Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Ident thumbnails

Graffiti by BLU.







These are just very rough moving thumbnails.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Listen to the wise man, the Walrus said.

That's just something my art teacher used to say when he had an idea. Amazing.
Anyhow,
I've had an idea or two that's been made from my thinky box between my lugholes. FIRSTLY!

The Virgin tv Ident. I've had several ideas. A lot of them involve a dragon with no tail.

This one idea just came to me, I woke up inexplicably at 4.32am on a saturday night, sat up and thought to myself...Ohhh I know I'll do this....wrote it down and went back to slumber. How odd is that? The Idea issss.....A wall painting animation. I've been playing around with this idea of a dinysaw (dinosaur, I CAN spell I just don't want to) or creature, coming over the hill, thud thud thud go the hills, and then he lobs the red room at the viewer. And that's it. It's an average idea. But it'd be better if I did it like Blu.

http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

The most difficult thing will be finding a wall that someone will let me paint on. Because I'm not up for building my own wall.

The second is an idea of a sparrow I got whilst playig the guitar and thinking what to do next in Fallout 3, but the idea actually came from the intro movie on Fable II.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q-HEuRIlbA

For the Storyboard.

I chose the pirates one. I shall say this simply now and forget about it, but this is probably the worst script I have ever read. Except for the other two that we could've chosen from. No matter.
Instead of just pirates I have ""been inspired"" by Futurama on this one. Robotpirates. Where the pirate playing the pipe IS a pipe, and the pirate playing the accordian IS an accordian. There's Cabinbot (a cabin boy) Cookbot (The cook) and others. I thought it'd be more fun this way. Also I can take the piss out of the stereotypical pirate that they've written about in the script. Yarr me hearties and all that nonsense. What I want to know is why Pirates are always Irish? They always say, so they did or so they do after everything which everyone knows is what Belfastians say. Like my dear old Dad. Anyway I shan't get into a history lesson or this shall turn into a rant.

Flash Lip Sync


For this I have had many ideas but have settled on a zombie and a worm for the caricatures. Other ideas included 2 doors, a book and a pencil, and a jazzman. In the section of the soundtrack that I've chosen, the girl alice is describing how you absorb stuff from books by breathing in and breathing out. And I don't know but the idea of a worm inflating itself and deflating itself talking to a zombie on how to use books for research amused my greatly so I'm going with that;

M: I, I'm really traditional like my... mine is that you do the research and you read and you read and you read until it's in your
head and then you can confidently know what you are talking about so then you can just kind of write stream of consciousness and then you can go back and work over it and support everything and say this came from here, you know and you've got all your quotes anyway, quotations, like have a little book of quotations with all your references so you don't lose them, you know I'm quite... I do it that way... [laugh]
A: One of the tutors said you suck it in and spit it out..

M: Yeah [laugh]

A: so you suck in... she was like sssssshhhh whhhhhoo [sucking/blowing sound] just you read everything and then you just go with
what you know, what you've learnt.

It'll be a bit creature comforts-ish.
For the CGI environments, well I'm sort of in denial about that one because it's going to be epically difficult. I am going to do the most simplist thing I can think of, like a corner of our kitchen because then there will be less to go wrongded.

Anyway that's all I got, thought Id just update this so everybody knows that I am actually having some ideas. This is supposed to be a brain journal after all I guess.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

As I was saying earlier.

Wednesday, wohoo free day. Why am I paying all this money for a free day...don't know, don't mind either. Mum if you're reading please don't call and nag me about missing something because I really haven't mmkay :-)

ANYWAY.

If anybody...is actually reading this, and into blues then listen to seasick steve. It's as you people say 'the s**t'.

On to buisness. Them thar drawings. I've been a bit of a blog perv and snooped around everyones (literally, I didn't miss anyones) blogs to see what everyone did for the background thing. Hugely dissapointed because most of you haven't actually uploaded anything. Although on the one hand it's kind of good because It means I don't have to get depressed over the superior work everybody did, but on the other I'd kind of liked to see what you all did. Nevermind.
Again if anybody is reading this, and if they're not I don't care anyway...well I do, a little bit. But, my favourite was Sians water blue thingy (http://blogologgie.blogspot.com/), because mainly I have no idea how it was done and I love the colour and sort of lack of classical composition. So I give it 4 thumbs up (out of 5) and my own personal Horray!!

Now to my own stuff,
The buildings one I nicked from Bernard Buffet, I actually just cobbled a load of london buildings I could remember off the top of my head and stuck them together, you might notice that the gerkin is on the left and st.pauls is on the right, well, a bit of its dome is. But I copied the straight black lines hopefully to give it a bit of an imposing and strong feel, it's not great but I think it looks quite solid.

The er, well it's supposed to be the inside of a spaceship (see earlier blogs, stolen from Halo partially) with the sun(s) glaring into it. I got that idea from the film Pitch Black where there is just that blinding light. I think I nailed the light bit, I have no idea if the shadows are correct but I don't really mind that they aren't I was going for affect. Artistic license gets you into every club. My interior is a bit dodgey can't really tell whats what, but I like it like that. Sometimes lack of clarity works, I'll let you decide if it has.

BLUE. I like blue. I worked for ages on this, over and over layers and layers. But that was the plan. I did drips, I did crayons (or art-wax-colour-sticks if you want to be grownup...pfft.) I did watercolour/wax resist, marker pen, normal pen, almost-run-out-of-ink pen, pencil, graphite, rubber, felt tip, brush tip, glue, spit, I even talked aggressivley at it. There would have been blood on it if my blood was blue. I think it looks quite cold, which is nice, it's supposed to be snow, and snow is blue no matter what anyone tells you, it just is. Take a look at a photo of snow and look real carefully. I think the mountains in the far distance are quite succseful. I tried to add a little detail into the abstracness to give a bit of something to look at. To me though the farthest plane isn't perhaps as deep as I want it to be. And by that I mean the mountains look too close.

I think I'd give myself a B in school grades.
If you want an excuse then I could argue I was busy with that godawful essay. But honestly I spent more time on this. Next time I shall do something more fantastical and splendid that really might take your breathe away, so look out asthmatics I'm going to try and draw something wonderful....

Monday, February 8, 2010

Animation Backgrounds (final)

I'll do a response later, but I'm a bit tired right now and overjoyed at the Saints beating the Colts. Woot.






The three below are the ones I actually submitted for marking. All of the above are just me mucking about with camera settings like exposure and light settings and such.






Thursday, February 4, 2010

few more things.









General thoughts; Concerning the essay assignment this week, I went to the library which is huge and has a million trillion books etc, the books relating to animation are about...3 in number. Which makes it hard to write about animation because a lot of the books I've been using have been written about live action film and cinema and then had to try and apply that to animation. Surely there is a niche here in which someone can make their fortune writing theory on animation.

Anyway heres some more stuff I've drawn the past couple of days for the backgrounds thing. Which by the way, should be great in CGI because you can just choose to listen to physics or not. Personally I might choose to ignore it, just because I can. I also like the fact that somewhere a science teacher will be really annoyed that the light i've created isn't what would really happen.

And yes one of the drawings has dead bodies hanging from trees, before you sent me off to a shrink, I just thought that road looked a bit like one the Romans would use to make an example of slaves.