I've revised the sneak cycle line test drawings to include a backwards lean at the start - before the step. I also added the second stride i.e.the right leg movement (for the first test I just repeated the left leg movement before committing to the right leg drawings)

 

 

I'm happy enough with the drawings now so next I'm going to trace over them in a darker colour, either black crayon or pencil.

We've been given two more briefs from Barry since the last post, a sneak cycle and a skip cycle. So far I've only done the first line test on each one to check the movement.

 

First line test for the sneak cycle.

I've only done one step so far as it's enough for me for now. If you don't look to closely it seems to be a continuous walk. Anyway I'm not happy with the backwards lean at the start of the step so it's just as well I hadn't done too many drawings. In fact there's only six drawings so far, changing every four frames. These are the main key poses. To be honest I spent ages trying to figure this one out. Barry did give us reference drawings but after several attempts I couldn't get the figure to move the way that I wanted. In the end I had to film myself doing a sneaky walk (not for the first time). I then imported the footage onto Premier Pro and I was then able to break down the 3 key frames. I then sketched these out and added 3 breakdown drawings. This made up the six drawings in the line test so I might get away with five tween drawings - to give the movement a better flow.Once I'm happy with the movement I'll add the opposite stride and tweens.

 

 

First line test for the skip cycle

 

I was lucky enough to have access to a lightbox this week during the class with Barry and so I got the ten drawings used for the linetest done. I didn't get the chance to test them in the class though due to the queue for the line tester, so I photographed the drawings and imported them into Premier Pro to test them. I think they might need a bit of reworking, especially the arms, but the overall gesture isn't too bad.

 

I've been working on Barry's latest brief this week. I think we've all realised how important it is to keep on top of the traditional work 'cos when it piles up it can seem a bit overwhelming. So the latest brief is a run cycle. Any character can be used, i.e. realistic or cartoon, but preferably one that we make up ourselves. There are only eight drawings required for this cycle so I was expecting to get it done easily enough. As it turned out it took a long time, mainly trying to keep a consistent scale to the character, as we had been already given the key poses.

 

As in the previous briefs for Barry, I drew in red crayon first with the intention of going over it in blue pencil, and finally finishing the lines in black. The first line test showed that my first four drawings were too faint, which resulted in a kind of blurry appearance. I also noticed something strange going on with the head.

 

 

I ran a second test using drawings five up to eight and repeated - to make up the cycle -  just to check the overall movement. It now became obvious that the head was wrong which meant I had to study the drawings and correct this.

 

 

It turned out that I had three different head key poses where there should only be two opposite ones and two in-betweens in every cycle of four. I had noticed that drawings five up to eight were copies of one to four, with the limbs on altering sides of the torso. With the head corrected I've gone over the lines with a blue crayon and am happy with the result. I want to add clothes next - maybe I'll make this character a woman so I can add extra movement through a dress and long hair.

Our finished animation of 'The Deserted Village'. We didn't exactly stick to the storyboard or animatic, due to a lack of time, but we all agreed that it still portrays the transformation depicted in the two stanzas we were animating.

 

On a final note, for this brief, I've eventually got round to finishing the rubber cast model of the stone wall effect.

 

 

There's still e few millimetres to be added but I've ran out of patience as the latex takes so long to set, so I decided to take off the mould anyway. 

 

Loosening the screws at two of the corners meant the timber sides could be separated

 

 

The edges had to be separated from the wood with a blade but it didn't do any harm

 

The next step was to separate the rubber from the plaster

 

I thought this might prove tricky due to all the irregular shapes and crevices

 

Luckily the vegetable oil I'd sprayed on as a release agent worked well

 

It actually turned out well, I even found it could be wrapped around a cylinder to replicate a curved wall. Maybe I'll make a miniature round tower. I think that I now need to investigate mixing a hardening agent with the liquid latex to speed up the curing process. It would be useful to build up a stockpile of these from the mould so that next time I need several together I won't need to wait ages for each one to set. Still it was a good result and worth the trouble to do.

 

 

Recent Traditional Animation work carried out this semester for Barry.

 

The first clip involved lip-synching a character to a given sound file

 

 

Again we were given a sound file and had to create a character and lip-synch to the voice

 

 

This clip included a head turn

 

 

This clip included some arm movement along with the lip-synch and was created using full animation, as opposed to separate mouth drawings.

 

 

This clip involved animating a bouncing ball and an explosion to the sound file.

All the sound files were analysed in Adobe Audition and the corresponding actions were added to an exposure sheet before drawing began.

 

 

Again I created my own character for brief no.5. My original voice clip was by Jack Nicholson from the film 'The Shining' but the background music was overpowering the talking. I then found the same line used in another film 'Hide and Seek', which was spoken by a young girl. This gave me the opportunity to animate a girl character, which I've never done before, and you can see that I added a little twist at the end.

 

Some of the contextual research that I did for the deserted village brief, along with some characters that we didn't get time to include

This research was to gain an insight into the style of clothing worn at the time - for our characters. I also tried to get an idea of what the inside of a tavern/pub would have looked like.

 

The top character was to be the old man laughing. As I didn't have a background to work with I imagined him leaning against the bar counter. I also animated him laughing, i.e. shaking head and shoulders. The other characters are the people mentioned in the second verse, and a couple of onlookers. They're actually saved to transparent backgrounds in their original form, I just added a dark background for here to make them more visible. They are supposed to be ghosts of the former customers and I made the heads and arms on separate layers so they could be animated.

 

 

The old man laughing was animated on a transparent background so the clip could be imported into effects at post production stage.

 

How one of the ghostly characters might have looked on set. This was to be the barman standing behind the bar. The set would have been dimly lit for this shot which would add to the haunting atmosphere. When I get some spare time I think I'll try adding these characters to the final footage to see how they would've looked against the finished lighting.

 

One 'trick' I wanted to try out was to create the effect of a real fire in the hearth by using actual flames footage that I'd captured on my mobile phone. After making a cavity in the chimney to conceal the phone we played the video of the flames. It worked fairly well but when we were filming the lighting proved too bright and the flickering light from the flames was lost.