Life Drawing.

20 Minutes.

5 minutes.

2x 5 minutes.

4x 2 minutes.

5x 1 minute.

5x 1 minute (left hand i.e. not your dominant hand)

5x 1 minute.

10 minutes.

The Jean Beanie

Here he is, The Jean Beanie. I've drawn this in Flash. Hopefully (I think I remember Andy saying it was) I can use the model in Toon Boom or TVA. Anyway I'm pretty proud of him. That's a whole summers thinking right there.

Also my Experimental project is well on the way. I bought 2000 post-it notes for £5 the other day so now I've gotta get drawing. I only need 1400 so I can make a few errors.

First step is drawing the post-it animation and getting that to work. Then it's on to phase 2 of my mighty plan. I'm giving myself 2-3 weeks for this. So I have to draw about 200 post-its a day. It sounds like a lot but they're only little things and you can hold them in your hand and do it anywhere.

I'm hoping I can use the Jean Beanie for the 11 second club thing in November which is why I thought I'd get him out of the way now. I'll try animating him later or tomorrow and put that up too.

Emotional State

Here's my emotional state changing video. The Brief was to animate a sequence where a character changes from one emotional state to another. This will probably get feedback along the lines of not expressive enough or not enough gesture. But I kind of hope this is a little more subtle I just wanted to try something a bit different. I think it works. Could probably be slower I guess or better drawn in some places. In my defence though Flash crashes a lot and that kind of wares your patience down. But hey I might have another stab tomorrow morning but at the minute I'm pretty happy with it and I think it gets across the nervous to adrenaline rush okay.

Experry MENTAL

The next page in the epic struggle between Manbotroboman and Shade and the Witch.

I did this for the house and if anyone wants it it's going for a million squids. Nah only kidding It's not for sale because it's so...good? Well it's okay. Better than looking at a blank wall right?

This is Peter.

And my map of things to come. The little squares are post-it notes. I'm en-visioning a round robbin of the post-it notes so that they're all moving.

I've had an idea. Unfortunately another group had the same idea. So I had another idea on top of that and whilst I was thinking of that Idea I had an Idea that stemmed from that Idea so I combined those two Ideas. Make sense? Good.

So my first idea involved photographing the sky approximately 30 times a day, or 5 times every 30 minutes for as long as I remembered. And then do something with seagulls on a moving sky. Sort of like a speeded up nature thing.

My second Idea involved drawing on post-it notes from remembering something I saw ages ago (It's a short film that's called Escape from Post-it Land but unfortunately it's not on you tube or anything)

Then whilst looking at that French animation (see older posts) and listening to the Vivaldi piece, I had a few other noggles (that's an "ohhh what If I do this..."). Anyway I did a bit of research on our pal Vivaldi and turns out he started off a renound wealthy composer and died a pauper after the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI of Austria. This is pretty much because Charles was Viv's number one fan and commissions from the King of the Habsburg Emperor certainly help pay the bills. Anyway point is the Habsburg Coat of Arms (Charles V Coat of Arms) is pretty neato to me. I was particularly drawn to the double headed Eagle which is a symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. Eagles were also a popular image of Napoleon France for anybody who cares to know. Annnnd combining that with my French Animation discovery that features that big black Raven/Unknown Bird I have arrived at my sketchy Double Headed spooky morphing bird.

I don't know what to call it really from a species point of view, so for this exercise I shall call it Peter.

So the grand plan is; To combine all of these things...

Basically Peter is on the post-it notes. He dances/flies/moves to the music behind a pixilation puppet (me or some "volunteer") who is pretty much clad in black but is recognizable as a composer. He slowly degrades and moves and responds to Peter's movements.

This is best explained by a picture. (up top of this post)

I want to explore light as well so I'm going to have to do this at night and I'm either going to use spot lights or tea candles.

So the experimental techniques I am using will be, Pixilation and slight silhouette animation and well I was going to put clay/plasticine in there somewhere because the composers face shall be melting, by using a mask with clay/plasticine running down it.

So there will be a lot going on and I probably haven't explained it greatly but It will all make sense once it starts coming together, it's a little easier to explain visually this idea.

Dear Alphabet - Marina Budovsky (CalArts)

Yellow Sticky Notes

DEADLINE post-it stop motion

Found this. Gave me Ideas. It was a suggestion from something my mummy showed me a while ago by this Canadian guy (see above post)

Anyway having more ideas for the experimental project. I've decided to go with the Vivaldi piece.

Walk and Lift

So here's a walk and lift.Lift is late (as in deadline) so very sorry about that, but it's there and at the wrong angle. Well not the wrong angle just a difficult one. I think he also doesn't stretch enough when he lifts the box up, but that can be amended with a couple of frames I think.

The plan with the walk was to make him walk across the screen but It's only a 6 drawing cycle and I looked at it and I would have had to draw those 6 frames about 12 times and....in a nutshell I didn't.

I think I got his stomach bounce quite good and the legs but the arms aren't great and it's a still a little fast for what I was going for but it's a walk nonetheless.

I might try using Toon Boom or TVP for the lip sync task for next week. Mostly because it'd be good to try it out and its probably a little easier to do that on the computer than draw it by hand.

En Francais

Just saw this whilst searching for something completely different but a nice stumble nonetheless. I really enjoyed it.

I'm not sure how to post it on the blog so just click here.

Summer's over.

Should have posted this first maybe but....we like mixing it up here at paddymeharg.blogspot!

Basically I know I said I was going to animate about 3 minutes of American Football but frankly it's very hard and this may turn out to be a life long thing. It took me a month to get Tony Romo here to throw the ball. I'll shoot it properly on Monday because the stuff I have at home isn't playing ball (no pun intended...well maybe a little bit) and is playing it really slowly. Anyway here's some finished panels from my comic book / graphic novel which is really fun to draw. And as a quick reminder to anybody reading this who may be marking my degree, it's supposed to help me with my storyboarding and story telling.

And the story, in a nutshell, is about A Human who think's he's a Robot (idea first came from the Futurama Episode "The Cyberhouse Rules". It's told from the Human perspective where he fights an evil Witch and tries to rescue a pretty woman, and from the Robot perspective where he dons a cape and fights crime.

In the Human world he ploughs the Wicked Witch's fields and he gets along fine until she kills his Cow (and best friend) Daisy after he takes a break. From then on he swears a vendetta against her and vows to rescue the damsel locked in her tower.

In the Robot world he meets Shade who is some sort of experiment or apparition gone wrong, anyway he corrupts our innocent young hero into "dipping his hand into the cookie jar" once in a while, so in other words when he stops a bank robbery he pockets a few notes. Obviously this kind of thing attracts the attention of the "suits" who pursue him and label him a vigilante. This all spirals out of control until the Robot is eventually killing people.

Anyway eventually the two worlds collide and it becomes apparent that the Witch and Shade are the same thing. It ends revealing that he is a Robot who thinks it is Human and that 'Shade' is a virus and the finale is the Robot fighting Shade in a big battle of virusy doom.

The story may be a bit cliche or deja vu but I'm hoping to tell it in a different way. I'm going with the Quentin Tarrentino philosophy of 'It's the same story you've seen a thousand times just told in a completely different way'

It's what I'm aiming for anyway.

And the Jean-Beanie, well he came from my other summer task that Kathy gave me which was to try and create more cartoony and animate-able characters but starting with simple shapes like Beans. So I did that, but as I did more and more I sort of stuck with it and am on the brink of creating a whole new brand of characters based around Beans, Fruit and Vegetables.

Let it be known that the only beans I actually like to eat are kidney beans. I'm not some kind of 'Bean-Freak-Obsessive' . Although to all you BFO's out there, I don't mean any offence towards your healthy love affair with beans.

I'm hoping the Jean-Beanie will be able to make a relevant appearance this term. I've worked quite a bit on him to try and make him a good character but it's still a work in progress. One book that was very helpful to me was Animation 1. It's in the campus library and it's not hard to find because the Animation section is only about 2 shelves, and it's a big thin book by a character designer from Warner Bros. I think it was. It teaches you basic head, body, hand, feet construction and how to build and construct all types of characters. And if you can't find it it's because I've probably taken it out.

Anyway that's all for now. If you want to know how my film for the BBC is coming along (I'm not commissioned for it I'm just going to send it to them relentlessly until they accept it) well I've written the opening and am fairly happy with it. I shan't run down the plot as I fear this blog is too long already but very briefly; Agoraphobic Teen is assigned to look after an ex-commando pensioner for Community Service. It's about opposites attracting, personality clashes and conquering fears. It also focuses a bit on how the Mother deals with it all.

Why Agoraphobia? Well I'm Claustrophobic and I find the opposite quite interesting.

Also, anybody seen the Film '9'? (Elijah Wood does one of the voices and Tim Burton helped produced for anyone who's a Tim Burton nut) It looks really good. It looks more serious than say a Pixar family film.

Enough chat! I'm hungry.

New Term, New Era...THE JEAN BEANIE ERA!

So just who IS this Jean Beanie? This Martyr? This saviour of pretty women? This do-er of good? This vanquisher of evil and humble hero of the streets?

Well he's just a baked bean. Did I say JUST a baked bean? I'm sorry, I meant that he is the Bean to save all Beans. This bean is not afraid of fork or spoon. He fights knives for fun! No this bean has bigger ideas, bigger dreams, higher aspirations! This Bean, the Jean-Beanie is going to take on the Humans themselves!

At least that's the dream. Right now he's just lifting a box up and down.

Pretty neat huh?

That's just the key frames. I've done two thirds of the inbetweens. But I won't really know how it looks until Monday morning. Hopefully I've nailed it, but in reality I've probably forgotten something vital, like drawing the box.

Oh and I haven't drawn his face because I figured it would be kind of easy to get away with facial expressions and gritting teeth and beads of sweat and closed eyes, so I've decided not to take any short cuts. Not to say that doing all that is a bad thing, I'm just trying to force myself to animate it properly before I add all that stuff in. Walk before you can run, at least for me.