drawings and paintings done last year that I shall attempt to re-discover

End of term.

Well I've just been thinking. Why everything I did this term was a load of fart.

I think what happened was, I tried to be like everyone else then make it different. Rather than just being me. Because I was thinking what I like and what I'm good at. Which is, painting, colour, expression and boldness (as in strong images not being brave). And then what I don't like and what I'm not good at, which is cartoon images, human figures, game concept rip offs.

And when I look at everything I've done, save for the storyboard and background. It's all what I'm not good at and don't really like. And I'm not sure why I've done that. It might be because I feel I have to. Or that I started looking at it and got absorbed by it and tried to copy things I wasn't really good at copying.
Whatever, the point is I wouldn't do it that way again. So next term I'm going to go back to my roots. And be...well, 'arty'. Because I think I've lost that and that's probably why I've found this term to be a lot more like hard work than fun. I know it's supposed to be hard work, but I mean It felt more like I was doing someone else's style rather than my own and it exhausted my thinking power to the point where all I could think of for that ruddy Ident was a stupid monster hitting a guitar around. And then doing it in Flash. Which I'm sick of now :p.

So I'm not going to do anymore cartoons. Or David Firth esq stuff. It'll just be me next term.

Anyway,
For things that did work. I think my lip sync worked. I mean the actual lip syncing. He actually talked. It was kind of cool. Except in the final showing the sound didn't work. But mine wasn't the only one so thats okay.
The backgrounds was the best for me. The more I look at the 3rd one (blue with trees) the more I hate it though. The way your eye moves on it is all messed up.
My storyboard was fun. The feedback on that was, put stage directions and more clarity as to whats actually going on. That was my fault though. But for both of those the most positive feedback was on the 'painterly style'. And I wish I'd done that for the Ident now. But I neglegted it, for whatever reason. Stupid stupid.
Also my essay got a good mark. I don't mind essays. They're easy if you put up with all the reading.

So yeah. Next term. No more of this Deja Vu generic Animation characters. Just painting. Or stuff similar to painting. That'll be the roots. Actually thinking about that....I might do a masters in painting....that might be quite fun. Anyway. I'm going to shut up for a month now.

Idents pt1.

Out of all the Idents on The TV room I think Channel 4's are definatly my favourite. The problem though with doing something like that (moving buildings etc to make the logo) is it's firstly quite complex, a bit of a rip off, and generally far too much for one student to handel. Also they get about 30 seconds I think, for theirs. This is only 10 seconds.
I also quite like the BBCs new batch of Idents with swimming hippos and stuff.

So when approaching this project I tried to use all these as a starting point, but sort of failed. These all focus on a number really. 5 for Five (duh) 1 for BBC One (again...duh) 4 for Channel 4 and er....V for Virgin...? R for Redroom? It might just have been me, but I couldn't really think of a way to use the Virgin logo (really just the word Virgin underlined) in the way that these other TV channels have used theirs. Because one has that nice pleasing circle shape, the four has lots of geometric angels but a V or an R is a bit...difficult. Especially given my limited grasp of most technologies.

I also tried mimicking the five ident below, with the man drawing himself then the logo. but to be honest that was a bit...boring and predictable. And kind of similar to what they already are using as their idents.

So I decided to go the more E-Sting (E4 idents - 2 examples at the bottom) way and just sort of...wing it.
I took direct ''insperation'' from the Virgin Monster...puppet thing (At the top) that everyone seems to loathe. So instead of copying him I made him a bit more cute. Yeah I've decided to go cute and cuddly for this project instead of wierd. I figured it was more Virgins style. If it was for E4 or Channel 4 it'd be waaaay more bizzare.

So I just started designing him and let my mind wonder for a bit.

Forgive me for the minute my blogs are bit messy, I've uploaded the finish at the start and the start in the middle and the middle isn't here yet. I was planning on doing 3 shortish blogs mainly pictures just saying where I started, what happened then, and where I ended up. It'll all get sorted in the next couple o' days.

Ident. pt2

it's half past four in the morning WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I've nearly finished my Ident. Tomorrow it shall be finis.

Judging by the animatic it shall be about 7 seconds long. Unfortunatly I've just seen a David Firth stop motion animation that I never knew he did, that's with busts and wierd lights. I thought it'd be quite good for an E-Sting. But it's too late to do something like that for the Ident now. http://www.fat-pie.com/clay.htm It's called 'crooked rot'




Okay so this is the middle blog. It's not 4am anymore I'm rewriting this.
Anyway. I'll upload more picture later.

Bassically after having the first idea of Monster drawing door, walking through door, throwing room, drawing room etc etc. I particularly looked at Mutu by the graffiti artist Blu. I tihnk I mentioned this a few weeks ago. I asked the council if I could do some graffiti animation, they still haven't answered but I couldn't find a wall that didn't actually belong to anybody or wasn't in plain view of the whole world so I had to abandon/chicken out of doing that. It probably would've taken weeks and in the meantime other people would've drawn over it and stuff.

I then got sick of the monster idea and went for a strange nazi/gasmask wearing/staff carrying wizard bloke. Based on a character I like to call Gandalf the White meets that scary Nazi Ninja from Hellboy.
The plan was to do a sort of manga style, makes crater in the ground uses funky magic to rise it from a trembling earthquake. But there were several problems to this. I realised I couldn't really draw manga or japanese style anime very succesfully and would need a lot more practice to actually animate it. I got a convincing earthquake tremble (think I've got the video for that - i'll do that later) but as for the beams of light and magic I spent two days trying to get it right and it just wasn't working and I eventually got fed up of this stupid character and it was too much for 10 seconds so I returned to the monster thing.

And two things sprang to mind.
Licking
and smashing a guitar.

Licking was my remembering E4 and being strange idea.
Smashing a guitar was remembering to try and relate it to it being a music site.
I couldn't decided. so I decided to do both.