James Fennell - BA3A Animation

Over the last couple days, I have had maquettes of my two characters 3D printed based on my exsiting 3D Models. I plan to finish and paint the two along with adding mockups of the fabric outfits that will be used on my puppets. This process has saved me a lot of time although it does somewhat hinder my ability to iterate without modifying the 3D prints.

When being inducted into the 3D workshop, I found that they had a 3D printer. As I will be in this department when working on the sets and props for this project, I realised that it would at least be worth producing some tests with real 3D printed faces. As I was already working on my character design iteration, I decided to design my model in Blender rather than producing physical maquettes. This would allow me to iterate and change things easily and re-use the face model for my actual film. I should be able to 3D print a full maquette from this model in order to help with lighting and painting tests.

Here are a couple of basic character sketches for my modern fable project. I have been trying to diferentiate the characters while striking the right balence between realism and a more cartoony design and I think the second image is my closest yet to something that feels like a useable deign. This is true in terms of how the two characters look together and compliment eachother.

Here's my initial animatic, lifting some frames directly from my storyboard. This animatic was produced to a fairly tight deadline and lacks the needed amount of detail in a couple places for it to really read well. After getting some feedback in todays group session, I plan to create a new animatic entirely from scratch with a better use of camera angles, more frames overall and a clearer story

Today, I attended an induction for the usage of the uni's motion control rigs with stop motion animation and helped to produce the above test. I had planned to incorporate a dolly shot at the end of my piece so this piece of equipment will no-doubt prove to be very useful if I choose to shoot digitally. If shooting 16mm of 35mm film still seems like a good option after working on my animation tests, there is an old manual motion control rig still in the studio that I may end up using.

My next steps with this project will be to finetune the overall visual style of this piece and complete an animation test to see if the idea of shooting the animation on 35mm film would be at all feasable.

The above video shows the results of my first test. Although it's a little rough around the edges, I'm pretty happy with how this came out and it didn't take all that long to produce.

Although this project is quite new, I have some ideas for how the protagonist in my most well developed plot would look. I'd like an aesthetic of simple shapes and a character that doesn't look particularly heroic of handsome, more a kind of skinny underdog type.

Another idea that I would like to persue would raise the question of whether the way in which someone lives their life can be seen as flawed if they spend it all in some kind of virtual world. Perhaps it would contain imagery of someone enjoying themselves in a virtual environment intercut with footage them sitting or lying motionless. Although it's quite vague at the moment, I think this basic concept has potential. Perhaps a voice-over could be used to help fit the narrative elements into the required short length.

Today, I drew up a revised plan for my report based on feedback from my Unit Assesment Form. This plan included better organised chapters, more chapters overall and more detail per chapter regarding the specific concepts and historical artworks that I will aim to explore in my report.

Another concept of mine was a music based piece with a man who has given up on life, singing the blues and playing guitar while doing things like walking into the road and jumping off a bridge only to magically walk away unharmed. Eventualy, the man would come to and realise that life was worth living, perhaps mirrored with a more positive verse in his song. I like elements of this idea although it does feel a little simplistic and pehaps too relient on the musical aspect

My idea, as it currently stands, would show an old man creating an artwork of some kind only to be joined by a robot doing much the same thing only to compete with the robot and eventualy work with it to create something beautiful.