MAF

I enjoyed the event because I connected to a person I’d met online who I met face to face at this festival. We discussed his independent animation company -  In Lucid Reverie

https://inlucidreverie.deviantart.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/ReverieStuff

We spoke about the challenges he faced being a freelance animator.

We discussed collaborating on future projects, we keep in touch online.

I watched The Breadwinner – fell in love with the film, beautiful style.

The story was well driven and grabs the viewer, immersing, and emotional.

The Breadwinner Directed by Nora Twomey, tells the story of Parvana, an 11-year-old girl growing up under the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. When her father is wrongfully arrested, Parvana disguises herself as a boy in order to support her family.

Mark Mulley – gave the masterclass on The Breadwinner, which discussed work behind the scenes. The process was amazing to see and has expanded my knowledge on approach and software such as TVPaint. 

Cartoon Saloon – I’d like to work with this company who create 2d animation. I went on to watch other films by them (Song of the Sea)

Links to check out:

http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/

http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/our-work/

http://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/podcasts/

  

Blue Zoo – Masterclass

UK animation studio, independent, focused on 3D animations, children’s shows and commercial work.

I learned how they successfully market and create their work based on the clients’ needs – being more aware of the whole process. The masterclass gave me insights into job ideas and how to approach different clients and attract them to what you have to offer.

There were so many films and events I went to during the 3 days which I could talk about but it will most likely fill more than 1000 words of my blog alone, overall the experience was amazing and I look forward to attending next year.

Webapp idea and design

I thought I would talk about this webapp I'm creating with a few friends who have a lot of knowledge in terms of coding. The purpose of this project was to make a webapp inspired by google keep but to work in a preferred writing structure I use. I started this project with a simple design which I could easily design using html and css, instead of writing it in the pre-set format I used my preferred languages which are Jade and Sass, both compile the code I write, into html and css.

Here is the design I created:

I drew the layout, heavily inspired by an application called Discord which is a popular service mostly among Gamers, which is its target audience. Aside from the gamers, there are loads of people who use it as a general chat service or in my case, an artist social media platform because of all the functionalities embedded into the application. The layout is not the only aspect that has inspired me from this application, i found functions such as the find section and chat server icons a very interesting function to include in the webapp I want to create. I've looked at how they developed Discord and found out that it is a webapp, designed the way I plan to go about making my webapp.

I could go into detail as to how it functions but that would make this blog to long, although I do want to continue blogging about this project as it is personal to me and is a practice in coding and animation, I'm planning on learning how to animate using code as I really like the turnout of most webapp animations.

I also wanted to create an animated representation of the login screen which I animated on animate cc. But I don't think I will be including it in the application as it does not need it, but here is the animation.

As you can see in the above animation, I would have loved to include this in the design of the webapp but it's not needed for the webapp, even though I would have liked to learn how to translate it into code. but I guess I'll learn by including it in the designs through functions in the webapp, for example when something is clicked on such as a settings button, it will open a window up in the app of settings, done by creating the effect of fade in and slide up.

update 20/04/17

here are a few screenshots of the webapp:

and here is a live view of the webapp:

I've learned a lot in the process of creating this webapp and I hope to progress creating it and learning more about how to animate objects in the app. here is a link to the Github page I made for it https://github.com/bashpro/Notebook-webapp

Fanart Dva (overwatch) WIP

I started this drawing on February 11th which was close to the end of the games current event where we received new skins for the character, one character I've been desperately for to get a skin was Dva, so I decided to draw a fanart of her new skin, plus I have been wanting to draw her for a while. So I present the process I've done so far which in total has taken over 2 months to even be close to finishing.

Rough li

I felt as if the drawing needed a bit extra so I decided to add her mech in the example below: 

Drawing the mech was difficult so I started with the basic shapes I could see,

starting to add more as I'm doing other work,

 The mech is roughly drawn and needs a cleanup,

Clean up and base colours were added,

Rough background,

Background lined and slightly finished colouring,

Added shading, lighting and highlights on the mech and Dva.

And so this is as far as I have gotten for this drawing, I've probablly spent around 16 hours creating this, and yet it is still not done as I've got to sort out the backgrounds which I hope to finish after deadlines. but I've learned a lot throughout colouring this peice, I've never drawn a mech and coloured it in so that was an experince I wont forget!

I've been posting these screen shots on some discord servers, and Alymew absoulutly cant wait to see the final drawing as she also wants to promote this drawing on her youtube channel. she also mentioned the other day that she would love to do some voice acting for future animations and she provided me with  voice acting showreel she created which is super awesome.

Artist influence: Nik

I recently came across a background artist who was streaming on Picarto (art website streaming service ) under the name of Nik, he's from Singapore and mainly draws landscapes of Japan, as we can see in the example below:

What I mostly love about his work is the composition and colouring, each background he's created feels as if it's from real life experience with his own interpretation of colours used. In particular in the example above there is a mixture of red, orange, purple, blue, grey, green, yellow and brown. which are all not fully saturated to blend together and to act as a natural palette.

Here is another example of why I love his colouring:

As you can see, it's all the same environment with different atmospheres, each one gives a great understanding of how the background would look like in different settings which is very difficult to achieve. I hope to be able to create an environment that I could recreate different settings for, just to understand what it would feel like, this is not only good for gaining an understanding of what something would look like but also an understanding of how lighting/colours plays with the environment.

life's a pitch presentation

Life's a Pitch

We were briefed on what we had to do for life's a pitch, (tldr) this involved joining a collective made by us and having an idea to showcase/presents a pitch for what we would like to like to do as a team.

We all started to join different teams and I happened to join Tess's collective, her collective team members are Vlad, Luke, Brenda and Alex. As I joined we got straight into thinking about ideas for our group, we all ended up agreeing on making an Artbook which represents us all as a group of artist/animators who work in different styles for the clients needs. with a variety of styles, we can all provide our skills to produce work together.

We then researched into how artbooks are firstly made and what layout attracts the audience, I gave some advice to Tess and Brenda as they were looking at layouts, and it seems they took it on board when creating mock up layouts. Tess found a website where we can print out our artbook, she asked us what size we should print at and we all agreed on "A5 landscape".

Tess asked us all to put our drawings into the drive that was just recently made and to select from best work and sketching drawings, here is what I presented to them:

And then each one of us made a small mock up of the layout and presented it through our pitching. We hope to develop this into an actual artbook as it is not that expensive to pint out A5 landscape books from vistaprint and it's an effective way to advertise all our works, which we hope to present at the art exhibition at Leeds collage of Art and possibly Studio 24.

Moana

There are three aspects of this Moana that I'd love to talk about. The composition, story, and colour within the animation.

Each scene follows rule of thirds throughout the film and is why it works really well in informing the story, being able to place everything correctly in a composition is important to help the viewer understand what's happening, but this generation audience already understand how it works unconsciously, but as you can see Moana is positioned to the right clearly talking to someone who is on the right being Maui. I hope to take these aspects and apply the way they compose each shot.

The story is nicely written, by that we are introduced to a Demi-god who took something which caused a problem to occur in the world. then we are met with the main protagonist being Moana who is growing up on an island where everything is fine until one day this utopia they were living in falls apart and she is led by her grandma to go out and find the Demi-god who caused this problem to go fix it. From this description, it's the basic storytelling of a problem happening in the story and needs to be fixed.

Along the way we learn and experience how each character develops which is to teach children and is nicely done, the aspects came across clearly. I would like to create a story like this in future projects but of course not as long as this film unless I have a big team helping me out. but overall I don't have a problem with the story.

The colour palette works so well in this film, from the blue skies and seas to the green landscapes everything fits perfectly together, there are colours that people don't even notice such as the purple shadows which I've experienced through drawing, it's my favourite colour for shading. Overall each scene is blended in beautifully. and I would consider using some of the colours from this film and include it in future animations, here's an example of my favourite shot:

Animator visit: Reg Isaac

Reg Isaac came in to give a talk on how he got into the industry, within only 3 years on big productions such as Simon's cat as an effect animator. but he mainly specialises on character animation as he explained throughout his talk, so he explained how he was at university doing a degree in animation, where he developed his art (mostly in anatomy) and observational skills throughout the course. he's so good at understanding the weight of movement in his animations, He mentioned that the process took a while and that everything takes time to create.

He showed so many animations with the process behind them which was awesome as we learned the steps he takes in order to complete an animation within a set time, such as helping on Raddish Pictures film doing all the 2D animation which is amazing for such a young animator. Throughout his talk, he basically explained the approach he took to get to his final destination of each project, such as always using references and creating your own reference to either help with understanding how movement works or to help rotoscope and finish animations quickly.

I've learned so much about the process and how important it is to get better at observational drawings as he explained, when it was summer he went camping around just constantly drawing using different mediums just to get a feel of how they work and to get quicker at drawing which is what I'd like to do.

Fanart for youtuber

I was watching one of my favourite YouTubers and found out that they had a discord server which I joined, I started communicating with everyone on there including the Youtuber herself and decided to create a fanart for her dressed up as her favourite character from a game called Overwatch, here is the process of creating the drawing:

It took me 2 days to complete this for her and this is the response I get:

I'm so glad I made it, not only did I become friends with her after that I learned a lot in the process, in terms of colouring, I looked at a lot of references to help me, I've never drawn a metal material before and managed to on the wings, that I'm proud of.

This is her twitter banner and thumbnails for youtube of my artwork, she's been trying to promote my work as much as possible, which I'm grateful for and am considering making more art for her to promote essentially providing my art for her thumbnails.

I've gained a lot of people thanks to her <3

Hyun's dojo Studio interview (creative presence)

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Animator visit: Fraiser Mclean

Fraiser Mclean came in to give a talk about he got into the industry and managed to be the main animator of many live action animations such as Roger rabbit, Space Jam and Ducktails the movie. which I grew up with not knowing who animated the characters of each of these films when he mentioned how he got the job I was amazed.

He explained his experience in life showcasing the difficulties he had to go through, one of his experiences involves his artwork from a young age. He entered a course for fine art and was able to create drawings that should deserve awards at his age and time, but unfortunately, this was not what his teacher wanted to see and being told over and over that his work was not up to par gave him the motivation to do better and study how to improve his observational skills which he presented through the presentation.

As he got better he wanted to apply for an art job, and found the job of an inbetweener and signed up for it, he got accepted and was assigned to work with another guy to make the inbetweens of a scene. He said that they both spent a week not understanding what they had to do, that he'd look at the sheet of paper and just left it. after the first week, one of the AD's came to check up on them and found them with nothing, and because of this had to teach them how to do their job.

As he eventually learned how to create the inbetweens and eventually this lead to him being able to work on many films which I've mentioned above. He also explained the process of how he did live action animations, and how difficult it was back then compared to now because of the advancements of technology.

one example is Tarzan where he had to animate Tarzan riding down the tree within a 3D space, back then the 3D software was terrible and was still being created. it took them a long time to construct a scene but they had ways of going about it to slightly increase the process by directly colouring the 3D objects which I can't really explain but understood from what he was talking about.

Another example is the live action mixed with animation in Roger Rabbit and Space Jam, the process was as difficult as the example above about Tarzan because they had to animate on top of the recorded footage and be able to keep it smooth by this I mean that the characters were all animated in 2D and had a bit CG effects to make it stand out and feel apart of the scene. which really seems like a difficult task back then compared to what we can do nowadays.

Study Task 3 - Animation Studio Research

I researched Hyun's dojo studio for this task, as I'm a member of the community at hyun's dojo i already have a lot of information about this studio and how it was formed, since i registered on the release of the website.

From looking at the research I've done, the events that occurred had happened as I'm experiencing them. This can't really be called research unless it's about the animators themselves, as I get to communicate with them through an application called discord; initially for gamers but many art communities also use it. I've been able to get in contact and talk to Hyun, Jomm, Terkoiz, Miccool and Ehlboy and have learned about the history of their journey from how they started with animation to how they got together and worked as a team creating animation from commissioners.

My presentation covers mostly how the dojo came about but did not mention events such as the livestream events on a production of the website and various amounts of events that occurred such as many old school pro's helping the preparation such as a user called stone who owned the stickpage and FA (fluidanims) websites. we can call him the father of bringing the community together as there was not a place to post "stick animations" besides websites like "NewGrounds and Youtube".

On the day of presenting my studio research, I forgot to mention a few points but i think i did well. I could have improved on points i should have explained using notes or flash cards as i was presenting from my memory which tends to make me stutter or repeat myself, Research was a bit limited because i didn't include any slides of timelines which could have helped explained how they came about. watching everyone's presentation informed me that i haven't presented everything about the studio and i should think about the points i need to present to the audience to make it clear as to what im presenting and is informative.

From the explanation above, there's a lot of work that i need to improve from such as my presenting skills using flash cards and learning how to create an informative presentation which is clear to the audience, plus improvement on being confident when presenting.

studio task 2 SWOT

Within this session we were asked to fill in these SWOT analysis forms which was given out to us, this form basically showcases our current strengths, weeknesses, opportunities and threats that correlate to our personal, interpersonal, technical and artistic skills that we have learned over the years. Filling the form i could see that I am not so great with a few weaknesses, such as time mangement and planning for my skill set but compared to strengths i have, it is balanced out. With this in mind i would like to make my weaknesses my strenghts, to do that i will have to organise everything i get tasked to do and just finish it and move on to the next task. Its Great that i have many opportunities to be able to work on group projects within a community online, i also get the chance to work on student competitions that will help develop my animation skills which also gets my nae out there for potential commissioners/clients in the future.

Im glad that for my technical skills, i only have a tiny weakness which i could probably turn into a strenght is the lack of using 3D software, the best way to overcome this is by going to youtube and looking up some tutorials on how 3D works. Besides all that here is the form i filled out:

We then moved on to the next SWOT form where we had to write about anothers persons progress, in my case i worked with Grace on this and we started discussing about our skills and what we can do to improve our weaknesses which is pretty much the same task, and heres the form i filled out for grace:

What ive learned from this is that i really need to work on my weaknesses and make them strengths so that i will be able to sort out my time mangement and then be able to plan what i need to do next, I will start by making time tables and try to stick to these time tables!

Artist influence: Lpip

One of my all time favourite artist goes by the username Lpip, she is well known on a website I visit showcasing professionals, this website specifically focuses on Japanese styles of drawing, mainly manga. It's called Pixiv.net.

What I love in particular is how her style is different from many artists, even if it has the base of being a manga it still portrays a unique feeling. but besides it being unique, I love the anatomy and have tried to analyse it as my as I could through drawing guidelines over her drawings.

From the guides, I've tried to really get an understanding as to how she forms the body, and I'm hoping that I will one day be able to draw similar in my own unique style. I not only like her anatomy but her simple choice of colouring is, here is an example of one of her drawings I really get inspired by:

The colours feel so soft as they blend in all together, it almost looks like it was painted with a limited colour palette. I hope to use her influence in my artwork as I progress,