Evaluation

Visual Language has been a long brief and has been a very effective Module at keeping me on my toes with the large quantity of work. The main aim of the module was to show us that animation isn’t always about animating and making things move, this module has been all about pre-production, something I have recently gotten a big interest in so to be given a chance to try out the areas of pre-production is fantastic.

I was encouraged to use more varieties of media with this module, just like pre-production artists would use in the industry. We aren’t just limited to pens and Photoshop there is still an entire history of art that came before animation and we can make full use of this in pre-production work. I applied this mind set to my set, series and sequence brief where we were given a word and create 24 images then 12 from one of them and then a 6-12 paneled storyboard. My word was spider. I'm arachnophobic. But I didn’t want this to deter me from working with the word as it had so many possibilities as well as the fact that in the industry, sometimes I won’t get a choice and say thanks but no thanks so I dove into it. It was actually really enjoyable to do as I got closer to the storyboarding stage, I had found many possible spider related themes to work with and I was able to use a wide ranch of media to bring these drawings to life and to represent them. It was a good start for me to get back into the ideas of secondary and primary resources and research to remind me of my practices from foundation.

My main piece of enjoyment from this module came from the Captain Character task where we were required to create a character of our own choosing, starting with simple shapes and building up from that to give them details. This was a great task to give us a lot of freedom to create interesting and unique characters of our own choosing and designs.  However this was only during the early stages as later on we were required to make these characters into models which was a little unexpected as we weren’t told about it initially. If this was intentional to show that sometimes over complicating designs can lead to a downfall its good as it made me realize that just because I'm designing or making something it may not be what I think its for resulting in a very different end product than initially thought. If this was a mistake on the tutors part I feel that they could of explained earlier on so that I didn’t go and make a model that had mist for legs. These characters were taken one step further with a turn around task, with which we had to make our character turn for four seconds with it doing one cycle a second. Like with the 3D model it was a little unexpected but it was a good chance to understand how a 2d character might appear 3d in their own world on the paper. The gradual progression of the use of our characters made me realize that there is so much more to character design and that while I can be free to draw whatever character I wish they still need to be applicable to further development down the line.

The other tasks stopped using the character we had initially designed and focused on other aspects such as scenery. Environmental storytelling was the most difficult of the briefs to complete as I had never done technical drawings or backgrounds to such an extent before. I wanted to use this task as a chance to widen my range of skills and focused on looking into perspective in scenery to try and bring about depth and distance to a scene. It took me a bit of practice but I was finally starting to grasp the basics of perspective, I noticed that compared to my initial sketches and even my earlier developed images, my later ones were much more interesting and detailed and I felt I could call them technical drawings as well as accurate. With all the drawings I tried different media and different techniques to create a variety of drawings, but with perspective being present in all of them.  As well as the environment drawings we had to also do life drawings, capturing movement, weight and details in a range of medias. I most enjoyed doing the quick movement sketches as they had life to them because I had to work quickly with only 10 seconds to draw I used ink and graphite sticks to catch the essence of the people in the short amount of time I had. I also enjoyed the longer 20 minute sketches which gave me a chance to really try and show who the person was as if they were looking into a mirror this gave me the chance to give them identity and strength of character. However while I enjoyed the short and long sketches the 5 minute drawings were too long for any movement or life to be instilled but then they were too short to give the drawings character so I feel they should be shortened as it would mean I could focus on representing the weight of the character. All these tasks go back to observational drawings, something I have always enjoyed doing as it gives you a chance to see the world differently than with a photograph and you can show others how the world looks to yourself I was really happy to find that we had a module that focused on core drawing skills and emphasized the basics of drawing.

Overall I'm happy the module is finishing however as it has been very long and has resulted in some nasty surprises along the way, however it has also reopened the possibilities of my work and my future animations and how I might approach them, not just with Photoshop.