Author: Nicolle Watters

Our week 7 task was an introduction to Animating, more specifically timing and spacing. I remember when doing my media course and implementing my clips I had always experienced issues with timing, scenes would either drag on or I wouldn’t be entirely sure on what felt natural to prolong in a scene for emotional impact or a structure of story telling. From my own knowledge timing when it comes to animation is an important factor due to cohesion and flow of a characters movement, and it’s is the key factor to a believability of a scene. Timing and spacing frames translate the speed of an action and the physics/weight of that object.

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For week 5 we were to create characters that would invest the audience in the story we were going to tell. Characters are what make up a story so I want to invest story telling elements into my character designs to inflict appropriate emotions onto the viewer. I needed to try and understand the story I wanted to tell and how my characters come into play, so I needed to be mindful of the following design steps: target audience, where the character appears, other existing designs, character uniqueness, personality, utilizing exaggeration and strategic colour etc. There is also the matter of us needing to animate this character, so we need to keep our designs simple enough so the overall group are able to translate the designs over into their own style.

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Week 4 was dedicated to colour theory and it’s purpose. I wasn’t in this week so I was unable to complete the on sight exercises, however I watched through the blackboard content to ensure I had a firm grasp on what I missed during class time.

Going through fine art A-Level colour theory had always confused me. I knew how to use colour to invoke a mood or emotional tie to the image you were seeing, however I tried to only ever add darks and lights to symbolize depth, which in truth isn’t always the case. For example I never considered the technique of atmospheric background depth (see Perspective – 10 minutes to better painting), where instead of adding darker values to symbolize objects behind using a cooler cyan (de-saturated colour) to show the difference that it can make by considering colour and stretching the difference. I try to now take complimentary colour palettes into account when creating a illustration and finding new ways to implement colour that gives the feeling life rather than shading to only fit realism. Animation is an illustration of life, and although realistic colour palettes can be used it’s a medium that bends reality to fit a purpose, and that’s also what colour can achieve.

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Week 3 we looked into the importance of value and tone when it comes to design work in animation. This is an important step to how artists render and shade objects to communicate light and shadow – depicts form of the design and the overall shape and texture of subjects. The fundamental concept is “when we change the tonal values of a form it changes how we visually read said forms.” Value of depth- contrasting values allows us to understand foreground and background, horizon means lighter tones and the closer the object the darker the object. With going in depth of tone and value I hope to better frame my subjects and depict accurate value changes to my forms.

Continue reading “Week 3: Tone / Value.” →