3rd Year Work

Okay catch up for over the past few weeks. We've recently been introduced to working on the 3rd year projects with each of us doing small tasks in one way or another. I have been set to work with Cherie on her film Timmy's Gift, as the CG Artist, which entails lighting the scenes. Below is a mood board on the kind of styles of lighting that Cherie would like:



The film will have a feel of the Tim Burton-esque, so something kind of dark and eerie. The story is about a boy called Timmy, who attends a sort of magic school, and he gets put through a few challenges to find out what his magical gift is. During this small film we also see other characters: Rowley, a little tubby kid; Milton, a geeky looking kid; a spider, Timmy's friend and Diederich, the evil seeming teacher putting children through a string of tough tasks so that they can find their powers.

So far I've done the main base lighting that will be referenced into all the shots, relevent to which lighting mood is wanted.

On with the tricky part ...

Over the past few weeks, we've all started to be re-introduced to essays: the reading and writing part of the course more namely known as research and method. Below is listed my chosen three texts I've decided to look at:

'Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women's Animated Bodies by Elizabeth Bell.' In: From Mouse to Mermaid.

'Putting themselves in the pictures: Images of women in the work of Joanna Quinn, Candy Guard and Alison de Vere by Sandra Law.' In: A Reader in Animation Studies.

' "A Certain Refusal of Difference": Feminism and Film Theory from The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis by Constance Penley.' In: The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.

For this literature review, I have chosen the topic feminism; and within that the representation of women. The first text as listed above explores the theme of how Disney represents women in their films. The second text, deals with the analysis of female animators and their approach to creating an animated film and how, in turn they represent women. My final chosen text looks at how women were represented in early classical film and touches upon how men perceived women, within the field of working in film.

Over the Easter holidays I will be continuing to study around the subject of feminism and the representation of women, to get a greater understanding in that field and apply what I've learnt to produce a film analysis.

Me thinks this is how a computer virus should be!

It may also provide much more entertainment when a program crashes... yes, I did indeed get distracted for 10 minutes

Animated Short Film Oscar Winner 2010

Thought I'd check this short out when I saw quite a few people mentioning it. Logorama, directed by H5 (François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy et Ludovic Houplain), is the new animated film that so far has won many awards throughout 2009 and part of this year. It can be quite random at times but it does have a general simple storyline throughout, with car chases, intense hostage crisis and zoo animals rampaging through the city. It's a pretty clever little animation, with a few things including: Ronald McDonald not being able to jump over a weight watchers sign; the ground cracking into an x-box logo and falling signs including the American banks which probably signifies that they went bust. I'm sure there's plenty more things to spot watching this film over and over, which I think it's why I like it, there's quite a bit of re-watchability in it. So if you've got a few, check it out ...

And so the sun sets...

Now, I must admit that I have slightly been slacking on blog posts here over the past three weeks, but have pretty much been working non-stop with not much free time. But here it is, the updates from the pas three weeks, right here over the next few blog posts. First off there's continuing and finishing the Design Bible for my pre-production project, starting to work on the 3rd years' major projects and of course there's a bit of writing splashed in there with the production of a few essays and a dissertation proposal due in. To start with I'll go over the work that has become my Design Bible.

Characters

For the final pages in my Design Bible I had to produce pages exploring the two main characters movement (the Doctor and Rose) and produce final turnaround sheets, and a final colour image as to how they would look in an animation. I think my most successful and well-designed character is Rose and I think I have developed her character well as I subconsciously designed her as the main protagonist which I do feel that the Doctors companion is, for the Doctor wouldn't be able to achieve what he does without them. I especially liked the thought process behind the design of her character and the others as well, at how their faces were going to look and changing body proportions to come up with something new, and how the hairstyle affects the initial thought of what their personality is like. After this was designing the clothes and possible combinations of different fashions and coming up with new ideas, and also how changing the colour can reflect a different personality. Below are my final character pages for the Design Bible. Also included are three sheets exploring the characters movements for the main characters, along with turnaround sheets and facial expressions.











Backgrounds

Below you'll see the most of the concept and finished background work that was included in my Design Bible. I really enjoyed creating the last image which is of Reinette's bedroom, it's very showy and detailed just as a 1700's french bedroom. I particularly enjoyed colouring in the lighting and the final effects on how the light catches the bedposts and drapes creating some nice shadows.











All-in-all I have really enjoyed this project and have worked really hard on it to produce some good work that I'm proud of and hopefully a couple of pages that my tutors will be happy with. I particularly enjoyed designing the clothes for all my characters and all the possibilities of colour variations and clothing combinations that could have been, but my favourites were the designs for the main characters. The hardest part of this project was drawing the male characters, getting the right body proportions and facial construction was quite a difficult task for me to overcome; but at the end of it I feel as though I have learnt a lot on designing the male characters and also designing any character on the whole. However, even though I have put a lot of effort into this project, I feel as though I could have produced a bit more work on a couple more additional characters, and if I had another week or two I would have loved to have explored the spacey side of my chosen script further to add a bit of contrast into the Design Bible.

Overall this has been an excellent learning curve for me, and I now know about the process behind designing an animation Design Bible and what it takes to produce even a small amount of work for it, but hopefully in time, I will become progressively better and quicker at coming up with ideas of characters and backgrounds. Over the Easter break I hope to pursue the pre-production area further and apply what I've learnt from this project to my own work to produce some really good drawings and concepts.