I like how these have turned, especially the Library Front and the Bookcase shots. I decided to do the colouring as shown because it allowed me to apply colour quickly and it gave the animation na unique look. The intention is that anything that animates will be coloured properly to seperate it from the background, distinguishing parts of the video more easily.

I think these will be the only backgrounds for now, or at least to this quality as these have taken quite sometime to produce and I’m currently just trying to bust out the anamatic itself for now. So most, if not, all of my attention is going to be on the character’s and animation’s motions and basically trying to finish a draft of the entire video in anamatic form.

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)

Edit: Fixed the link so that the image should link to my DeviantArt page with the uploaded flash file on it. Also, the sound file is approximately four minutes and fifty seconds long. Enjoy

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.

 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:

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.

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.

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

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.