Showreel Jan 2016

Recent Showreel of animation done at Uni.

Other showreel of personal animation done in free time and old animation projects.

Week eight

Finally the fun starts. This week Leonie had the rig ready for Dotty the ladybird. I am the lead animator for her character so I was able to begin playing around with he rig in celaction. Firstly I tried to get a flying cycle done. I referenced my flash animation I did at the end of week 7. Leo liked the movement but she didnt want the wings to go as far foward as they did. I made ajustments and got the flying sorted. I then did my own little test for a scene in the animatic where an apple drops. Dotty is happy she managed to knock an apple down then as it lands it breaks into which causes Dotty to be shocked and then her expression to change to sad. The final test I did was for a scene where Dotty tries to pull an apple of the tree but she can't. I enjoyed doing the last scene the most and I feel I now have a good grasp on how to use the program. 

Since I wasn't working on anymore editing for the animatics in either projects I was free to do some colouring on Jack's test shot. So far only Salomone was animated so I was able to spend some time colouring him. Jack's project is being animated in TV paint- a program I have used before but am not too comfortable in and I need to learn how to do some things. I feel like I did learn a bit from doing this first colour and I hope I learn more TV paint as I go along.

Week seven

This week I had pretty much finished the animatic for Falling in love. Alphabet Patch still needed some changes. We got feedback in the lesson to make sure we were keeping the animatic to the correct length for a children's TV show. Leonie did some research and found out the different lengths for childrens tv shows most common being: 5mins, 7mins or 11mins. currently our animatic was 6mins and 50 seconds. But we still needed to add an introduction sequence and a ending sequence meaning we needed more time then we had left. We all began to brainstorm on what we could cut. I then began to edit bits out and while I was working I noticed some other shots that could be cut short. In the end I managed to cut the animatic to 6mins and 14seconds giving us enough time to fit in a opening lasting 10-20 seconds and a ending lasting around 30seconds.

For Alphabet Patch story group we had come up with ideas for more episodes that will go into the pitch bible. We had a meeting and decided we would be set episodes B-F for this week.

I began writing ideas for episode C first as I had a few ideas already. Each episode has to have the characters going on an adventure linking to a word that begins with the letter they are learning about. In this case C was the letter and I thought of some words beging with C that would fit the show:

Words begining with C

Caterpillar
Change
Cocoon
Colours
Cabbage
Cry
Confused
Cheer up

Moral of the story could be- Learning that change isn't always a bad thing and that it can be a good thing.

I then wrote a flow chart for the episode and what could happen through out it.



Episode D was the next one I did:


Don't
Danger
Ducklings
Duck

Dark night
Day light


Then episode F:
Fun fair
Ferris wheel
Frog
Fun
Fast
Favourite
Fruit

For this week I was also given the task of sorting out the length of each shot in animation frame rate. 24= 1 second. I did this for each shot in Alphabet Patch and for Falling in Love.

The final thing I did for this week was an animation test for Alphabet patch. Leonie is working on the character rigs and we are going to be animating in Celaction. Each character has a lead animator so to keep the style of animation for that character consistant throughout the project. Me and Leonie have the most time set to doing animation so we have taken on the most time consuming characters. Dotty and Paddy are the two characters that seem to talk the most and do the most. I took Dotty the ladybird to be the character I animate. I love animating very animal characters and since Paddy moved closer to a human I thought I would enjoy animating Dotty more. However I didnt think about how difficult she could be to animate having wings, six legs and two different body standing possitions. But I am excited for the challenge. I was so excited I thought I do my own test before the rigs are ready. I had the animation program at home called Flash. I thought I could use this for a quick test. I traced over Leonies Dotty design in flash and then animated it using symbols.

This is the test I did:

To do this test I referenced some real ladybirds which I was watching late one night when I couldnt sleep to get inspired.

Week Five

Animator Luis Cook came to look at our animatics this week he had a few suggestions on how to improve on the animatics. This week consisted of having lots of meeting and brainstorming on how to improve the ideas. I had to do the editing again after everything had been gone through.

Alphabet Patch

We got feedback to make the characters stand out more and make their different personalities more extreme. We had some fun brainstorming about how the characters would react in different situations. One fun one was asking ourselves "what would that characters favouritetheme park ride be?". We said that cecil the snail would love the rollar coaster since he loves speed and wishes he could go faster. Dotty the ladybird would like the ferris wheel since it goes high up and she likes to fly. Mrs Beanie the chicken would like the T-Cup ride and finally Paddy would like something more education like the train that goes around the park. We all liked these ideas and thought this could even be incorpurated into an episode idea. 

Falling in Love

Luis Cook had many good suggestions towards Jack's project one inwhich involved more gag ideas for the character trying to kill himself and failing. We had a brainstorming session and came up with lots of ideas. Jack asked us to go away and write out a few new gag ideas.

I also did a few silly sketches of Salomone from falling in love.

Week four

This week I was asked to gather sound effects for Mads project I Am Dyslexic. We made a list of all the sounds by going through the animatic.


I also then became the editor for both Falling in Love and Alphabet patch. Jack had a load of storyboard drawings and I had to edit them together. I also edited the scratch track to this. It took me and Jack two days to finish the animatic which was much longer than I had antisipated. Jack had over 100 drawings to be timed and edited and there were loads of sound effects to be edited in too. His animation is very sound and timing heavy so it was a hard task. I edited and Jack directed. Although it took a very long time to do I did enjoy it a lot. For the ending of Jack's film we looked at a short movie titled "The Hedgehog" to get an idea for the atmosphere and editing style for the entire ending scene.

I then spend a lot of time editing Leonie's animatic for Alphabet Patch also. We had a discussion on what kind of editing style we were going to go for.

These are a few examples of the kind of editing style we aimed for:

Week Three

After the rush job we finally got to start working on the chosen projects. I wanted to have a lot of focus on Alphabet Patch. I was also working on I AM DYSLEXIC and Falling in love. All the projects had meetings this week to get people started.


Over the weekend (at the begining of this week) I had a look at Jacks script for falling in love and made some suggestions. I also looked over Leo's script for the pilot of alphabet patch. I made some changes to that too.

early in the week we had a meeting for alphabet patch. Leonie made a story group. Me, Midnight and Leonie were in this group and we focused on the story in it. Leo said she was completely changing the pilot idea. It was now about the characters going apple picking. We all had a big brainstorming session together to come up with ideas for the episode. We then had the task to go away and bullet point the episode structure and in the next meeting we would finalise it.

I went away and came up with 3 flow charts with ideas for the episode structure. I also campe up with a few lines and bits of scripts.




A bit later in the week I had a meeting with Mads group (I AM DYSLEXIC). It was a genral first meeting to get an idea of what people wanted to do. They had a massive group already and I wasnt too sure what I wanted to do on his project. 2D animation was something I thought could be good. He gave out some tasks for people to try out for the first week. For anyone who wanted to work on 2D we had to just practise the style and draw the characters out. We could also draw our younger selves in the style. So I started trying out some of the style.

Then when the final script for alphabet patch was written and we were asked to add some ryhmes to the lines. I began to add as many as I could.

Examples of ryhmes I used:

Wait I can fly let me try

The apple is too far I can't reach it at all. I'm too heavy I'm afraid I'll fall!

I can't pick them it's too tough. I'm just not strong enough.

Over the Summer and start of 3rd Year

Summer

Over summer I began developing my idea for a final project.

I decided to go with my idea ‘Richards and Dean’. This idea was the one I came up with during the first pitch bible project in year two. I knew I had to do some development work over the summer to get ready for the final year. The style was inspired by woodcut and I thought the characters would be very hard to animate like that.

Richards and Dean was originally an idea for a series I created in the pitch bible projects. For this project I am pitching it as a short mini episode.

It is a thriller, mystery loosely based on the film noir genre.

The target audience would be more aimed at teenagers range from 12 and above.

I began researching different styles.  

I've always liked Native American art and I thought about maybe being inspired by that style. By having the characters with very bold outlines and patterns.

 







 I tried a quick and simple drawing of the two in a similar style.

I liked the idea of keeping the black and white film noir style but I tried experimenting with colour.

I then had the idea to have the characters in colour and the backgrounds in black and white. I started re-designing the colours for the characters. I did some rough drawings (in my own style – not the finalised style) to test out colour schemes. 

I began looking at different animals too. I still wanted it to be a fox and a dog but I thought I could look at different kinds. The common red fox is quite popular in animation so I was wondering if there was a different kind of fox I could use. I looked up Gray fox, Swift fox, Silver fox and Marble fox. I did a few colour tests and did a research collage. I looked up some different types of dogs for Richards. I wanted to change his character from a Labrador. I wanted to have a dog that was close to a fox in size and a slightly different shape. I still needed the dog to have quite a different body shape to the fox so they were distinctly different. Floppy ears and a short tail worked quite well. The dogs I particularly liked the look of were the Beagle, Weirmaraner and a Brittany.  

The size of the beagle worked quite well as it is very close to the size of a fox. 

I liked the simple colours of the weimaraner and the look of the dog. 

The Brittany had a nice pattern on it but I really liked the ear shape and face shape.

I ended up doing a simple design in which I took qualities from all these dogs and mixed them together.

It also ended up that Dean look best as a red fox or a silver one (if the characters where in black and white).

I was then inspired by sin city as I remembered the style it had. How it was mostly black and white but there were some bright vivid colours that showed through. I really liked this art style of the movie and thought it looked cool. I thought I could possibly do something similar with my idea and have a few things in colour while the rest in black and white. Richards bright blue eyes was something I thought would be good in colour. I looked at Dean and I wasn’t sure if all his fur should be red which would make him really stand out or if just his eyes could be. I also thought blood would be good to have in colour as I remember from my old drawings I was always a bit stuck on what shade in black and white the blood should be. In sin city the only things in colour were primary or vivid colours while all the rest was black and white. 

I began doing some character practise sketches after doing some research into design. I had a look at my old style. I liked the shape of the characters but I did think they were a bit too realistic looking and that this time I should try and make them slightly more cartoony. I did some more design and style research.

 

 

 

 

Last time I looked at animals of farthing wood so I had a re-look at that style

I then did some early designs.

After the initial design ideas I played around with the colour. I found some black and white wood cut images online and placed my characters in the scene and I messed around with the colours to see what looked good. I also painted some blood in the scene in colour.

I liked the colour on the fox and thought it made him stand out against the background. The only concern I had was that he pulled a lot of attention in because Richards was just grey. But I kept it like that as I liked his design. I realised I needed to work on some background designs to see what the characters would look like in the style I ended up with.

First I did some further character development. I had feedback suggesting Richards should have a pattern on him instead of being all one colour because Dean is two colours it would fit better. I did a number of pattern tests but this was the final result.

I did some research into backgrounds. I wanted to go black and white and simple. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to have the woodcut style in the backgrounds as they took a long time to draw.  

 

 

 

I quite liked the simplicity of the last image.I did some drawings and practised some styles. I wasn’t too sure if the styles were too simple and I really wanted someone to help me with the style. I emailed my tutor and she sent me some inspiration images but in the woodcut style again. I decided to give the style a go again.   
 

 

 

I really liked these woodcut backgrounds and I experimented with doing something similar. If my idea was chosen to animate I would ask for lots of background artist to work on these backgrounds.

 

 

 Test

 My wow first image design

 Second done in wood cut style.

I began re-developing a story idea for a mini short teaser episode as I was working. I did a few draft scripts and I brain stormed many ideas but eventually my final idea was this:

The story in brief will begin with the pair at a crime scene. Richards is studying the body and Dean has become very impatient as they have been out for hours. He feels like he isn’t really needed. When Richards figures out the killer is a cat Dean rushes off to find the killer himself despite Richards saying to wait. As he leaves a shady figure appears and Richards doesn’t notice. As Dean is going down an alley way he sees a shape in the clouds that resemble an angry cat. This makes him realise he shouldn’t leave Richards alone while there is a dangerous killer on the loose. He decides to go back where he sees Richards struggling with the assailant. Dean races over and takes down the antagonist he helps Richards up. Dean recognizes Richards does need him.

I did the turn arounds for the characters and developed them further. I used the old turn arounds for Richards and drew over them with his new body shape.

I did the cat villain drawing and early concepts. Below is the final design.

 

I finalised some wow images and added my characters to some of the backgrounds I had finished and I was quite pleased with how they turned out. These were the final peices I created for the practise pitches and the final thing I did over the summer.

 

Week One

The first week back we had to get ready for our pitches on wednesday. We also had some introduction lessons. I made sure all my designs where ready and put together a presentation power point. I then wrote down what I was going to say next to each slide. I realised I needed another wow image so I thought I'd do some work on one.

 I also began to get worried because I was pitching a series. I started wondering if they would ask questions about the episodes and what happens in the series. I hadn't really thought about this much since the time I worked on this project for the first time last year. I thought I should look over the old episode guide I had written and I spent that evening coming up with new ideas, re-writing and changing some episodes.I hoped this would help me feel more prepared.


After the practise pitch I had some feedback on making my character more extreme and different from each other. I also needed to explain the story more for the real pitch. I then had a suggestion from some class mates that because Dean was so red it made him look more important than Richards since he blended into the backgrounds. I decided to try and play around with his colour again and see if I could make him stand out more.

 

I tried a few but I ended up liking the Beagle inspired colours with was originally one of the dogs that Richards design was inspired from.

Finalised designs and artwork for pitches.

 

I developed the characters personality further for the pitches as well.

The dog is Richards he is very intelligent and is the town detective. His owner was a detective and Richards learnt skills from him. 

The Fox is Dean he is Richards’s detective partner. He doesn’t have the skill set Richards has when it comes to studying a crime scene but he helps Richards keep focused and out of trouble.

The two tend to collide a lot on how to go about solving the case. However when working well together they can become unstoppable.

Richards is very slow but he gets the job done. He is confident in his detective skills and sometimes he can come across as arrogant which can rub Dean up the wrong way. A lot of animals think Richards is a bit strange as he seems to know a lot about the human world.

All he wants is to catch the killer and solve the case that is his soul focus. He keeps his emotions in check and tends to think logically about every situation.  

Dean on the other hand is impatient and opinionated. He is sensitive to criticism.

He can be clumsy and tends to rush into situations without thinking. He is very caring to his friends and loyal. Dean can become distracted when he should be helping Richards. He is particularly distracted when he sees female foxes in town. 

Dean wants justice and he wants it fast and Richards wants to make sure the job is done correctly no matter how long it takes.   

Friday
We had the real pitches in the Poly. I asked to go 4th so I could get it over with so I wouldnt feel so nervous. When I went up however I felt prepared and thought I delivered a good and clear pitch and answers questions well. I enjoyed everyones pitches and thought everyone did a really good job. I particually liked Jack and Leonie's ideas, I also laughed a lot at Jame's idea and thought his would be fun to animate on. We wouldn't find out who's ideas would be chosen until next week.