of tests to determine how the character would move and to question the agility of the character.
Develop basic combat - When using fast combat, keep the poses at the end, even if the moves are fast.
Synchronised movements- Characters fighting together
Super style - Heavier fighting moves which are much more developed
Game play animations - Abit cinematic
Game Hero - A cinematic piece with gameplay involved. This needs to be built up too, 1st in blocks, 2nd rough cuts with basic characters and 3rd will be the final piece.
USE PERSONAL ACTING TO SEE HOW MOVES FEEL AND LOOK
Shoot any acting like a movie



As you can probably tell, this pipeline isn't in as much detail as the Pixar one, but the same rules apply. Do research, look at real movement and make it is realistic as possible.




Here's the preview for Heavenly Sword. Now all thats left to do is for me to get a games console and not be dissapointed while i play it?

Osbert Parker at the flip fest :)

Next up came Osbert Parker, who has some lovely work and ideas! He works using collage, found objects and pictures from books. I was really inspired by some of his more recent work such as 'Film noir' and 'Yours Truly' because he was taking alot of inspiration from old black and white films and working brilliantly with cut-out animation and live action filming. These films have a lovely experimental feel to them and it works beautifully.
These images are from 'Yours Truly';


















The film is about a character's burst through yesterday's emulsion to tell the conflicting story of Frank and Charlie who sacrifice their morals to find love as two worlds collide.
It 's made out from 16mm ‘in camera’ reconstructions of photo cut-outs and real objects in miniature environments.

Film Noir;



Film Noir is a mixed media animated adventure. Is created in-camera combining live action with animation, found objects with photo cut-outs that are weaved into a non linear narrative and manipulated into a dark story of romance and psychological tension that unfolds into a cinematic world never seen before.

Parker's Film noir is a pure extract of the best and most characteristic qualities of this classic genre in the history of cinema. This short reveals the genre's most typical methods (shooting, narration, acting) and applies its own creative code (animation, layering and overlapping of image fragments) in order to build a unique noir atmosphere and thrills.

A few points i picked up Parkers talk were these:
He prefers handmade animations- using found materials.
He uses his sketchbook for personal projects away from his clients work.
Look for accidents. :)
See's leaves and things on the floor and turns them into something else.
Influences- Painters such as Picasso. Max Hurst. David Lynch movies.
Makes collage 3D if it appears too flat.

Flip festival huh?

So, we went to the flip festival last week down in Wolverhampton!...unfortunately due to being extremely late i didn't make the Saturday, but i DID in fact make the Friday, which was of course the better of the two days anyway! ;) The weather was a tad dismal at the hour of 6am but it had become a beautiful sunny day by 9am. Completely irrelevant as we were inside all day! :)
First up was the open shorts, which were all quite good, a few more so then others but i have to admit it was the comedy ones that stood out to me most of all :) The first i would like to point out was a short called 'This way up' by Smith and Foulks


http://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/this-way-up-by-smith-foulkes

Good site for examples of their work.

This was a great piece, and really stood out against alot of the other work, not only for its brilliant animation techniques but also because it had such a great sense of humour behind it, and I'm guessing its no coincidence it was by British directors.

Again, another British piece that stood out was one called 'Mister Gallagher’s Boat' by Chris Sievey & Brian Little. This featured a quite well known Frank Sidebottom and Cardboard Frank.
I found this my personal highlight of the open shorts, simply because the the humour really appealed to me and the style of animation was quite different. For example, one character that made me laugh so much was a man who carried a mirror around with him and refered to his reflection as another person! A key moment for me in this animation was when there was a birdseye veiw of the boat going down the canal and then it tunred into a pinball machine and propelled the boat down the canal.
I thought this was very creative and appealing! :) oh, and heres a little clip!


One short however which i really did not like was 'Milk teeth' by Tibor Banoczki.
Milk Teeth - film clip



The reason being that i thought the experimental aspect was taken too far and really just didn't work at all. They attempted to make a 'weird' animation and instead made one that not many people could understand or see the point of. The storyline wasn't at all gripping and it just didnt appeal to me at all.

There were alot of shorts, and this is just a brief overview of a few that stood out in my personal opinion. What i have learnt however through discussion with my peers afterwards, is that humour works best! :)

To be continued.....

Shall we have a bit of a catch up? :)

Righty ho, short of listing artists i like, should i do that? I think i need to have a small catch up and just fill in a few gaps :)
Sooooo, last week one of the things that we did was to make our first wire models! The correct way to do this is to take a length of wire and twist it so its effectively doubled, the reason being that if you just use wire in single thickness, when you bend it for a characters movement, it decides it will bend back a small bit, and also depending on the thickness, it will probably snap. So the neatest and quickest way to do this was to thread it into a drill and drill it, so that it looks lovely and neat (this way was so much quicker then attempting it by hand) :)
My wire man it turns out didn't look too much like my character design unfortunately, so after a short animation session (and quite playful one) just to get a feel for our wire men and to see how the movement worked on camera we called it a day and i modelled my wire person into an extremely amusing dancing pose which i have included on my character sheet! And the video will be up here soon, promise, but in the meantime here is a photo.

The one on the left with the purple head is mine, and the normal looking one on the right is becky's. :)











And then...let me think, what else did we do? Last week we also discussed how the shape of a character is more important than the actual detail, and Neil proved this by handing us a sheet with blacked out characters on so you could jut see the shape and we identified nearly all of the characters.




SO the message is make the shape memorable and the detail simple!





NEXT post folks could well be the flip festival one, so hold onto your seats :)

Susan young

This is an artist i am growing pretty fond of, so i thought I'd give her one of my blog entries and explore her work a little bit.
She's from a little place i like to call BELPER in derbyshire. :)
Which also happens to be my hometown, and one of the main reasons i like her is because not only through many years of hard work has she created her own style, but also because she seems to love colour just as much as i do.

http://www.sherbet.co.uk/directors/susanYoung/levisVariation/

Her favorite medium is apparently big thick brushes with black ink on, quite like Chinese calligraphy and i am currently trying to use bigger and thicker pens, and more blocks of colour in order to try and create similar effects, and the fact is that i am quite enjoying working with these things! They are not easier, which i thought they may of been due to the lack of detail they enforce but in fact harder because of this! :)

http://www.sherbet.co.uk/directors/susanYoung/classicFM/

This is a beautiful hand drawn line animation, and i just love the way its so obviously ink and how there is smudged ink, blotted ink, lines and shapes all at once in many occasions!

The Bayeux tapestry

I am going to be looking at this mainly in my RVJ but here is an animated look at it and a few background facts that won't be included in my RVJ.
This 70 metre long tapestry was created to record how William the conqueror invaded England in 1066 with his Norman army.
It is also a very early example of just how unreliable historical sources can be, it is highly suspected this artwork was very one sided in its recording of the events and since there are no others to dispute this re-telling of the events we cannot know for sure exactly what happened.
What is very important here though is the power these images have, and they are 1,000 years old!



This is an animated version of the original, i think its effective because it barely alters it and that quite important with an artwork like this.

Pixar ey?

EXCITING NEWS. I have met/listened to a real life Pixar animator. ''Michal Makerewicz' How?' - You may gasp in wonder, but it is indeed possible, even from Birmingham. He came down to the Millenium point building and did a talk on 'Wall-e' the lastest of Pixar's animations. Would you like to find out what i picked up from this talk? Good, i shall begin then....(If not, just stop reading, its easy.)
The general upshot of it is that a hell of a lot of work work goes into these films, they take about 5 years to make, and Michal basically went into quite abit of detail about the processes the film must go through before we see it at the cinema...

Development- The team will work with the director to get a rough idea of the story, characters etc.
Story- The basic storyboard will be created, this will be thousands and thousands of sketches which will then be played on a screen so the director can get a feel for how the film might be. If the director likes it temporary music and sound will be added.
Art- This department deals with characters and all the research behind them. For 'Wall-e' they looked into the previously animated film 'Robots' but came to the conclusion that they wanted their robots to appear less human. The robots in 'Robots' even had eyebrows and were extremely similar to humans and this wasn't the look Pixar were after. So instead they focused their attention on machinery that existed and operated in the real world, they also went on location to tips for set research.
Modelling
Set Dressing
Shading Dept
Layout- Layout camara in computer.
Animation- LOTS AND LOTS OF RESEARCH. In order to be able to emote and bring characters to life! Some animators act in front of a mirror to see what their own expressions look like. Some use thumbnail sketches.
Fx (effects)
Lighting- Starts with colour scripts
Matte Painting
Rendering

And so you can begin to understand how it takes 5 years to make one film. For Wall-e there were 130,000 frames rendered, 445 models made and 41 sets produced.
As you can imagine we then asked a range of questions about how we might present ourselves if we were interested in working at Pixar sometime in the future. This is just from my notes again.

Basically for you demo reel, keep it short and sweet, no longer then 4 mins really, use your best work first, use work/dialogue that means something to you in your work, have a range of work- physical, dialogue, subtle, out there, etc. Don't back it with techno music.
Its not just about polished animation, the ideas are important.

I got an autograph and doodle of eve too :)