Animated Documentary - Week 13

These are my final designs for the CD cover for a physical showcase. I finished it off with the slogan "Everything has an origin" and title 'SILK', using two different styles.

The calligraphic title style used in my last image was preferred by the team as it suits the theme of ancient China.

Final Video:

Animated Documentary - Week 12

This week I designed another background for another scene of the trader's market which will showcase two trader's making a trade.

After that I started creating a CD cover to showcase what our documentary will look like as a physical copy.

I decided that it would be appropriate for the Silk Goddess to represent the documentary as she is the main reason for discovering silk. I drew inspiration from the Silk Goddess design of one of my collaborative partners to use for my own design of the cover.

First Design

Second Design, I might use this for the synopsis

Animated Documentary - Week 11

Initially one of my collaborative partners and I worked together on producing the assets for the characters within this animation.  However, critical feedback highlighted the fact that our respective assets were of different styles. This brought to our attention the problem of using two different character artists with different styles.

With this I looked towards making a small gif for the caravan's time lapse travelling along the Silk Road.

I then went to work on creating the backgrounds for this gif to be walking against using the drafted concepts made by one of my collaborative partners.

Story Board with the scenes I have made backgrounds for

These backgrounds have layers to them so that I can create depth by moving each layer separately while the caravan walks along. This will make it look like the camera is following the caravan as the scenery drifts by.

Desert

Rocky

Grass Lands

Final Caravan Video:

OUAN503 End of Module Evaluation

I felt that this module went fine, however there can be more improvements to my performance but overall it went fine. Through this I have discovered my enjoyment in these competitions which I might still participate after this module. It has shown me an effective way to create and interpret set briefs in my own way and will also allow me to get some recognition from other fellow designers which could potentially help me with my career in the future. I didn’t make much time for developing, creating and testing different outcomes as it comes to be a habit of sticking to one design. It would be good if I can show more time and effort into the process of developing assorted designs for characters instead of deciding on the one design for all my briefs, but I felt for most of them I needed to get them out of the way quickly to make way for other briefs and make time for resting myself. I was still able to show some development in a detailed way, showing every possible reference that did and could have inspired me to create such designs. At the least I show various references when making designs for some of my chosen briefs (primarily the character design briefs). I do well to take them into account for my designs to create something interesting, unique and relevant to what the character is. Besides making my own twists to the designs allowing me to make them more interesting than normal or for a more comedic effect (e.g. a wizard, a warrior, etc.). For my last character design, it showed a meaningful change and progress as it gained dozens of more likes and attention from other participating designers then my first three (besides my first one as there was trouble submitting yet I was on time). When doing my chosen animation briefs (11 Second Club) I learned how to lip sync effectively, received feedback which can help me improve upon it and found lip syncing to be relatively easy to adapt and understand. It wasn’t perfect but went well since I learned to lip sync more effectively. I also used a more useful way to sync up the animation to the audio so that they move well in unison and allows me to add extra frames where they are needed. The session we had for lip syncing from applied was also/more useful for my chosen animation briefs. With all this in mind it will now be useful to me when I make any future lip syncing animation in order to make them as effective and convincing as possible. I just need to learn more for correct mouth movements and work on time management since at most I manage to finish off the outlines for the characters and scenes without any colour. I need to work on this as most of my animations are made without colour. This isn’t inherently bad as some of my animations are suited to that sort of style but shows a lack of time management as it’s also a result of resorting to a colourless animation to make do with what little time is left. However, I was happy with the animated movements I created making it feel as much as possible a scene that involves characters that act almost like real people who are talking to each other. This involves hand gestures, body, eye and head movements as people don’t usually stay static when talking to each other. Besides some excessive gestures or lack of movements it went well. For future briefs, I will hopefully be able to consider creating other designs for development before making a final decision on one design. This will allow me to provide more material with which to show said development and will also allow me to explore more options for my designs showing a list of possible ways to display my creative imagination. With what I have learn while creating my animations I’ll be able to create effective lip syncing with convincing movements and get some colour added to my characters and scenes. This will go towards creating more effective use of my time and more interesting animations with convincing characters. (704 words)

Collaborative Practice - YCN Roald Dahl, Research

Through researching the books I looked into moments in the book to make sure what happened since I have only known most of Dahl's stories though films which could be different in many ways to the books.

These are some examples:

In the book of The BFG the bad giants actually used BFG like a toy and played catch with him,

a scene I'm not familiar with from the drawn animated film.

In the film The Witches I recalled how the Grand High Witch killed another witch by shooting energy from her finger, but in the book she shoots energy from her eyes.

In the book The BFG the girl Sophie is depicted with long blond hair yet in the film she is depicted with short ginger hair.

In the book 'The Witches' it is described that the witches are bald just like how they are in the film, so this cancels out some of my designs where I depict the witches having some strands of hair.

Thanks to this I am able to understand what is required for the scenes, so that I don't just reimagine them with my own ideals but also take into account what is described in the book.

Collaborative Practice - YCN Roald Dahl, Final Designs

After creating our designs for the characters and backgrounds for the scenes we finally had them inked for the final design which are to be used for printing.

The following show the final design and a more inked version to create a template for the printing process:

Using the mixture of paint and templates of our designs the final designs were created:

These are examples of the sort of patterns and colour combinations created by these prints:

Combining the template designs and the colours creates are final designs shown below:

The BFG, giving a child a dream

The Witches, grand high witch killing another witch

James and The Giant Peach, on top of the empire states building

Collaborative Practice - YCN Roald Dahl, Background Designing

After making and deciding on our character designs I started working on background designs for the scenes we chose to illustrate. We chose to illustrate a scene from 'James and The Giant Peach', 'The Witches' and 'The BFG'.

These are some of the concepts and drafts we created for the scenes we wanted to re-imagine:

James and The Giant Peach, at the top of the Empire States Building

Draft for 'The Witches' scene, the witches conference meeting

Draft for 'The BFG' scene, when BFG is giving a dream to a child through the window with his trumpet

Collaborative Practice - YCN Roald Dahl, Character Designing

For collaborative practice we were tasks with grouping up with other art departments in order to collaborate on a brief together. I grouped together with illustrators for the YCN Roald Dahl brief in which we were required to re-imagine scenes from Dahl's books.

To start off with we started with making designs for Dahl's characters in order to determine a style we liked and seemed appropriate for Dahl and the target audience (kids).

For this we need to look into the books for what the characters were represented as originally and how they are actually described in the book so that the designs we make correspond to what is described in the books.

The following are my designs:

The BFG

The BFG

The BFG, bad giants

The BFG, bad giants

The Witches

The Witches

Matilda, Miss Trunchbull

James and The Giant Peach

The Witches

The BFG

The Witches

These are some of the images my collab partners have done:

The Witches

The Witches

The BFG

James and The Giant Peach

The Witches

The Witches

11 Second Club - Up to Something

For this 11 second challenge on '11 Second Club' the challenge provides us to animate a random piece of audio.

I took the style I used for my turn around for this character who looks similar to style of that used for the animated characters used in the music videos of 'Gorillaz'.

Examples of frames I used in my animation. As shown there is a slight difference in the design of my characters in my animation. Also, I take a dark comedic approach using the audio to interpret it the way I do.

In the following is my final video as it is which I managed to submit. The lip syncing look fine and appear to be talking to the voices in the audio. The movements are fine but as told by one comment from one voter on '11 Second Club' there was too many hand movements at one point.