Sunday 7 December 2008

I would like to show you my some of my very first animation exercises. The first one is of a flower shooting up from the ground and then blossoming and the second is of a tap dripping. I think that they are quite succssful, however, I do realise that they are not perfect.I hope you like them anyway!!


With the flower animation I wanted there to be a sense of anticipation. I wanted it to be as close to actual movement of a flower growing and blossoming as possible. I didn't want the flower to spring up too quickly as it would not be a true representation of a flowers movement when growing. I think it worked but it's not as accurate as I would have liked it to have been. To give a sense of anticipation I repeated some frames in the sequence, for example when the bud was about to open I went back to the frame before that and shot it again.
I like the style of drawing I used for the dripping tap. I do, however, think I could have drawn another frame for the splash. This is because I believe it ends too abruptly. I had tried to make the water, sort of, hesitate for a while before finally allowing it to drip out of the tap. This was done to emmulate the way in which water hangs onto the rim of the tap just before it drips in reality. I also decided to repeat some frames in this animation to give the feeling of, agian, anticipation. By repeating certain frames it made the water look as though it were bouncing, or bobbing up and down before it dripped.
I have recently had a couple of lessons in character design. During these lesson we were asked to create a character and to develop it. My character is called "Abstract Annie". Annie is made of various shapes and lines and her features have been slightly exaggerated. For example I have given her very pronounced cheek bones, huge eyes and a ridiculously small waist. I went through several facial design before finally finding one I really liked. We were asked to create a mood sheet or page for our character. The mood page should show your character from different view points or expressing various emotions. The first image you see is of the various facial design ideas I went through for Annie. I decided to go with the one on the bottom right hand corner as I felt she had a very emotive sort of face and I liked the propotioning of her facial features. The images you see of Annie in full form were done during the second lesson of character design. It was in this lesson that we had to experiment with movement concerning our characters. We had to show them performing differrent types of actions so as to develop their particular way of moving. It wasn't easy!! Annie was made of alot of different shapes and so I had to simplify by just concerntrating on the simple outline of her over al shape. It was a really enjoyable exercise and I learnt how to make the characters movements emmulate the personality of the character.

Supporting Studies

I am currently studying Animation Arts at The University for the Creative arts and for several weeks now we have been attending lessons known as "Supporting Studies". I have found these lessons very helpful as we have been able to practice things such as; drawing within a limited time, drawing people in motion and even some storyboarding. I would like to show you some examples of the work I have been doing in the lessons.