Score for More

I decided that the best way to approach this animation would be to do it properly, hehe. As it has been established many times before, one of the first things that animators usually produce first for an animation is the score, or at the very least a sound board in which to work from. So before I go into animating or even creating an animatic, I have produced a draft score.

I had help from my Tutor Gareth who supplied a large assortment of instruments and helped out act out the script (supplying half the characters and sound effects)

The Winking Slug

So I haven’t uploaded anything in a while. It’s not to say that I havne’t been doing stuff, I just haven’t found the right time to upload what I’ve been up to. So hopefully that’ll be up in the next few days now that I’ve got some freetime with reading week coming up. For now, I’ll just pop up some stuff that I quickly threw together in the last day.

yesterday I was asked if I could create an avatar of a slug winking. So I did. here are the sketches:

 

From there I picked the ones I thought would be the best to present, cleaned them up and added some colour:

And there you go, a bright and amusing winking slug.

Not Project Related

Just fancied doodling something. Thought I might as well upload it.

Charley Cycle V2

An updated version to the original Charley on the Move Flash. I’ve added a jump cycle:

Charley Cycle

Currently a work in progress. It’s an interactive flash file which shows different movements of my character Charley. The images are roughly drawn because I seem to find the long way around doing things and this has literally taken me all day (although I have also been learning to different types of movements as well so that might be while it took so long). I’ll update it as I improve it:

Late Submission

Something I realised I never got submitted last year was a proper walk cycle and understanding of key frames and other frames. Most of my information about this came from Richard Williams’ ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ and other bits I found in articles about animation on the internet.

 To start we first establish the key frames. These are the crucial points in an animation as these drawings are what will tell the story. They’re what we could use for the storyboards or even the images to an individual panel of a comic strip.

 For this instance, the two key frames mark the beginning and end of the animation and two whole runs of the walk cycle.

Next we have the extremes. These are the points where the character might interact with something or contact with something is present. In this case I have noted all the points when the feet touch the floor. This gives us an idea of how many steps it might take the character to walk from one key frame to the next. Although the key frames and the extremes are pretty much the same images, the distinct difference is that the extremes are not necessary in order to explain what is happening in the event. They serve purely as the initial planning to the animation.

The breakdowns are the next step to the animation. also known as passing positions, the midpoint between two extremes (or key frame and extreme). As this is slowly developing into a fully fledged animated piece, the breakdown stage of the animation can be used to see for any errors in the animation, check time and pacing and make any necessary edits or changes before the serious animating is done.

Then we have the in-between frames, the remaining frames or even straight ahead runs. These are the final drawings that will link the key frame to the extremes and the extremes to the breakdowns. This will give the animation body, a smooth motion  in which the character appears to flow across the screen seamlessly (or intended to). Once this stage is complete, we can then play the frames back one by one at a pace that suits the animation. This took three hours to put together, is forty-eight frames long, runs at twelves frames a second with an un-looped time of just under four seconds long. Enjoy:

Mr Fox

Considering the short explanation I made for my narrative project, I thought I would take the chance to quickly throw together a design for mister Fox. Just in the event I might actually take the Fox and the Apple animation idea further:

The weird creature thing on the second image in the top-right corner of the page is just something random I sketched and inked. It’s not related to the animation with Mr Fox, I just find myself going on a tangent sometimes when I’m coming up with ideas.

I decided to add a bit of colour to break from the dullness of the grayscale and to give a colourful visual to Mr Fox, what he might end up looking like.

Bringing Literature to Life in Panel Form

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This is the storyboard to my campaign animation. Instead of just telling you what’s going on, I’m going to do a bit of a crossover with my other project and explain the narrative of this animation. Then I’ll go a little into why I chose to animate this set sequence of actions.

Setup – Charley is walking through the library playing his handheld console, completely oblivious to his surroundings. Through his blind trek through the library he kicks a book, which makes him fall over. As he stands back up he grabs the book. He looks into the book and a flash of light surrounds him.

In this case, the initial event of the setup which creates the following events to occur is when Charley picked up the book and began to read it.

Conflict – Dazed, Charley finds himself on a vessel. Standing at the bow of the ship, looking out to the sea. Charley stands nervously as a great-white whale burst from the sea high into the air. The man at the bow lifts the harpoon he had in hand and tosses it towards the whale, missing. Charley looks up to see the whale falling towards the ship and Charley covers his face with his arms. The screen goes black.

Charley opens his eyes to see small people walking about him. He notices them chucking rope across him and some of the small people hammering the rope into the ground. He quickly bolts up while breaking the rope off him at the same time, relaising he was washed a shore from the whale attack. The small people start running around frantically in an attempt to not get squished and in fear. As soon as Charley is up straight he darts off, trying his best to get away from the shore as quick as possible.

While running he is suddenly lifted off into the air by a giant eagle. He grabs its feet in an attempt to pull himself loose with no success. When he calms down slightly Charley notices the view of the land below him and is amazed, but is quickly brought to ‘reality’ when he sees a giant nest sat on a cliff side, with chicks in it chirping hungrily. He begins to frantically beat the birds feet and the eagle finally let’s go of him near the cliff’s edges. He rolls to safety and stops near a skeleton. With no pause for a break, a dragon flies down and roars at Charley aggressively.

Climax -  Charley smirks, quickly grabs the sword, shield and helmet sat on the skeleton and charges towards the dragon.

Resolution – While Charley dashes towards the beast, the dragon bellows a torrent of fire, filling the screen and fading into white. Then the campaign logo “Bringing Literature to Life” and the additional logo “Be Apart of the Adventure” fade in and the campaign ends there.

So why did I choose to establish performing certain actions within the campaign?

His obliviousness in the library is to establish is disinterest in reading or the books. It’s not until after he is forced to confront a book (by kicking it) that he is tempted to look at the book.

The fear that he establishes for the first half of the campaign add a bit of realism to it, making the idea of a fantastical world seem scary to a new person.

The point of his good feeling as he is soaring through the air is just to give a small hint that he is starting to take to the idea of this Literary wonderland.

His change in characteristic when facing the dragon, challenging it rather than running away, is the transformation in his character which constitutes to his acceptance of the literary world. He has finally taken to the fantasy and, instead of avoiding, wants to become apart of it. This is the change in the character that will hopefully allow the target audience to realise the fun and interesting adventures to be had with literature.

[Nar-uh-tiv] Structure

[Warning: Big bundle of text with very few pictures. Not for the faint of heart or easily bored.]

Keith Reynolds Can’t Make It Tonight by Felix Massie

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9 by Jake Armstrong

Bendito Machine by Jossie Malis 

Procrastination by Johnny Kelly (Coincidently something I suffer a lot of… especially the tea bit)

Meltdown by Sam Morrill

Birdboy by Alberto Vazquez & Pedro Rivero

DNAUXB by Tony Comley

The Cat Piano by Eddie White & Ari Gibson

Puppet by Patrick Smith

Blik by Bastiaan Schravendeel

One rat Short by Alex Weil

nar-ra-tive

[nar-uh-tiv]  noun

1. a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.

2. a book, literary work, etc., containing such a story.

3. the art, technique, or process of narrating.

 

All of these animations above are different in their own way. Their animated style, length, complexity, tools, fluidity etc. But there is one thing that all these animations have in common and which a large majority of non-abstract, and even some abstract, animations have. Narrative.

Narrative is basically the foundation of any story to any animation, film, book, theatrical play etc. its the setup to a story that gives it structure and meaning. Narrative is commonly broken down into three components that bring a story together:

Setup – The stage of the story were the audience is introduced to the main characters, primarily the protagonists & friends and sometimes the Antagonist and their friends, any history that leads to the main body of the story and other materials that would be necessary to establish the beginning (This could include a small story itself, such as a prologue, to build up the beginning). The setup is important as it establishes the characters giving what will eventually stick with the audience throughout the story, life. This is also were a problem would be introduced, something that would push the story forward (An example of this is when a large explosion goes off in the animation Birdboy, killing nearly everything or when the puppet strikes the guy in the face for the first time in Puppet). This then leads into conflict, or act two in other words.

Conflict – The primary part of the story. An event or events that are usually triggered by the catalyst (The initial incident that occurred in the setup). This is the parts of the story were we see the protagonist journey, the discovery of the key to the resolution, the antagonist plotting and throwing obstacles in front of the protagonist, the further development of the characters (the character arc, in which the protagonists goes through life changing understanding by the events that surrounds him/her or have been through). This conflict allows the story to build up into an event that can be resolved. This leads us to the resolution.

Resolution – the point in which the event becomes overwhelming. This could mean the protagonist has arrived at the allocated destination of his journey, the key to the answer has been set in place, the plots of the antagonist are nearing an end or the final battle has commenced.  This gives the story closure and allows the audience to see all the pieces of the story come together, to give meaning to the events that have taken place and ultimately establishes the climax (the point in the story when a decision or action is made usually made by the protagonist that becomes the turning point of the narrative and also defining to the protagonist  who they are as a person) of the journey for the protagonist and/or antagonist. The most common use of this resolution os to allow the audience to see the protagonist finally overcome the antagonist i.e. the hero beating the villain. The basic good finally conquering evil. It would be hard to imagine a story without resolution. It would be a story where the hero is forever journeying and the threat of the antagonist forever developing, both cases in which it is no longer interesting or of importance because neither will finally accomplish what they set out to do.

If we take one of the animations above, DNAUXB for instance, we can break it down to its basic narrative components. The setup shows the character, Bear for simplicity, flying out of a large ship that is currently exploding into a space war. This establishes the motives of the setup being escape and survival. In the conflict he is targeted by two enemy spaceships and is forced into a cat & mouse chase. After escaping the two enemy ships he warps away, into a larger problem, the mothership, as he then tries to escape he is attacked once again when the mothership fires a large number of drones. So we can obtain from this that the protagonist chooses the option to run, which leads us to the climax when he returns with the drones chasing him in the act of self-sacrifice, bringing us to the resolution. He crashes into the mothership along with the drones, destroying the enemy in his sacrifice and assuming saving something or someone. That is DNAUXB simplified to the narrative structures considered above.

So we have the basis of the beginning, middle and end of a narrative. So the question I ask myself is why did I look into the structure of narrative?

I have been set a new project. A fictional animation. One with a story, a made up story. a story with a narrative (not abstract is basically what I mean here… yay for not abstract). The importance of this little research is that I intend to produce a short story that have all of these components of narrative. Setup, conflict, resolution and climax, revolving around the overall plot of this animation.

So to finish this little rant up, I’ll throw out a quick idea of a narrative story that I could propose for an animation:

Fox walks out of his little hut and stretches. He yawns and pets his stomach, clearly hungry. He walks out into the shallow forest for a bit, walking past pig who is stood on a ladder fixing his roof, and ends up by a tree. upon inspecting the tree Fox sees an apple hanging off a fairly high branch. After trying to get the apple, running jumps, kick and all, Fox remembers Pig with the ladder. Rushing back to pig he asks to borrow his ladder. Pig lends him the ladder which Fox then uses to climb the tree and pick the apple.

Setup – We are introduced to Fox and establish that he is hungry. The hunger is the initial incident that starts the journey off, which in this case is looking for food.

Conflict – Fox progresses the story by looking for food, passing Pig through his journey and eventually arrives to the apple. Through his attempts to retrieve the apple, the first and only climax of the story occurs in which fox decides to ask Pig for his ladder, rather then walking away and leaving the apple or continue to reach the apple pointlessly.

Resolution – Fox obtains the ladder, returns to the tree and gains the apple, which he then eats happily. Like the beginning, this part of the narrative is short as it serves to close the story. Fox is no longer hungry.

Charley

I thought it would be appropriate to upload the designs that have gone into developing Charley. They’re a bit grey as I photographed these from my sketch book (didn’t have a scanner around me at the time):

I already had an idea that I wanted to develop a mascot type character for the campaign. Something that the target audience could maybe relate with or like. I wanted to create a cartoony style similar to the sort of cartoon you would find on CartoonNetwork or Nickelodeon as it would allow it to fit in perfectly with those types of channels. So this page was basically a starting point of the character. At the time I hadn’t really given Charley his name and used this primarily as a way to get some ideas on paper. As you can tell I took a liking the bottom-left image of Charley as something about it just sat right with me. I even made a note of it.

After picking a Charley that I liked, I then furthered developed on it. I did a bit of study on the facial expressions that I could and would maybe be required to employ in the campaign if it was to continue as planned. Details that concentrated in particular for this Charley was his round head and his neck. The head I decided needed a bit more shape to it, something that would make it stand out as a face and not just a circle with eyes and the neck related details was more of an application of a neck, what size and thickness of neck as a lot of characters that I have designed in the past didn’t get a neck. This lack of neck application was due to my lack of confidence as I can be repelled from a design very easily if certain details are off and the neck is unfortunately one of those areas that puts me off continuing a design.

I know, a bad habit to have as both an artist and animator but its something that, especially in this project, I’m trying to breakout of. This could also be taken as me coming to terms with the fact that everything i make won’t be perfect first time round and that designs don’t have to be perfect first time round, hence why they’re design.

The face in the top-left of the page shows how Charley’s face began to develop. The way that his hair is becoming that three-wave constant with the flicks at the back. I used this page mostly to draw Charley at different angles. So laid down, as a giant, a person looking down at him (that’s the Charley with the books) and slightly from the side with a bit of height added. In the middle of the page is a Charley that doesn’t really fit in with the rest. This is because I decided to try my hands at drawing Charley in a different style, in this case like Jake Long from American Dragon (A cartoon a use to watch and one that I was reminded of as I drew the various designs of Charley). I did this so that I could get an idea for a different approach to Charley as I wasn’t too fond of how the general shape of his body was turning out. This allowed me to adapt certain aspects of Jake Long that I liked and apply them to Charley (such as the posture that Jake naturally holds or the way the clothing is drawn on him).

This page was used to try and develop some action poses of Charley, along with facial designs to show examples of what Charley’s face would look like when he was to express certain emotions. This page was ultimately the lead up to the character sheet that would be presented in the proposal to the client. I wanted to include at least one pose of Charley running as I still struggle with proportions when the limbs of a character are put into exaggerated positions (for instance, the top-left image of Charley show him sprinting but his arms and legs are clearly too long and stretched out too far, even for a cartoon standard). Something you’ll notice about all these Charley’s is that the outer eye always intercepts the line that represents the side of his face. At the time this was how I was drawing him but I eventually pulled his eye back onto his face as it was looking too alien for my liking and also gave him a large gap between his eyes. Also you’ll notice that there are pointy fingered hands that are on either side of the running-at-an-angle Charley, that were at the time just an idea of how i could draw Charley’s hands differently. I kept to the standard rectangular fingers for a while but on the final Character sheet you’ll see the pointed fingers again. This was eventually re-applied as it just flowed out naturally as I drew Charley’s fingers and I decided anything that I did on instinct I would keep in as it would make animating it easier (because I wouldn’t have to concentrate on it as much, allowing me to concentrate on other parts).

This is the attempt at creating Charley’s character sheet. Various things that appeared on this page just made me want to reject Charley as a character all together, I know that’s a little extreme. It’s mostly because what I was drawing here would effectively be the ‘final’ design of Charley, the one I would present to the client and for some reason I couldn’t quite get him right. I think the problem was that I was trying to just flat-out create the character sheet. So after disliking it enough to start over, I moved onto the PC and create the character sheet from scratch on there. I chose to do this as it meant I could make as many mistakes I wanted and go back and not only re-edit them with ease but also spread the designing around the page. Hide designs of Charley that might distract me and basically make the whole process easier.

Quickly, Something I hadn’t done as of yet was look at some colour designs for Charley. It was all great and all drawing him but the final animation wasn’t intended to be in black and white, and as a result it meant that I would need to consider the colours of Charley. I took this as an opportunity to look through colourlovers.com again, and find a colour scheme that I liked.

Something that I forgot to present during the practise client presentation was the colour palette (I forgot to put it into my presentation folder). Its nothign too major but it did show my look at the types of colour patterns I could apply to Charley. They were considered after the above image (which was used as a purely experimental approach to illustrating Charley that had colour applied after I finished the colour palette). Through this colour test I could pick out a colour pattern that i liked, which ended up being the third one of the palette although I did make a few more changes (the hair was made brown and the colour saturation was increased to add more flare to him).

With all this considered, I was able to move onto designing the Character sheet, and ultimately the design of Charley that I was confident with which I could then present to the client.