This week, I thought more about the atmosphere I want to create for my segment of the animation. I used Pinterest to find images that convey the energy and style I want my animation to have. For the backgrounds, I would like to create liminal spaces – places that feels almost familiar, but not quite. A space which makes the viewer slightly uncomfortable would work well for an animation set in Hell.
I aim to draw scenes that use dark colours, wide shots and empty floors.I might also add a dream like blurry effect as well. I also looked at images of people to inspire my characters. The fisheye lens effect causes me to focus on certain points of the image – I think this would benefit my animation by guiding the viewers eye to what needs to be focused on.
Character Progress
I made some progress by designing the character “Bubz” further.
I think these sketches I made using photoshop show his personality more clearly. I tried to express that he is a silly character, despite his snake like features. I recognise the risk that this may translate poorly and confuse the viewer as they may see his reptile features and guess he is villainous, so I have rounded off his features and given him a slouched body language to counteract that.
Bubz Swatches
To come up with different colour schemes for Bubz, I had to experiment with the knowledge I gained after the colour theory lesson. I began by coming up with a new pose for Bubz using Photoshop.
Then, I coloured him in while remembering that the background is most likely going to be dark blue.
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2
3
These three colour schemes are analogous, complementary and analogous again.
The first colour scheme will look nice against the blue background because orange compliments blue, however I do not want Bubz’ appearance to distract attention away from Eden. The second scheme might not look good against a blue background because the shade of green is too vibrant. The third scheme will look nice against a dark blue background and won’t distract from Eden – the only risk is that he might blend into the background too much.
These are the finalised colours that I would like to use for Bubz. I think the blue-green skin colour will look much nicer against a blue background in comparison to the bright green I used for swatch number 2. I also like that the eyes are a complete different colour to the rest of the character, and it might come in handy when animating expressions if attention is drawn to the face.
Josh has designed the two characters below named Eden and Mr. Jenkins. I love how expressive Mr. Jenkins’ face is and how round Eden’s design is – I will have fun learning how to draw these characters for my segment of the animation.
Flour sack Homework
I began this exercise by sketching a flour sack using different shapes and showing them from different angles. This helped me get a better idea about how this flour sack might move, which will be helpful when I storyboard it. These sketches are very rough – to improve them, I will use cleaner lines and look at more reference images of flour sacks.
Flour sack storyboard
I came up with this simple storyboard which shows the flour sack attempting to descend a set of steps.
I like the drawings of the flour sack in scene 4 and 5 as I think they express the flour sack stumbling down the steps well and the fast, straight line work adds structure to the sack . To improve, I could look at some reference images of flattened flour sacks for scene 6.
Flour Sack Animation
I decided not to animate the flour sack stumbling down the steps and instead animated a leap. I felt that doing this instead would be more achievable within the time limits. I drew an arc and inserted keyframes of different poses along the arc. This allowed me to reduce how much the flour sack jitters as it moves along the curve.
I used Krita to animate a flour sack jumping. This task made me think about how a flour sack might look in 3D for the first time. I decided to have it jump because that allowed me to use some of the principals of animation I had learned about. It makes use of anticipation and squash and stretch as it charges up for the jump, slow in as it speeds up towards the end of the jump, secondary action as the corners of the sack move slower and are dragged through the air by the main body and the whole flour sack moves along an arc. Considering these principals made the final animation look more exaggerated and interesting, however I feel that my line work, limited number of frames and variation in volume makes it appear stiff and rudimentary. In the future, I will ensure I use thinner, more expressive brush strokes and keep the volume of the flour sack consistent. I also think I could benefit from watching animated movies and shorts that show similarly shaped characters to see how they express emotion and movement and try to mimic that to practice.
Classwork – Straight Ahead animation
In class, we were tasked with animating frame after frame, as opposed to making keyframes and adding frames in-between them. I really enjoyed this exercise as it encouraged me to think creatively and the animation I came up with was unexpected. It was entertaining to not know what I wanted the final clip to look like and I enjoyed shaping it as I went along. I believe I have found a new method to break creative blocks when I find myself unmotivated to make something new.
I started by making my first layer a straight line for the ground, the second layer for the green sketch and the third layer for my refined line work. This helped me create a smooth animation and allowed me to filter out any mistakes from being shown in the third layer.