Animated Series - Personal Project...

Recently me and my mate Nathan have been creating an idea for what we hope may develop into an animated series aimed at teens - young adults...Yes - slightly ambitious but as the ancient saying goes "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (Lao -Tzu)

It will be a humourous, slightly surreal take on various characters of contemporary England and based in a regular shop you might find in a city or city suburb. Think of a lighter version of Monkey Dust mixed in with a british version of The Simpsons..

It is very early days at the moment and this is the first blog I have posted about it. Watch this space!

Here are some of our character ideas:

Blue Sky Application and Portfolio

I have applied for a summer internship at Blue Sky Studios... The job is for Visual Development which means helping out with character and set designs. I saw the opportunity come up on their website and decided to go for it. I have posted them my portfolio (including a copy of my Illustrated book "To make an Amblongous Pie" - see December 2009) along with references from Andy and Nigel - who was my Illustration Level 1 teacher last year - and a cover letter. It took me a good week of preparation before sending it all off. If I get the place I will be an extremly happy chap!

Here is the portfolio I sent:

Virgin Ident complete! YES!

I am very pleased that - after a long night - I have now completed the Ident project. It was fun to deepen my knowledge of Flash and incorporate a lot of hand drawn Artwork to carry out my idea of bringing snooker balls to life..




There was a moment of crisis last night - the flash file kept crashing. With the help of some determination and several cups of tea I solved it. The problem was I was trying to animate massive 'png' pool balls. By converting them to jpegs it allowed my computer to cope with what I was trying to get it to do.

I have learned from this last term to adopt a new technique to time managing projects. Pretend that the deadline is 48 hours before the actual deadline. This way I may be able to add all the finishing touches that I desire instead of handing in something that I still feel could be improved.

Anyways I fully enjoyed watching everyones ident.. its amazing to see the wide range of stuff that people produced.

I am now going to fully enjoy some sleep!

Knight Rider storyboard

I like that storyboarding is an interdisciplinary skill and can be used for Live Action as well as Animation. Its an area I am definitely interested in as It seems to offer a fair bit of creative license.

Jane - The talking empty jar...

So heres my final Flash project movie..



I found myself laughing out loud whilst working on this, it was fun to
give an inanimate object such character. I think I may have been subliminally influenced by Family Guy in terms of facial animation.. I found it helped to work on the realism of the setting to increase the impact of Jane the Jar and give her a sense of place. All in all I found it to be an enjoyable project..

The Life Aquatic - Animated sea creatures..

Love these sea creatures that were thought up by Wes Anderson and animated in stop motion by Henry Selick. They are the sort of aquatic fish that dreams are made of.. I thought they were done in CG but was surprised to find out that they are stop motion.

"For creature design in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson had the interesting idea of taking something you know, then adding one strong new element to it: golden barracuda; sugar crabs; jaguar shark. He believed the resulting creature would be something the audience would want to believe existed (I know I wish they existed). In the case of the Crayon Pony fish, I went for a slight variation from reality in anatomical design, but–as you see in my sketch–used actual crayon colors that Wes picked for the body. In bringing the creature to life, we gave it a carefully and beautifully animated horse-like mane with some equine head motions while having it look like it was floating in water."

Henry Selick, Director of Animation

Sources :
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/mn/lifeaquatic.html
http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/hydronicus-inverticus-interview-henry-selick

Virgin Animatic

Heres my animatic... it seems essential to do this to see how the timing works and how the whole thing looks as a whole. I'm happy with the music as well (borrowed from my mate Nathan - hopefully thats cool but better check with him soon..!)



Now all that remains is the final version......

Flash Project

Picking out the bits of audio I liked the sound of...(no pun intended)

Initial brainstorming/mind mapping...

Composition/Character development

We have a character!

Designed into Photoshop then Flash. The top one is a bit too pretentious for my liking so I will use the bottom one.

Placed in her kitchen environment

Backgrounds

Here are the backgrounds I have been working on. I enjoyed getting fully involved with these as it allowed me to release my 'inner artist' and get funky with paints and pastels etc..! I have included some of the rough thumbnail sketches that I based my final backgrounds on.

These 3 ideas were totally my imagination:

My kitchen and a Ratatouille design:

The lower 2 thumbnails were developed from a photo of Gylly beach:

I developed these thumbnails into my 1st final layout background:

Some further thumbnail ideas - The bottom one was inspired from a hardware shop I used to work at:

I developed the thumbnail idea into my 2nd final background - heres the line drawing:

and in colour - using pastels, pencils and a pen :

Some more thumbnail ideas - the first one is based on a photo I took of a creepy atmospheric corridor, the second is my room :

A drawing of inside the media centre:

Here, the first drawing is from a photo from inside a coffee shop, the 2nd is from my imagination and the third is from my memory of Brighton beach:

These three are all from photos I took whilst travelling in China and Hong Kong:

I developed the last one into my 3rd final background, here is the line drawing:

and in colour - using gouache, pastels, pencils, highlighters and pens:

Here is the photo that I used as reference:


As you can see I got really absorbed into creating these, especially the last one. It was great fun!

Live at Five

I quite enjoyed working on this project with Joe, Chloe and Lucy. It involved producing graphics
for the Live News program being broadcasted at five by the broadcasting studios. We were given very short deadlines (i.e. around 1 hour to do the weather maps) so we had to work well together and spread out the work evenly between us. I enjoyed my role as producer, acting as a communication point between the broadcasters and animators, trying to ensure we would meet the deadlines.


Pictured above is the weather map we produced (as you can see - a very bright and optimistic forecast.) We also produced both static and animated astons and surf/tide reports. At 5pm we went to the gallery to watch our work being put to use in the Live at Five program. It was insightful to see behind the scenes of how News programs work and rewarding to see our work put to good use. I felt we worked efficiently and well together.