Experimental Project Production Report

Experimental Project Production Report

For the experimental project this term, myself, Lucy and Corrine teamed up for production. We chose to use the short musical clip ‘Drones and Refrains of Death’ out of the choice of music’s. This clip stood out above the others for the staccato, edgy quality of the music and vocal chants/shouts. We felt we could produce something really unique to coincide with the music.

Our initial idea was to utilise a solid material to create an end result. Our first attempt made use of blue tack sculpted into a figurine model. When this proved slightly more restrictive than we thought, we moved onto use rice on a glass surface to creating shifting shapes and patterns. The rice proved to be a more effective medium to work in, allowing us to produce varied shapes, patterns and other things with relative ease, as well as being easy to work with. The oriental ambience of the sound also went well with the innate association of rice with the orient.

Eventually, however, we decided that rice didn’t quite do justice to the more macabre element of the music. Our decision to move from a solid to a liquid medium was what really made for an effective shift in direction, making use of a not inconsiderable amount of fake theatre blood to create our work surface. Jarring, strange and somewhat morbid images took on a whole new meaning when done in what for all intents and purposes looked like blood on glass.

The equipment used was fairly simple; a camera and a tripod, a glass plate and the materials mentioned above, using stop motion techniques to get the pictures of the various images and their stages. The footage was then edited together and finalised on the computer.
For my part, I helped produce the images in both the rice and blood mediums, along with taking a turn at operating the camera while we cycled roles.

The final result came out very well, in my opinion. Some slightly overt jarring occurred, but through fault of computer and software limitations. The images in fake blood really worked well with the music and its strange rhythm and chants. Images such as the skull and crossbones, bird like creatures and wolves really matched the grim nature of the sound.

New term, New work

Back to Uni and back to work, looking foraward to doing some new and hopefully interesting stuff. And putting out the results worthy of it.

Little bit of refresher animation, a figure picking up a fairly heavy box. Not perfect, I'd probably add in a few more stages if I were to re-do it, particularly at the anticipation stage. Even so, it flows fairly well, and I was quite pleased with how it came out in Photoshop, frame by frame.

Sit-Rep

Just a quick one, with two completed character sheets for The Firm;

Not a Shrubbery

Big dump of concept art for the Animal Firm project, which I simply call 'The Firm', after the main group or protaginists.

From left to right and down;

Firm Overview, Edward Thompson and Edward-Charles Melbourne

Angelina 'Demon' Gerards, Terry 'Terror' Sanderson

Terry 'working' with an 'associate', Finbar O'Conner

Rachel Crosby, Detective Sergeant William Keegan

More to come.

Bring us back...a concept art!

Well, how about three pages?

Basic char design and knocking ideas around;

Defined first character, and front/side poses;

Second character, defined, front and side poses;

Stay tuned, more to follow asap.

Or I shall update you a second time!

New term, three new projects. Let's see, shall we?

Group Animation Project: Looks good. Myself, Stacey, Corrine, Lucy and Joe are tackling this one. We chose to do the 'What' project. The script is very simple; two people saying 'what' a total of five times. We have the character and story idea nearly pat down, and I'll be uploading stuff when it's finished and scanned in.

Animal Firm: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking barrels meets Wind in the Willows? British cops and robbers with an anthro twist? Sign me up for this one, big time. Given a lot of my art (Read; majority of) is anthropomorphic, this is really a case of finding a story that works and making some characters I like. Then it should be plain sailing. Some period or contemporary research will probably go far here.

Experimental sketchbook project: After being initially confused on how to tie this in, I've managed with some help from Cathy to link it into the Animal Firm project, looking at Day to Day items and how they would work in a world where the people were different to humans. E.g. chairs with holes or room for tails, larger chairs for larger body types, hats and helmets with holes for larger ears/horns, etc.

Pictures to come of various work, and more rambling.
-Red

Brain Dump

Animated Map for the Live @ Five news course students;

The lip sync project has been completed succesfully, with a video to be put up here in due time. The Storyboards project has been handed in. The 3D environment has been completed, as well;

The last project is the Ident for Virgin Media's Red Room. Work shoul be finished on that by the end of next week.

Given the deadline is a week today, that's pretty much a given, isn't it?

Artistic Babble

Been a while since the last post. Mostly due to holidays and then getting back into the swing of work.
And, boy, is there a lot of it.

So, just to update, here are the designs for four characters to be used in the up-coming flash 'lip sync' project. In the project, we choose a segment of a recorded interview with four students, and have to animate characters that lip sync with the spoken words.

Here are the concept designs for the four. I left out the interviewer, as her spoken segments are very quiet, and it would detract from the focus on the main characters having to change the view just for a few lines.































I'll keep the background simple, having the four character sat on and around a desk, to tie in with the artistic nature of the characters and the courses they are talking about.

I was inspired mostly by the Aardman animations used in the 'Creature Comforts' series, which is a similar brief to our own; animating characters in sync with recorded voices from interviews.

I also need to begin work on other projects; a 3D modeling project of a room, storyboard panels, an ident project and this lip sync project.
Needless to say, I'm going to be busy.