Today was the return of the poetry event, Fluent On Paper, I help to run with my friend Kadhim Shubber, who studies physics at Imperial College, London. As you can see from the video above showing the highlights of the first Fluent On Paper, we're extremely professional and charismatic performers. So, as the token guy who can draw, I usually paint up the banner, which you can see me doing below with a big grin on my face;
Today I sent my armature design off to John Wright Modelmaking after a bit of discussion about which joints would work best in which places of the design. I decided to use John Wright just for the wolf's legs, because despite the higher price, the armature will be a lot more durable than a standard kit from Animation Supplies and since most of puppet's movement will come from it's legs, it makes sense to have these being stronger. I decided to use the Animation Supplies' standard armature kit for the main neck/body/tail section of my puppet, however, to cut down costs. The other benefit of using John Wright is that he supplies single ball armature joints and while Animation Supplies has a fixed joint system I have found in the past that the brass stopper is slightly wider than a standard 8mm ball, so slightly reduces the tightness you can achieve normally, making them a little weaker. You get what you pay for, I suppose.
I put up an advert around university to find a costume designer to work on my film. Pretty self-explanatory. The drawings, I sketched up quickly to give any potential applicant a rough idea of what I'm thinking of for these two characters' costumes.
Pre-production ends; Production begins. That's the theory anyway. At this point my animatic is still unfinished because the nature of live-action filming means that I can't get a definitive composition for most shots because it is determined by locations, which are subject to change due to availability, budget, practicality etc. That said, there is still plenty of tasks that doesn't require an animatic, such as finding a costume designer, sourcing props, actors, puppet building materials etc. - Many of which don't have as much to show for as regular animation tasks, but are still essential to the process and take up the hours. Hopefully my photo-documentation will show the hours I've put in, even if they haven't all been sat at a desk beavering away.
This is the end result of 3 weeks of learning Adobe After Effects. The idea was to create an atmospheric interpretation of my final major film, using the effects and presets available on After Effects to their best use. Aesthetically the project was fairly successful, as I spent most of my time giving the misty night's sky depth and creating a variety of silhouettes for the individual trees and the rest of the forest. However, what this meant was that there was less time spent on pacing the overall film nicely, so I think the result is that parts of the camera work and animation could definitely do with improving to make this an effective film rather than merely a consolidation of my newly improved After Effects skills.
As part of a mini-project to learn the ins and outs of After Effects we had to produce a series of tests to show our implementation of various animation tools, effects and presets, and the joys of exporting video correctly (without them being gigabytes/second...)
Here I have combined all of my tests; the effects and presets chosen to support the later final piece, which was to be a 30+ second consolidation of what we had learnt. For my tests I geared it towards a sort of promo for my final major project, which features an otherworldly wolf creature and some dark atmosphere. Below, are my thumbnails and highly neat and orderly storyboards;
I’ll admit I’m not the best at selling my work, but as it’s a marking requirement for uni, here comes a whole bunch of post-dated work from October to now. I’ve been keeping the work documented well enough, just not collating the documentation as I’ve been going because, honestly, I find it a bit of a ball ache, I fucking hate computers. But it’s got to be done, so here it comes, and on my birthday no less.
To begin with here is my plasticine lip sync project from October that I should have posted with the mime project but somehow never got round to doing. The lip sync I found a little trickier than the mime, partly because Plasticine tends to melt under the lights making the colours smear into each other. So while I think I had relative success in-betweening the mouth shapes by squashing and stretching the removable mouth pieces, by the end of the shot they tended to have lost their recognisable shapes and ended up the same. That said, it was good to have more plasticity in the animation than you would normally get with rigid mouth shapes made from, say, the Magic Sculpt I used for my lip sync project last year – giving it more of a ‘cartoony’ look, as opposed to a hard, dark look.
As featured on Mr. Rapey's disembodied face, here.
