Category: Animation Studio

This week we were split into 9 groups and tasked to come up with ideas for designing a world. After piling together about 100 ideas and getting to know each other better, we came to a final decision of what we all wanted in the world, which was a little bit of everything.

We have radiation in the air resulting in mutated creatures, hostile and passive, who run around the traditional villages where people have less equipment to defend themselves with, making them easy targets. There’s also cities which are alike various areas of the world such as Japan, America, Europe and Africa, along with a bio-luminescent rain forest with exotic creatures who become more active in the night. All the cities around the world are protected by huge domes that are controlled by a special government funded force who can disable them at any given time in the state of an emergency. These cities are also very highly advanced in technology and everything is futuristic in these areas, with mechanical properties almost everywhere throughout the city and advanced medicine.

As for the creatures that live in the environment, most are mutated in either appearance, abilities or behaviour, (e.g. the mutated genes can make them more violent and lust for blood, or cause them to hallucinate) these could either aid the villages with things such as stronger and faster equines/mounts to carry out their tasks or pose bigger threats to the environment and economy with creatures such as the Nyxer, a canine which has been mutated to become a killing machine, often hunting in small packs. Aside from the creatures that play a big role in the world, there’s also creatures just floating about in the sky for atmosphere and beauty such as whales, sharks, eels, jellyfish and squid-like creatures called Gazers. Of course though, all these ideas are still just that, ideas. They’re all prone to change and even removal.

Above you’ll see the concepts I drew for some of the creatures, each are bio-luminescent and only the Nyxer is hostile, the other two are just creatures for atmosphere that float about the world.

For inspiration I used things such as the game Warframe and its new infested Deimos update including a canine like creature called a Kubrow which they reworked to give an infested look. The infested feline like creature, a Kavat, also helped me when thinking about the eyes and how they’d glow. I was also very interested in Anubis at this point, so the little part at the side of the face as well as the overall shape and look of the face was also inspired by Anubis alongside the infested Kubrow. See below for an example.

For other creature such as the shark and the eel I used more real life counterparts than creative ones such as a lemon shark and an electric eel and just gave them a kind of design I felt fitting, though for the shark I did have a sort of vaporwave design in mind with the neon blue lines on the black body.

For our very first piece of work, we had to go off and study the underlying forms and shapes of three animated characters of our choice. Alec had provided sufficient examples of his own work via MP4 files and a PDF example on Blackboard, along with lectures and articles and videos to aid us with our task and make sure we understood it thoroughly.

There were a lot of characters I had ideas on studying, but i had to start off with something i could handle and not get too ambitious. I usually draw animals- mostly canines- so i decided to use Balto from the Disney animation “Balto”, Shirou Ogami from “BNA” a new anime I recently got into, and to mix it up and try push myself out of my comfort zone, Lucifer from one of my favorite anime’s “The Devil Is A Part Timer” as he has a human form and features wings too.

Along with studying the forms of characters, I had to understand the forms of simple shapes such as circle, triangle and rectangle before progressing any further. To do this I first drew out the simple 2D shapes, then making each one into a 3D shape by drawing them on planes and squishing/stretching/pushing them in any way i could think of to try get my head around how their 3D forms worked. I did struggle a little with the triangle though.

I also practiced my line work to improve my drawings and sketches with various exercises such as drawing lines both horizontally and vertically for as many I could fit on the page, filling the page with circles and drawing as many circles as possible inside those circles. I also had to practice my pressure line work by leaning heavily or lighter on my iPad with my Apple Pencil to create different points of pressure in a continuous line.

At the end of this homework, i was more aware of the 3D forms of shapes and had a better understanding of how to turn a 2D shape into a 3D one, helping me to draw better and more interesting forms for my designs and sketches.