As a homework we had to take 3 characters and draw over their underlying form. I tried to pick characters with different designs so I wouldn’t be doing the same thing 3 times. I picked Patrick from Spongebob, Mordecai from regular show and also Spider-man.
For homework I drew out 12 thumbnails which involve different perspective.
For homework I drew 6 thumbnails that link directly to my groups world. I am in the demon portal group. These thumbnails also involve different perspectives, like the previous homework.
I chose one of these thumbnails and created a larger version of it.
In class we looked at colour, so for homework we had to chose 3 animation shots and create a colour scheme. I chose a shot of Darth Vader from the end of the Clone Wars, Lightning McQueen during a race in Cars 1 and a shot of Woody from Toy Story 1.
I am in the Demon Portal group, so in our world there will be an array of weird demons/monsters that show up. For my section of the project I want to make a character that carries the two protagonists across a dangerous lake.
I wanted to make the character look very strange. I at first designed it to be fish-like, but decided against it because I wanted it to jump over the lake instead of swim. I created several weird looking characters and decided on a blob creature which i will insert last here in the blog.
In class we discussed the story of our Demon Portal world and came up with the full narrative. We then split it up into 1 part per person. My part is the two protagonists reach a lake which cannot be crossed, then the Blob monster from my character designs picks them up in its mouth and leaves them over to the forest on the other side of the lake. I drew up a storyboard to split up my clip into separate shots, to then reference when animating.
I wanted to incorporate something we animated in class into my sequence, which will be when the Blob squashes down and jumps up, similar to how we animated a flower sack jumping in class. Also, I wanted to challenge myself specifically with the 8th shot of my sequence, as it will involve a squid arm coming behind from afar wrapping itself around the Blob, then animating the Blob correctly to show it squeezing and popping. In the second shot of my sequence, I wanted to include the large thumbnail I had done of our world several weeks ago, so I did that.
In the beginning of the lessons I enjoyed the early character work, it was good to get to understand the basics of the inner workings of characters. With the thumbnails as well I found it helpful that we got to practice with creating and understanding how perspective works in different shots. The colour theory was enjoyable as it gave a wider understanding of tonal value and how certain colour is specifically used to convey certain emotions or traits within a photo or animation. The homework was a good way to assess different usage of colour in certain shots, mostly finding similar patterns within colour schemes.
I thought switching to a different group nearly every week for 6 weeks was a great way to develop every groups ideas over time, as every new coming person would supply new ideas then bring inspirations from one group to another, leading to very well developed worlds when it came to finalising the groups.
Animating the movement of a round ball and also the movement of a jumping flower sack was very useful as it helped with understanding basic movement techniques to be used when animating, and also was very useful in teaching me how to use 2D animating applications (we used Krita, which I went on to use for my final sequence for my world).
Allowing us to make our own choice on what group we wanted to be in after 6 or so weeks of group hopping was good because it meant every group was a solid, different idea, and by letting us chose what one we wanted to be in it means that the final animations will have maximum effort put in as we all are in a group that we took upmost interest in and are committed to making work well. Once the groups were finalised, we devised the plot of our short film. Everyone was very involved in this process and worked hard to put the story together. By all working together and contributing evenly creating the story, it allowed for everyone to be happy with it, making it easy to split up the smaller sequences amongst ourselves. The sequence I was able to pick was when the creature carries the protagonists over the lake. I was happy with this as my character design was directly intended towards this sequence.
Everyone in our group sufficiently put in the work and frequently talked and gave progress updates on the group discord. This allowed for good chemistry in the group and gave us encouragement to work as hard as possible on completing the animation as best as possible. This was worth it as the animations all came together very well in the final clip, which we were given a private link in our discord to view once it had been put together.