This is a personal journal started from the 31st of October:
Principles of Animation: Push, Pull and lift exercises part 2
We continued the 2D exercise from last week so I attempted to do the pull exercise first.
We were also encouraged to do more of paper animation so I decided to do the lift exercise using paper. However, it took me a really long time to add the in-between and since some of the in-between are still undone, the animation doesn’t look as smooth as it should.
I tried using After Effects to edit the movements of the character which came out looking better than the original although it’s still not up to my personal standard.
Reflection from class:
I’m really satisfied with my pull exercise because it looks smooth and portrays the image that I have in mind thanks to my teacher’s advice.
However, I had a really hard time with the paper animation just because it took me longer to draw and to shoot as well. Hence, I’m still trying to get used to the process and plan to do the paper animation first before attempting to do 2D animation so that if I run out of time, I can always finish my 2D animation at home.
Stop motion TECHNICAL WORKSHOP (1st Nov):
I chose the stop-motion technical workshop because I tried both 2D and 3D workshops when I was in my BA years and am already quite familiar with them.
My aim for this workshop is to learn dragonframe software and sculpturing the characters in real life.
For our first class, we were asked to design our characters and choose one that we will animate upon.
Since the teacher told us that we will need to make the same character twice, I decided to go with the 2nd design in order to save time even though my heart is quite set on the 1st design.
I then started the sculpturing process as seen below.
Password: ilikeicecream
Due to clay scarcity, both of my model of the same character have different colour. I also notice that my second model is bigger than the first one.
Because there weren’t enough space for me to shoot at first, I decided to use my phone to shoot but the result isn’t satisfying.
Since I was running out of time but still wanted to present decent work, I decided to proceed with normal shooting and edited the video in After effects to zoom in more and add sound effects.
The animation came out somewhat darker than I expected but it was able to capture the mood of horror I wanted to go with since the character got squished to death.
Reflection from class:
I felt really rushed since we didn’t have enough room to shoot, so I needed to speed up sculpturing my model and also the shooting process so that my friend can use it too.
Still, it was a great class that helped me plan how I want to shoot the characters and become more experimentative.
Character Design WORKSHOP (2nd Nov):
We were asked to write the story for the character we had in mind and think about how we would like their shapes to communicate their personalities to the audience.
Story:
Lil Marcus got cursed by a witch because he has low self-esteem (and the witch got annoyed by that so she made him green with a fork stuck on his eye and octopus legs coming out of his mouth).
He lives in a magical ancient town and he wants to get the fork out of his eyes and the octopus out of his mouth. He just wants to be normal again.
He’ll get what he wants once he starts liking himself in this form (he doesn’t know that). He needs to overcome his insecurities.
Reflection from class:
It was a really straightforward class and with extra time, I managed to finish the character sheet by the end of the class.
Life drawing (3rd Nov): Gestures drawing
Reflection from class:
I really enjoyed this week’s life drawing because I am able to locate the bean this time and got more advice from my teacher on how to connect the beans together.
Looking at the drawings, I feel like I have improved even more from last week and am genuinely delighted with the result.
Overall reflection week 6:
This week has been entertaining and amusing since I got to explore new things with the stop-motion workshop and sharpen my character design skills with the character design workshop.
I am happy with my works and could see my hard work being paid off.
My aim is to challenge myself with designs I don’t usually go for with classes next week.