Dialog Acting

This dialog animation was alot of fun.  Before I thought that dialog limited you as an animator, since you had to animate to a preexisting rhythm.  However, just like with the conducting scene, it was actually more liberating than confining.  Now I just had to come up with ways to allow my animation to enhance what was being said.  We were also given the luxury of coming up with whatever story we wanted that made sense in our context.

In mine, I decided to have it that the cat caught the bird, and then the bird tries to get on the cat's sentimental side in order to save his own skin.

Special mention to our teacher for these two weeks, who was absolutely amazing!  Don't think I could have worked this well if it wasn't for him.

Next week, LAYOUT!

Character set

Well, after two weeks of straining labor I have finally created the character I will be animating starting May 9th.  It was a difficult journey, but the destination was satisfying and the travels enlightening.

Next week, Dialog Acting with a teacher who worked on:

Clay Time

 I have had alot of fun working with this material.  The exact name of the brand escapes me for the moment, but I wish I have had some of this when I was in school.  Unlike that terrible brown clay that could never keep itself up, this clay does exactly what you want it to, and never dries up (well, it will eventually, but never during time of production).  Here is my character for the escape project visualized in three dimensions!

Casting Call

Character Design is turning out to be tougher than I give it credit for.

We were given some new techniques and tools in desiging characters, the results of that right beneath:

The idea here was to design a character through the means of Photoshop, by cutting images apart and constructing a character Frankenstein style.  Another approach was to take pieces apart into distinct random shapes and piece them together.  One approach I took was to make random shapes in Photoshop and adjust as necessary there.  And the final two examples at the top involve manipulating the Pen tool and making simplistic lines.

Turned out I wasn't that keen on that system, though through examples from proffessionals and students I can see how it can work.  Interesting as it was, I just couldn't find my protagonist through these means.  So I was given free reign to draw on paper, and the top and bottom pages are what resulted from a day's work.

I demonstrated these to the teacher, and apparently these were much improved, and we agreed on which one we found most appealing:

That was the second one I drew.  Should have stopped then and called it a day :P  Tomorrow we will be making Maquettes of our characters.  Should be fun.



Lightbulb

Heres what I came up with for yesterday's assignment.  We were supposed to design characters for EU that will help convince people of switching from Incandescent light bulbs to Fluorescent ones.  I came up with a story regarding it all, where I pictures the consumer's relationship with Incandescent light bulbs similar to a relationship with an abusive boy/girlfriend.  You should leave him/her for someone better, but for some reason you don't.