Apply - Further StoryBoards

 While i started to draw my animation i had realised that there were still certain scenes that could be changed, and that i could of added stage notes and directions as well. with the below storyboard i altered it to tell the actions of the characters more obviously, in the third panel i separated them more to show them moving away from each other and in the fourth panel i was able to move her forward making it seem like she was catching up with the train, i also removed the backgrounds as it was still a simple animation. In the final scene i brought her forward so that the girl could run and collapse closer to the screen and i changed the angle of the last shot to keep the flow smooth and fluid.

I came up with another storyboard, that i decided to go with in the end. This storyboard uses one camera angle to keep the animation simple. with no camera angle changes i can focus on the animation and the animating of the characters. This storyboard also follows the female character completely not focusing on the male character at any point at all.

Apply - Animation Test, final rough

After drawing the rest of the secondary actions i inked up directly onto the pages with brown ink. I chose the brown ink over black for purely aesthetic reasons because of the setting of the animation. The 1920s times are always perceived in black and white, sepia colouring as are the photographs from the time. This animation is still only photographs from dragon frame so i need to scan the frames in.

Apply - Animation test 4

This tester includes all my frames with the majority drawn in with the details and secondary action, follow through and overlapping action. Personally i really like it as i have only done a few traditional animations, (few being two, one 38 frames and another 16 frames) and they didn't make use of the 12 principles of animation.

Identify - CGI 3D Animated Short HD: "Premier Automne" by - Carlos De Carvalho & Aude Danset

This animation is an incredible piece of 3D CGI animation,  i think it uses a combination of cell shading and cgi shading to create a really pleasing aesthetic of sincere looking characters in the children and a dark foreboding, shadowy world around them.

The animation is about two children who represent summer and winter, summer being the girl and winter the boy. However they can't interact as its impossible for the two to meet, but the children's (I'm going to call them familiars) familiars, in the form of labrador puppies for the girl and skeleton puppies for the boy begin to cross over to the other season causing the two of them to come together. This causes the familiars to get defensive of their owners on both sides eventually leading to them crossing into each others seasons themselves. Winter, however brings death, while summer brings life so once again another thing that kept these children apart. In the end however the two children come to an understanding with each other and appear to be playing in the final scene.

I think that, while there was a lot of symbolism in the whole film, it was in the last scene, in the end credits that had the most meaning; the children are on either side of a tree with the summer keeping it vibrant on one side while winter leaves everything dead on the other, and as they chase each other around the tree they can't catch one another and are causing the seasons in the tree to rotate around with them switching sides. The symbolism in this scene i think shows better than the actual film that these two seasons can never meet which leaves it to be a bit sad.

Apply - Animation Test 3

this scene is where the characters really start to move, with the train speeding up and the female character tripping and collapsing. I'd carried on with the pose to pose animation focusing on the core body shapes and less on the details. This has proved much more effective and useful for me showing how the body moves. This was especially helpful with the quick movements when the character fell and collapsed.

Apply - Animation Test 2

The second animation tester i did was looking at the motion of the head nod by the male character, unfortunately this looked way too much like the hat was tunnelling down into his skull because of straight ahead animation so i had to erase around 30 drawings of his head and then redraw them at a better angle using pose to pose animation.

Identify - StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void Opening Cinematic, Blizzard

This is Blizzards opening cinematic to their StarCraft 2 game. I have never actually played a Blizzard game, so I'm watching it with no prior context, this by no means i dislike the animation, i think the animation is incredible, because it aims towards a certain level of realism but still uses exaggeration and extreme character designs where the characters don't appear to have any coherence to each other, but the detail that goes into the character design along with the smooth animation is amazing. I find the action happening in the animation to be very reminiscent of stick animation fights, where there is fast paced action with slow motion and extreme poses but still making use of camera angles and details in backgrounds.

If there was anything that i dislike is that i know that the games graphics aren't quite at the same level as film animations. i hope that, however, in the future game graphics rise to be equal in immersion as the film animations that are shown in the trailer.

Identify - Scary Animals

scary Animals is a short animation used to advertise the animation website The Line. I like the animation because its short and quick with interesting character design, the dark, rabbit like character is sinister and ominous, leaving us with a scary image in our minds. I like the contrast of colours on the body of the character along with the dark surroundings compared to the green, luminescent 'blood'.

I would of really liked to of seen it longer rather than just repeated, as i want to see a more detailed story line of what this creature is and what it is eating, why is it spurting a green fluid and where is it where the grass is purple on the other side?

http://www.thelineanimation.com/work/#/scary-animals/

Identify - Doors, Hyuns Dojo

Doors is a group of animations hosted by Hyuns Dojo and created by multiple animators. A stick man is running through doors experiencing everything that happens in each room for a brief second. What happens in the rooms can be any thing so the animators were given free reign to do what they want.

With each Doors animation, they got longer and longer with more improved animation, and something that originally had no story in doors one and two, started to gain continuity and a very odd storyline but it all works considering how a stick animation tends to be action oriented full of fast motions and impressive spectacles, but less on character design which i would of liked to have seen but its not part of stick animations to do that.

Apply - Animation Test 1

 When i started animating i used dragon frame in order to have a proper look at my animation to see what direction it is going in. The first one was to see what it looked like and just get used to using dragon frame. At this point I felt it was looking alright with the animation as it looks smooth as well.

Identify - Motion comics

Motion comics are a type of animatic that makes use of comic book panels and illustrations and turn them into animations. They are more detailed than story board animatics but a lot simpler than animations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6KS_zl9uBQ

The motion comic above is more of just an example as I've never had much of an interest in DC (or Marvel) but what i like is the presentation of the story and how it is layed out, it uses basic animation with detailed comic book art style with sharp, strong shadows and very complicated and detailed illustrations something that isn't always possible in animations due to time and development.

While i see it as something quite good on one hand, on the other hand it is very plain because the animation isn't fantastic as characters don't move naturally, they stay fixed rigid in a pose which takes away the immersion and enjoyment a little and i have mixed feelings towards the combination of text and voice acting as one or the other seems redundant if the other is up.

Identify - PES

PES is a stop motion/pixelation company that create entertaining short animations using, most often, food or centred around a theme of food.

The above is their guacamole animation where they make the condiment using unconventional items, mixed in with stop motion. They created a smooth animation using stop motion with fluid transitions of the items while still looking like a stop motion and pixelation.

Western spaghetti is one of my favourites as the transformation of food objects into other objects after being 'cooked' or 'chopped' as well as what objects they use in place of food which don't have to look like the food they are mimicking just have to act like the ingredients.

PES's animations are generally witty and clever and wether they have meaning behind them is open to opinion, but honestly, as they have made an animation which is literally a pee-nut.

Identify - Entropy

This is a 2D hand drawn animation made by Rhubarb Zoo released in 2008. The story is about a young girl in what i assume is a post-apocalyptic world, so a world of entropy, and she's listening to a fuzzy radio, disappointed in the sound playing she hears a song playing in the distance so, curious she goes to find the source which leads her to the moon where she meets a man playing a strange instrument which appears to be made of bubbles and stars. The girl interrupts his playing to join him and as they play together the man slowly fades away and the girl awakes where she began in her post-apocolyptic world but with the song they made together instead of the fuzzy radio.

I find it incredibly appealing, aesthetically, because it was done in 2D and it looks so smooth and fluid and the motion feels so natural. The design of the world the world lives in looks tragic and even the moon looks like a disaster but it works so well with the entropic world presented to us, where the world we live on is brown and dark while the moon, also a disaster space is much brighter and appealing but still feels sinister because of the shapes making up the objects and moon itself.

Apply - Male Character Design Development

Using the sketches i came up with multiple designs for the male character with variations on the head shape, body shape and clothes style.

This first one incorporates the style of the shoes and the simplified version of the clothes, removing the excessive amounts of pockets and extra bags leaving only a simplified version of the back pack.

I tried to make this one more square in shape to counter act the softer rounder shape of the woman but its head looks way to square and the legs are too puffy.
















Too much detail on the jaw but something doesn't look nice or right about it. the waist is too small and tight.



















Redrew with stubble and straighter lines overall but looked too frail
















Gave the character slightly broader body shape and tried to make the character rounded like the female character but this made him more princey and not as strong, very unlike an army man.

















Went with a very broad design but this was a poor design as he looked to domineering and powerful which didn't fit the sad scene i was trying to show.




















Took the princey design and straightened out the lines creating a strong shape but still looking vulnerable of someone who is fresh to war.

Apply - Male Character Inspiration

In comparison to the female character design the male design was a lot easier as once id established the time period (the 1910-20s) i just had to focus on war time clothes of that era.

I found a few photos online for secondary research and sketched them out to get a rough idea of the style of clothes and the army gear.

Identify - Digimon Tri

Digimon tri is a new series of Digimon to celebrate its 15 year anniversary and it brings a new aesthetic to the series. Each series of digimon brings in a new set of characters and a new story, as well as a redesign of the world they live in but keeps the same style. Over the past 15 years the series has always had an art style and animation style that deals very directed towards children with bright colours and exaggerated actions, similar to how western cartoons are done. but with this series the animation and art style have all been switched up for something more, what i would say mature leading me to believe this is directed towards a nostalgic audience as well as new. I think that because the characters have grown up the story will be something both children and adults will enjoy.

I personally really like the new art style because it brings something old forward to the present day it also helps to show the more adult characters, i really hope that the telling of the stories will be more detailed and just as exciting as it was for me as a child. These are the promotional posters for Digimon Adventure and Digimon Tri while it has very different art styles it still feels the same even though the characters are so different.

Apply - Final female designs and poses

The final Design for the female character with poses to try different sides and shots of her. 

Apply - Female Character Design More attempts

There aren't many changes now as the designs are being finalised, the main changes are in the torso of the character. The bottom right two are stylistic copies of the 1920s clothes from before while the bottom lefts only difference is lines on the dress but this made too many details to keep an eye of so i didn't continue it. the only difference between the top two is an alteration to the collar i chose to use the top right as its simple but effective and it makes the character feel soft with no sharp edges. the clothing takes inspiration from the princess and the frog clothes i drew and some of the 1910 clothes drawn.

Apply - Face Design

Apply - thought of you, stylistic approach

While i designed my characters i noticed how simple they were with little detail on the body, with no actual visible hands or feet and it reminded me of the simple style used in Ryan Woodwards Thought of you, (my previous blog post) how he would show the emotions of characters through action alone and vague shapes. And when i rounded the hair it reminded me of the hair of Alice in alice in wonderland, rounded and puffy, like marshmallows.

So i took the designs of the previous attempts and shrunk them down again, removing a visible waistline and rounded the character out so that the female character looked puffy. I wanted to make her a soft feeling so that it looks like the wind could carry her away at any moment.

Also i still want to work on the face and the clothing style.