Summary:

I was initially very anxious today because it’s relatively unknown territory for me. I’ve loved animation all my life but I was worried that when it came time to actually start the PROCESS of animating – it would overwhelm me. I was very happy to be proven completely wrong! 😅

Our Advisor, Sarah Dargie, made us feel right at home. She began by giving us a presentation overview of the module and what we should expect. She was very upbeat and positive the entire time and engendered a welcoming atmosphere throughout the Studio Workspace. She then tasked us to roam around Ulster University to find and take pictures of objects fitting vague descriptions on a pre-made list. These were the photos me and my group (GROUP 8) came up with: (It was really fun)

THE PICTURES BELOW MATCH UP WITH THE ITEMS ON THE LIST GOING DOWN LEFT-TO-RIGHT

      

After each group presented their pictures, we got a presentation on “Form and Shape”. Here, I learned the fundamentals about piecing 2-Dimensional shapes together; intersecting, bending, and warping them to create more intricate and complex 3-Dimensional shapes which we could use as building blocks to illustrate ANYTHING we wanted. We did practice exercises on paper which involved drawing a wide variety of straight, curved, and zig-zag lines to practice our hand-eye co-ordination and sketching fluidity. We also morphed 3-D objects together to create simplistic characters.

Additionally, we began the process of storyboarding our upcoming 25-second animation project. We began by listing out “100 Ideas” (which really meant “as many as you can write before your hand gets sore”) for worlds we could set our animation in. I don’t know if we got 100 but we got A LOT before we narrowed them down to 5 key ideas that we all thought we could push and explore further.

It was honestly a very chill day. I chatted and joked with my friends and that made me feel more at ease in the studio than anything else. That’s another thing, I was also very worried about making friends. However, I was happy to see many familiar faces carrying over from my Art & Design Foundation Year course; and equally happy to make a whole bunch of new like-minded friends. I think it helps that we’re all studying the same subject and thus more likely to share common interests like TV Shows, Online Fandoms, etc. I think that’s pretty useful for the course, because it means we’ll all communicate more which helps us all collectively get better in the long-term. Either that or we’ll at least be able to commiserate together when we eventually get stressed out – either way we’ve got a Discord group chat now! 😂 (Below is a picture of some art doodles we all made together)

Homework:

Our homework was to pick 3 animated characters from our favourite media and break them down into their constituent 2-D & 3-D parts to better understand their composition. We were also encouraged to experiment with these parts ourselves.

 

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