This was my favourite out of all the Maya exercises, not just because the little tail ball is cute, but it allowed me to practice my squash and stretch, tail movement and animal characteristics all in one! It was a lot of fun making a small obstacle course too!
The tail ball was really hard to animate at first, especially when trying to get my head around how the tail should move. I didn't do this, but I would watch how different animals tails move before animating them, to know if you want them to replicate that look or make it look completely different.
I was proud of myself for getting the squash and stretch right along with the timing of the tail ball, making him anticipate before jumping and moving his tail swiftly to make him look really happy! I also loved how I made him slide on the obstacle course (it looked really cute!).
One thing I would change however is during his brief pause on the obstacle course, he's completely frozen. I would have to make him move slightly in order to show he's still alive!
Mery is a rig that you can use in Maya to practice on character poses and facial expressions. Here I didn't need to animate anything, but instead learn how to manipulate Mery into different positions, in which you can immediately tell how the character feels in one picture.
The five expressions I show here are (above to below):
Laughter
Anger
Fear
Sadness
Content
I believe I've captured the emotions of Mery clearly through her poses and facial expressions, making some areas exaggerated and cartoony and others more subdued to reflect a serious moment.
The difference between this and the basic walk from the last stop motion post, is how this walk reflects personality.
Live-action actors have the pleasure of showing personality through little movement. Animated characters show their personality through all of their gestures. This character walk exercise enables me to practice this.
The walk I chose showed a snooty personality, with the puppet looking down its nose and swaying from side to side without a care in the world.
I'm proud of this walk but I'm really proud of the first few seconds! Mainly because I remembered to bend the toes on the first step and it starts to look like a proper walk! I forgot to add the toes bends on the rest of the steps but either way, the walk appeared genuine and expressed the personality of the puppet.
My other problem is regarding the hands. Due to the hands of this particular puppet being unable to bend properly, the hands look stiff, and don't sway as smoothly as the rest of the body.
Note: The camera moves slightly due to somebody knocking over the webcam, twice.
I had to once again follow the traditional rule of the walk cycle, and this time in a stop motion environment. I added small touches to the walk, included turning the puppet's head side to side to make her look like's she looking around.
The basics of the walk are there, but the extra things that make a realistic walk (toes bending, hands relaxing etc.) are not. The walk ended up looking like a creeper's walk, needless to say.
Truth be told, this exercise looks stilted due to a technical issue I had on Dragonframe. Instead of taking 12fps, I instead put the settings onto 12fps which I was specifically told NOT to do! I can obviously see why now.
Regardless of the jolted movements of the puppet, he manages to show that he is throwing an imaginary ball across some sort of park...just very slowly.
The angle he's meant to be facing is also in the right position, a long with his arms, legs and where his head is pointing to.
Constraints and parents in Maya are hard to get your mind around, but is worth the trick once you learn how to animate two objects. Constraints and parents in Maya is essentially having two objects connect to one another, or having one object control the other.
In this exercise, the human rig is the parent and the box does what the rig says.
Overall, I am proud of this exercise as I've never animated a full human rig before, and it looks decent! The character herself moves smoothly, and shows some personality in the little tilts I've added to the head and pigtails. The lifting of the box looks good too, even though it was hard making sure the fingers grabbed and moved the box at the right time.
My only complaint is that the movement of the body goes to farther forward as she begins to lift the box. If that happened in real life, she'd be falling over.
Monty reminds me of Mike from Monsters Inc...and that's why I like him.
Monty is a great way of practicing character walks as he has very little features to work with, so it doesn't cause a beginner animator to be distracted by hair, clothes, facial features or even arms!
I've only managed to create one character walk for Monty, and it was my attempt to follow the traditional character walk cycle in Maya.
It was a good attempt as it at least looks like a walk! But it's more of a character walk than a practice walk. The walk makes Monty look almost prissy, with his toes pointing as he 'bounces' across the floor.
To give the effect of a character turning around really fast, elongated inbetweens is a way to show that. By turning the inbetweens into large distortions, a blur effect will appear for a split second show the speed of someone turning.
My simple practice of elongated inbetweens shows that the girl is turning from one side of the screen to the other at high speed. The inbetweens reflect the speed and the movement is smooth.
My problems are that she doesn't look like she's properly turning, just looking one side and then suddenly looking at the other. It is also worth noting that in order to emphasise the turning and the speed of the character, follow through of the hair and clothes and show that emphasis. Without that, the character looks very static and more robot-like.
This task was hard to grasp as it challenged me to animate the same bouncing ball exercise, but in a 3D room. In 2D, it's a little easier to imagine what the ball will look like from one angle in the room, but here you have to make sure it looks right from all angles.
Case in point, I don't think this one is my best work. As the ball is bouncing off the walls, the ball is already forming it's bouncing shape before it's even hit the wall! The ball ends up looking like it's own character, changing it's shape and being it's own texture as it pleases, instead of the wall determining it's shape and speed of bounce.
Maya is a difficult program. New animators, enter at your own risk.
Don't get me wrong, once you know all the controls and methods you'll be able to do it! Just be prepared for the amount of information you have to cram into your head.
The first 3D exercise I had to do was a bouncing ball (of course). Since this is the first time EVER that I used any kind of CG program, the bouncing ball took me a long time to do. In the end, it's not perfect, due to the ball bouncing and stopping too smoothly (bouncy balls go everywhere), but it at least looks like a bouncing ball! The anticipation as it goes up and down is well done and the bounces are nice and quick.
Creating a water splash has been my favourite 2D exercise so far, because now I can draw BIG!
The ball at the beginning of the animation is falling at the correct speed as if it was just thrown by somebody. I like how the ripples ended up, making the screen look like water without having to colour it in. The drops of water that came from the splashes are also a nice touch to the animation.
If I did have a problem, it would be how the splashes themselves don't seem to land in the water after rising into the air. They instead shrink back into the water, especially the second splash where it looks like it came out just to do a Mexican wave. The splashes defied gravity!
The splash was animated in twos and exported in 24fps, making the ending result look a lot smoother.
The walk cycle is an iconic exercise to do when trying out animation. This walk cycle done in 2D is the first one I've done and one I'm very proud of.
The line work throughout the cycle is slightly wobbly and the way the figure is walking looks a little strange, considering the legs sometimes slide across the floor and makes the figure look like they're on a treadmill.
However, being a first-timer when it comes to this exercise, I feel like I've made a massive improvement to my animation skills after studying this exercise, as it allowed me to look closer at how a human walks.
It has taken me such a long time to get this task right, and although with more practice I can do better, I'm so glad that I finally managed to make it look presentable (it's not just a ball with eyes now)!
Doing the head turn is harder than it looks. For this task I felt like I needed a frame timeline for referencing. I did use one but I believe there are certain things a frame timeline is useful for, and other times it feels kind of pointless using one.
I animated this in twos since I thought it looked more appealing. When trying to animate it in ones, it looked like the character was getting a whiplash. I ended up exporting it in 24fps in order to make it a lot smoother.
The box-man is a way of practicing how to draw people doing different things, in this case it's jumping. Though I do like the way it came out, I still think there could have been more anticipation in between looking left and right before jumping. The jump itself is good movement-wise but the pacing makes him look like he's floating instead of jumping, it's just too slow. Not to mention that the cleanup of this animation ended up looking a little scruffier than the sketches, ironically. Still, I believe I got the angles of the box-man right, along with his positions as he is jumping and landing.
We finally get to use puppets! Now let's forget about how hideous they look and look at the stop motion!
In general I like this one. I spent a little more time with this animation than I did my other stop motion practices, and it shows! Despite the lack of anticipation when the puppet actually touched her toes, I like the movements of each body part, starting with the head and ending with the hips (sorry that you can't see the hips bending from the front view). Even the hair was smooth during the animation, which I can imagine is really difficult to do (really it was just luck). Maybe the arms shouldn't have been so far apart at the end, but that's just a nit-pick.
'Tangerine Dream' involved me turning fruits into characters! Oh how I LOVE creating new characters! And drawing some fruit-inspired ones was defiantly something I've never done before. Though I've only done 3, I love the characters I've made, each one resembling the personality of what a fruit would look like! Tangerine is perky and bright, Strawberry is more demure but really nice, and Grapes is refined, since purple is the colour of royalty, and is also sour (get it, sour grapes? HA I'm funny). The colours I used were only from crayon but I am really happy with how I've used them, making sure the shadows and highlights contrast well with each other.
'Acting the Goat' was about drawing animals from life and turning them into characters on a film set…which really gave me an excuse to put them in fabulous outfits!
I've always loved drawing animals ever since I drew my own pets, and living in Cornwall, there's always dogs with their owners, cats on the street and farm animals not too far away! I had no problems finding animals, but turning them in characters confused me a little. I didn't know whether I was suppose to dress them up as characters or draw them in a cartoony style showing off a character's personality. In the end I just dressed them up, and they all look FABULOUS!
Even YOU will be impressed with Dapper Dog, Gypsy Cat, Fabulous Sheep (just look at those heels!), Hipster Dog, Peasant Dog and Shmoe Cow, who I relate to and his bag of crisps the most.
Animating a balloon was tricky, since most of the time how much it flows depends on how strong the wind is. I tried here to mimic a balloon gradually falling onto the ground and bouncing when it finally hits the ground. There are some missing frames and I think the balloon could've gone slower, it just looks like another pendulum to me. The bounce at the end was something I'm proud of but I could still improve it by making it less like a bouncy ball.
The bouncing of the heavy ball was a a lot easier considered it's just like animating a bouncy ball, except with less bounces! Though I prefer this one than the balloon, one thing I didn't like was after the ball's first bounce and how it slowly went into the air agin. Here, it should've bounced back up really fast, but instead looks like it defying gravity.
Another fortnight later we cut to more life drawing and this time I get to try drawing on brown paper (ooo exciting!). Despite my sarcasm, I actually don't mind using brown paper as to me it reflects a more natural skin tone than white paper, so I see it being more pleasing to the eye and indicating to the mind that this is a slightly more realistic drawing. Emphasis on the word 'slightly' considering I still haven't managed to draw heads in it's proper proportions! And I don't believe that is a great problem because drawing large heads and eyes are part of my animation style, it's still not acceptable in life drawing.
Drawing on black paper is my favourite since I like using white chalk to highlight different areas of the body (also the lighting in the studio shows off more highlights than shadows so it gets a little easier, not going to lie). My best life drawings so far have been using white chalk on black paper, as I am able to create more 3-dimensioanl drawings with these materials. The hair and head in the one above could be a little less white and smudgy, and the hands became a little disproportioned, but besides from that I was generally pleased with this one!
Some 2-3 minute sketches on different poses, with and without props. The majority of them are better than last week's.
This exercise above is Negative Space, where you draw you outline of the body and colour around him, leaving a silhouette in the middle. A quick and exercise, but by no means easy, since I got most of the proportions all wrong here!
For anyone who has ever studied film or is currently studying some form of film now, I'm sure they're familiar with shot compositions. For anyone who doesn't know, shot compositions are different types of proportion layouts for shots that are used to convey to the audience how they should feel or at least make the shot visually appealing. Shot compositions are also frequently mention when talking about the third principle of animation; Staging, where you essentially create the mise-en-scene of a shot along with using shot compositions to figure out where characters or objects should be placed on screen.
Shot compositions are very important references for film and animation as they allow us to create a proportioned mise-en-scenes for our film and therefore make it easier for the audience to understand the shot. But how can the audience understand the shot when the majority of them wouldn't know about shot compositions? We don't need to explain to others how to understand what they're feeling! Shot compositions are used because our eyes and mind have adjusted to viewing these compositions and instantly liking the proportions on screen. Certain compositions immediately tell us whether we should feel relaxed, happy, distressed or overwhelmed by a shot without us knowing about it.
The Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is the most well known of the shot compositions and most likely the first composition you would learn about when studying film. It is when a shot is divided into nine and the lines created are used as a reference to where the characters or significant objects should be placed.
The rule of thirds is a massive favourite to our eyes and mind due to how symmetrical it is. Having a character breaking the rules of the rule of thirds instantly makes us feel insecure as they are at a strange angle and not standing straight like a normal person does. This is why filmmakers use the rule of thirds the most in films as that's the one which is most needed, when it's for normal quiet scenes that are there to relax you not in the action scenes the film would lead up to.
[Rule of Thirds and "Whisper of the Heart" 1995]
The Golden Ratio
The golden ratio is a more complex version of the rule of thirds and required mathematics to create (geometry IS used in the arts). Golden ratio isn't just used in film, but in fine art and architecture as well. Leonardo da Vinci was a frequent user of golden ratio and used it as a reference for the Mona Lisa.
Like with the rule of thirds, our eyes and mind have come to a liking of the composition when seeing characters proportioned along the lines or within the circular layouts. However, unlike the rule of thirds where you feel relaxed when characters and objects are almost symmetrical, golden ratio can be used in any scene to make the shot more visually appealing to the audience.
[Golden Ratio and "Grave of the Fireflies" 1988]
Static Composition
Static composition is where the shot has straight horizontal or vertical lines within it.
To our minds, we associate horizontal and vertical lines with being tranquil and levelheaded, as the majority of the world we see has a lot of these lines. When an object or character is proportioned to go up or down, we feel happier about the path because the path is straight and rarely any complications happen on the straight path.
[Static Composition and "Wall-E" 2008]
Dynamic Composition
Dynamic composition is the opposite of static composition, where the lines are diagonal and are there to make you feel uncomfortable throughout the shot. Diagonal lines are not the straight path like horizontal and vertical lines. We are not used to seeing a lot of diagonal lines in our everyday world and therefore indicate when something wrong is happening when the camera tilts to the point where the set is diagonal or rows of people are sitting in a diagonal way.This is why we come to associate the winding road as the most dangerous road, since it's not a straight path and we don't see what's at the end of the road. The head tilt is also a good example. When someone smiles as their head is at a vertical angle, we smile back. However when someone smiles and their head is tilted to a diagonal angle, it comes off as something creepy and unnatural.
[Dynamic Composition and "Coraline" 2009]
Lead Room
Lead room or lead space is when the character on screen is given enough room to look to the side and face something. If your character is on left, make them look to the right and vice-versa.
This allows the characters to be given some breathing space. It tells the audience that the character is going to think for a while and whatever the character is seeing could be of some relevance to the plot, so keep an eye out for that! This is also a good composition for two characters that are speaking to each other, where the camera can focus on one character, so the audience can also focus on that character. This also lines up with the rule of thirds as the two characters are in proportion to the lines of that composition.
When characters are not in line with lead room, it automatically makes the audience feel uncomfortable knowing they don't have enough space to look around and breath on screen, indicating these characters are not quite human.
[Lead Room/Space and "Kubo and the Two Strings" 2016]
Scale
Using scale as a visual tool is a great composition to convey to the audience how vast or tight a shot is.
By making the character small compared to it's environment, the shot indicates that this is a big or important moment in the film. It could also show how large a city is compared to our meek protagonist. However when the character is larger than the environment, the character appears more powerful than everyone, or shows that the character is thinking about how small and insignificant the world is really is, which makes the audience think it too.
Note: The Scale examples are talking about regular-sized humans, not giants or borrowers.
[Scale and "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" 2006]
"Kubo and the Two Strings" has immediately become one of my favourite films. The film is an animator's dream come true, regardless of whether you're into stop-motion or not! It has set a new high for animated films and, whilst it's a no-brainer for every animation fan to go and see this, is really for everybody!
Let's start with the real star of the film: the animation. The animation in "Kubo" is gorgeous. Inspired by traditional Japanese culture, Laika has made sure you have a definitive feel for the folklore atmosphere of the film. The colours range from the subtle autumn shades of the village, to bright vivid clashes of the skeleton's cave, to dark blurred tones whenever the sisters appear. Colour has always been a favourite feature of mine and I tend to like animated films with a thought-out colour palette. Not only have Laika thought through the animation and the design, but the colours have obviously been taken into account to give us some samurai eye-candy!
Speaking of the skeleton, let's talk about him! He is a BOSS. Being the largest puppet Laika has ever made (twice the size of a human!), it is the most jaw-dropping character design in this movie, and possibly in all of stop motion. Just seeing this thing in every shot he's in makes your skin crawl, with both how creepy he is and the thought of how many cramps the animator's have after moving him. Skeletons have such a complex structure, so this puppet is nothing short of impressive.
"Kubo" is not entirely made of stop motion. Laika has been known for mixing stop-motion with elements of CG and even hand-drawn animation to give us some breathtaking visuals. The CG effects do not take the spotlight away from the stop-motion, but just add that little bit of life to the complicated puppets and backgrounds that show during the fight scenes or scenes that involve the ocean. Animators and filmmakers constantly question whether CG should be used at all in stop-motion films in order to make it "authenticate". My opinion? It is important for CG to not completely take over the animation industry, with hand-drawn animation almost dying (except for in Japan) and Laika and Aardman being the only well-known stop-motion companies. However, the ideas that the writers and the designers had for "Kubo" are very complex and, as impressive as it would be, it would take a lot of time, money and really tired animators to work overtime in order to make every single effect in stop-motion. With the financial crisis Laika is going through, they simply can't be doing with elements which can be achieved quicker and turn out more visually appealing in CG. Considering the grandfather's monster form at the end of "Kubo", Aggie's ghost from "Paranorman" and even the ghost children from "Coraline", these effects could not be achieved through purely stop-motion. I endorse the use of mixing all forms of animation in order to give us visuals we have never seen before and could never imagination, as long as it doesn't get to the point where there's so much CG, you might as well make it a CG movie.
Whilst 3D CG is used a lot for special effects, 2D animation can be seen during the ending credits, and as short as it is, even the credits are beautiful! Laika has a small reputation for placing scenes in the credits or making original art for it, just to go that extra mile for the audience's enjoyment. The credits feature original 2D art and animation, along to a cover of Beetles song 'While my Guitar Gently Weeps' by Regina Spektor, accompanied by a shamisen. At the end of a credits, a time lapse is shown of the "Kubo" crew animating the giant skeleton. That alone is worth staying through the credits for, so you know how much time and effort went into that puppet.
Let's step away from the glorious animation and talk about the story, one of the most important aspects of a film! As much as i like to gush about the animation, the story however is not so much to behold. This film to the bare bones (get it? Skeleton? Ha I'm funny) has quite a predictable storyline with reoccurring cliches that we've seen before in animated adventure movies…or adventure movies in general.
THAT BEING SAID, just because it has a predictable plot, it doesn't mean it's bad. Like I said before, the bare bones of the story is predictable, but the meat that is added to the bones is what makes the plot all the more forgiving. Sure it had done-to-death cliches and expected twists, but the character development, their relationships, the emotion, the music and the animation is what executed the story into something that made it new. For me, I was so invested in Kubo's journey with Monkey and Beetle and their development that I forgot about where the journey itself was heading! I know when I look back on "Kubo" I will easily be able to tell where the cliches are, but at the time, the characters were growing on me so much for being so likeable that I was generally shocked when I didn't see the twists coming! After watching the film I was suddenly reminded of "The Thief and the Cobbler" (the Recobbled Cut), another film which had amazing animation but a weak story. The film is down to the bones boy meets girl and boy saves the day, but I loved how cute the boy and the girl were together and how smooth the hand-drawn was, that I didn't care about the story! When it comes to these kinds of stories, I general don't care if you use them! What does make me angry is when a film does it in a way that I've seen it done before millions of times. "Kubo" executed it differently, and that's why I love the story more than I should.
The story itself, ironically, is about telling stories and how they pass down from generation to generation! Kubo is magical child who can control origami paper with his shamisen and is on a journey, with his friends Monkey and Beetle, to find his father's armour in order to protect himself from his grandfather, The Moon King, who stole his left eye as a baby. The film is told as if "Kubo" is an old Japanese folktale, similar to "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya" (which really is an old Japanese folktale). This is another reason to forgive the story for how simple it's written! There are many scenes that truly did make me feel good inside: when Kubo's mum tells him stories at night, when Kubo prays to speak to his father, when Kubo, Beetle and Monkey all eat together and just talk, when Monkey reveals her true story and EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN CUTE MOMENT BETWEEN MONKEY AND BEETLE. Who would've thought that in my life I would say "I ship a monkey and a beetle together"? Throughout each of these scenes, some serious character development is happening, accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack which mixes Japanese instruments with a traditional orchestra. This film makes you feel so many emotions, until the scene where the twists reveal themselves and you end up having a breakdown! Not because the twists are bad, but because the scene is SAD. SOMEBODY GIVE KUBO A HUG.
And although I love those scenes so much, there are other moments that really graded on a patience. Beetle is meant to be the film's comic relief and while I did laugh at most of his lines, some of his actions got a little tedious, to the point where something bad would happen due to the fact that he's an idiot. The scene where the twists are revealed is still a scene I love but it raises SO MANY QUESTIONS that we will never get the answers too! And the ending…again, it's really sweet but also a tad preachy. The word 'story' is tossed around so many times in the ending it might as well be a hot potato. I get it. I get the message. I don't want to hear the words story for a long time now, especially after writing that word so much in this review.
Overall, "Kubo and the Two Strings" is worth every penny. Laika needs your money to make more outstanding films like this, and they do deserve it. But don't just see it for Laika, see it for yourselves! Get yourself invested in this gorgeous film and I guarantee...you will feel emotions.
But seriously, if "The Emoji Movie" gets more money than this film, I would be embarrassed for every movie-goer out there.
I was to draw a difference object each day in the same location, in this case, my hand. This exercise defiantly felt more like a life drawing session than an drawing for animation task.
Top left to Bottom middle: My phone, a 20p, a stapler (the most complicated out of all of them), a pen, my glasses and my ring.
Here, I was to take an ordinary everyday object and give it a surreal twist! As you can see i tried to paint them but…painting is the sort of art I like doing instead of an art form I'm actually good at!
From top left to bottom middle: a lightning pen, a sharpener that burns away it's shavings, a rubber with ink coming out of it (it looks like a cape!), a bottle going into another dimension, space glasses, a hand coming out of my phone and a book made up of spider-web! The last one I did half of it in biro to compare whether it looked more like web with pen or pencil. Fair to say, both of them look suitable!
For this task, I was to draw my fellow animation students based on how they were feeling, and then add cartoon-like features to them to make their expressions more stylistic.
The emotions shown here (from top left to bottom middle) are disgusted (which looks more like a curious expression), sad, not bothered, happy (I was pleased with this one the most down to how I captured the emotion and how I drew her hair), goofy and…I couldn't think of a word for it so I just called the last emotion the 'AAYYY' face!
(Please ignore how thick the arc lines are! I drew them really quick and wanted them to look neat at the same time! There are also some mistakes on the arc lines so they must be used as a reference only)
As you see someone walking, the arcs that are made with the feet are similar to how a ball bounces. The only difference is that as a ball bounces, the bounce gets smaller until it stops. When you walk, your feet are creating arcs that are the same size until YOU decide to stop walking. There is not gravity at first pushing your feet down to the ground, as you have the power to pull them back up.
How fast you are walking can also be seen by the arcs. Here, the walk is slow and casual and therefore has long steady arcs. If I was to run, the arc lines would be higher and wider, to show that I am stretching as I run to go faster.
My first proper life drawing lesson began this week with an actual life model, and not a student or Cecil the skeleton! Above is the drawing I did on black paper with white chalk, to get used to highlighting certain parts of the body instead of drawing the outline straight away. Fair to say, I'm pretty proud of myself with this one! There are some parts of the body that are dis-proportioned and the lil the model was lying on looks…weird. But you can tell what position the model is in and which parts of the body represent the lightened areas through my highlighting. On this day I haven't done proper life drawing in a long time and to draw this with a material I'm not fond of made me feel good about myself!
There are two parts to the drawing above. The scribbles on the left wasn't me letting out my frustration, it's an actual exercise. An exercise which required to draw the model without looking at my paper AND without my charcoal being taken off the paper. It's obvious I failed in doing the latter but not being able to look at the paper was HORRIBLE. The exercise forces you to not look at the paper so much, since many people aren't used to looking at a model and therefore draw from memory (something you should do in life drawing), but if you ever decide to do life drawing, you will hate this exercise. From my point of view, the drawing ended up looking like a crap art-house film poster; a feeble attempt to draw people in through it "symbolic" work of art about reflection. It's some scribbles on a page, nothing more.
The drawing on the right, while much better than the scribbles, still looks a little off to me. The life drawing of the 'pathetic pirate' looks reasonably good if you didn't know what the model really looked like. In reality, the model has a wide torso with not so long legs and slightly more muscular arms. The drawing I did here makes him more squashed and thin than he should be. This all goes back to my own style of drawing, which is more cartoony, with large expressive eyes and the body parts are made up of simple shapes with no so many curves. My style is reflected in a lot of my life drawings and clearly doesn't work. This is a problem I will always have to work on.
I AM NOT THIS GOOD AT LIFE DRAWING. REPEAT, I AM NOT THIS GOOD AT LIFE DRAWING. Now that we've got that out of the way, no this isn't one of my drawings, not really. The exercise that lead to this drawing was to spend 2 minutes on drawing the model and then go to another person's drawing and add to theirs. The drawing above is the drawing I was first to draw. The sketchy outline of this drawing is mine. The added in details that made this drawing a whole lot better was done by other students. And boy, am I impressed! The animation industry constantly passes character and background designs to different artists to see if they can add to the concept. People are going to tamper with you're precious art for better or worse that this exercise is a good way for us to get used to it! This drawing definitely came out for the better!
These final sketches are rough 2 minute drawings to help us warm up. Warm-up drawings are always a good way to get prepare your hand for some serious drawing! The poses themselves…I could've done a lot better but warm-ups aren't supposed to be that great anyway! These drawings also help on my view of perspective, which is one of my weakest skills in life drawing.
Yet another bouncy ball exercise but this time bouncing against a 3D room instead of a blank space! The aim was to correct the timing of the ball, show how it bounces against the wall (indicating how rubbery the ball was) and figure out where the shadows should be placed.
Though this clip is more aesthetically pleasing than the last 2D bouncing ball animation, I believe I need more practice on the placing of the shadows. The shadows here seem to follow the ball and although that IS what shadows are supposed to do, they don't always follow the ball right behind it! It all depends on what direction the light is shining on the object and I seem to have forgotten that whilst doing the exercise.
Also I have a feeling the ball was moving too fast for 24 fps. I'm not quite how to solve this yet...
However, the ball is moving smoothly unlike the last exercise and resembles the shapes it would make when being bounced off a wall!
