Han

Character concept designs!! I like this design a lot, and I want to start sharing my work in animation & Motion Design more so 🤗

Some action pose practice I did today! I used a reference of a model posing with nerf guns from ArtStation. I found the one in the middle to the right the hardest because of the foreshortening. Hopefully, I’d like to draw over these poses maybe using Jinx from Arcane, simply because these feel very her (and she likes guns)

Here’s the reference :)

Although I’m delighted to finally be doing something I’m interested in, the animation module was a bumpy ride for me. I struggled at first with using Adobe programs but eventually I found that I was using them constantly and I’m now quite used to the suite now. For example, when making the Coraline poster, I used Photoshop, Animate, as well as After Effects to get the job done.

I found it quite difficult to adjust from seeing others in my class as competitors, to now my team and a group that I work with and share with. I do love working in teams though because I find that the greatest ideas come about when you have others to bounce them off of. Although I wasn’t around for the pixilation task (which looked pretty damn cool, by looking at what the rest of the class created), my first experience working in a team was incredibly fun when I made the stop-motion animation of fruit with Aine and Stephen. We had a few different ideas and although we went with the original idea, we each contributed something to make the story we were telling more interesting.

The phonemes task really pushed me. I hate working with clay and prefer sticking to 2D because it's safer to me, but I found that I learned so much from it. I learned how to create lip sync animations using phonemes (which seemed so big and scary before I actually attempted anything) and practiced this both physically with my hands on the clay model and digitally using Animate. I cannot wait to look back at the rough and messy work I did on this in the future and say “aw, that poor little thing had no idea what she was doing”, hopefully when I’m a lot better at it. I gave it a shot though!

Overall, this really confirmed that animation is what I want to do and what I’m passionate about. Yes, the process is insanely tedious and often makes me want to rip my hair out, but if it means that I make other people watch in awe and wonder “how did they do that?”, or when I’m working professionally and actually release something that inspires someone else to pursue a career in animation too, it’s worth it. 

PS, here are the playlists that got me through this module :)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1UuASj9ztmWQpXaPvoywkM?si=c11fc689ce1b4078

And I finally have this clay stop-motion piece done. Not to seem like I didn’t enjoy it, but boy did it really solidify that claymation is just not for me. I did enjoy and learned a lot from this project, though! Normally I prefer to work completely 2D because I have much more control over what it is I'm creating. This project pushed me completely out of my comfort zone because I found it was difficult to manipulate the clay in a way I wanted it to be, as well as trying to maintain a steady camera the whole time while adjusting the mouth shapes and facial expressions. 

I did find this incredibly helpful in learning how to approach lip syncing, though. Before, I thought that “the smoother the better” would be the way to go, and I thought that I would have to draw out every single change that happens when mouths move, but you can honestly get away with a couple (I used 9) moving quite quickly and you get the same effect. I actually also enjoyed the process of using my voice and applying it to something I made - really weird experience watching something inanimate using my voice to talk. I can’t imagine how voice actors feel.

Research on concept art for Spinel, a character from the Steven Universe movie. Not to be basic but she’s definitely my favourite character from the entire series just because of how much I relate to her and because her design is incredibly fun.

Some research I did on LAIKA studios. I used their website to get all my information. What I also found super interesting is that their colour palettes seem to be the same - all warm, soft hues. There’s nothing that feels cold about looking at their work.

Here’s a link to their website. There’s some really, really cool concept art for their different films available. I love the trivia on coraline, because it really emphasises the amount of effort that goes into these films. My favourite is that Coraline alone had over 6,300 face replacements.

This is my sheet looking at walk cycles. I never did the workshop with the rest of the AMD class, so I took it upon myself to analyse my boyfriends and friends to complete this sheet (in which I accidentally made them overly aware of the way they walk)

I found that the book, The Animator’s Survival Kit, by Richard Williams was incredibly helpful in understanding walk cycles as well as how to create your own. The breakdowns of everything were really simply explained so I found it super easy to understand.

Results from the trip to Fota!

This trip was by far the most fun I’ve had all year. Even though the animals kept moving, I found that challenged me to let go of capturing those little details I tend to fret over and instead draw the animals as they are. I tried to approach drawing the animals with a cute, simple soft style.

In today’s workshop, we worked on phonemes and lip syncing on animate. Initially, we were lip-syncing to an audio that Paul gave us, along with mouth shapes. After this, we then had to choose our own audio and repeat the whole process all over again.

more progress on the stop motion phoneme exercise! I’m not too happy with the mouths in the animation test with them.. I think, working off of the rotoscoped animation I did, that I’ll add more mouths in as in-between, because these mouths look mostly like keys and extremes, and therefore isn’t creating smooth animation.

For the actual clay puppet, we finally have some clothes! It’s very shabby looking, but I made this based off of a top I have myself. I used one of those shoe-liner socks to make this top and used staples (which proved REALLY useful to hold the actual top in place - I’ve used them as pins to secure around the neck and the back) to tie everything together.