Talking About Birds

So I'll be posting up my final animation piece (aside from the showreel of course) tomorrow so I figured I would say a few words here about it. As this thing's probably been marked already this will mostly be for my own gain when I write this lot up in my sketchbook. So yeah, given it's late at night  and the stuff mentioned above, I probably won't put any pictures in much. Maybe a couple.

So a quick overview first: it's an animation about art movements. I couldn't find quite enough to sink my teeth into with modernism or postmodernism I had an idea about how to do an animation based around art movements. As I still wanted to get a bit of focus on modernism and post modernism I based the movements on the ones before and after modernism. So there's Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Pop Art.

The project went through several shifts in perspective and style over the time I've been working on it. Even to the stage where I was planning on a very different ending just a few hours ago. So I'll start at the most appropriate part for this: The End. You see I was initially planning a slow zoom in through the window where the title would appear after the fighting artists are offscreen in a nice hand-drawn font and the first bird would fly by. But it was then I realised that because of all the horribly complex animated action at the bottom I'd have an extremely hard time pulling that off. perhaps if I were using aftereffects it might've worked but I was so far down this route that I had no options to change. By this point I'd already finished the fight section for the end and it had ended up a bit more brutal than intended. And I don't quite know why I though of this but I remembered the ending of one of my favourite horror-ish films: Funny Games. If I get time I'll do a spotlight on it. I mean generally speaking it's not a film I'd thought I would like. A thoroughly harsh film that's really unpleasant to watch, it has just enough satire and taste to pull it off. But the point I though of was the very end. After the film ends in a pretty spectacular manner the title hits the screen on a black background with red text (I ended up using white on mine though) with heavy thrash metal cutting in. It's an unpleasant ending for an unpleasant film. And I love it. And despite my animation not having sound at the moment I'll try and emulate that ending.

Whilst i think of other influences I'll just jot down where the inspiration came for each bird. The first one was done in my standard cartoony style but with the eyes borrowed from the very glossy eyes of my robot drawings and a couple of touches from Girls With Slingshots. The second and third just used generic google searches to find some inspiration. I'm not that happy with them really. I did them a week or so before the second batch and it kinda shows. For the modernism one I borrowed heavily from this picture:

I sadly can't find who did it. I'll try and get it for the sketchbook though. The postmodernism one was quite fun to do. As postmodernism is so varied I decided to give it a shot myself. I took the theory of minimalism, and employed it to a bird. I managed to reduce it to a square with a triangle for a beak. The wing was added just to give me something to animate. The pop art one was a mixture of lichtenstein and warhol's styles, using a very comic-based bird picture partially inspired by the bird logo of Darby Productions and my general experiences reading comics, and the duplicating picture style of warhol.

So onto the animation itself. I'd done three animations at this point. Or at least done a good chunk of three. The first was a decent length and looked fairl nice, but the animation was really clunky and the dialogue was terribly done. I'd also tried to hide how basic it was and probably made it worse by doing it. The second was my attempt at doing really smooth and decent animation. I used aftereffects for the first time in a final piece. And the last time too it would seem for this year at least. The animation was smooth and really nice but rigging up the characters took an age, and the animating was very slow. It's something I might revisit in the future though. I also tried to return to it recently but the layers are so badly organised it would take forever to do more work on so I'll just sew on the other pictures I'd done. So I'd done really clunky before and got a decent amount from even if it was very badly executed. And I'd done smooth animation that looks almost professional but it takes too long to put together a decent project. So for my 'third' project, the one I replaced Kelly's sessions with, I tried simplifying the art (and doing it digitally) and attempting a more frame-by-frame style. It turned out fairly well but used up that option for the final project. So I went back to the start, and used the same techniques as the first animation but with a knowing attitude, and far more experience. I also found inspiration from The Darkness's latest music video, which was made by one of my favourite comic artists ever, Nick Roche. The video's called Barbarian but I'm too tired to link it now. But yeah, I made this animation knowing immediately the limitations I would have and that instead of going for massive quality, I';d craft the whole thing with some preset boundaries in place. And through doin g this I was able to deliver on some of the best art Ive done for an animation yet.

So 'Birds: An Animation About Art' will drop tomorrow, and it's a weird one. I think I like it.

Spotlight: Bravoman: Super-Unequaled Hero of Excellence by Matt Moylan and Dax Gordine

Bravoman oh beautiful Bravoman. Why did you life end so suddenly? Oh sweet Bravoman you had so much left to give!
Okay that aside, Bravoman is the next chapter in my Spotlight list. It was a webcomic set up by Shiftylook, a studio set up to try and make good of some of Namco-Bandai's unused intellectual property. You see, Bravoman started out as a really difficult 1980s side-scrolling videogame. It got a very limited release outside of japan and outside of a couple of crossovers he never really showed up since. But as one of the launch titles for the Shiftylook campaign he was suddenly back in the spotlight!

As a comic it's a hilarious fourth-wall breaking affair with a truly wonderful set of characters. Its plotlines range from genuinely good to utterly bonkers, and it's a total hoot. Later it also gained itself a webtoon show with voices by Rob Paulsen and Dee Bradley Baker among others. It's quite fantastic and has an awesome theme tune.

It also gained a new videogame, but that really wasn't very good. It was perhaps the first sign of things to come. It felt rushed, and another month or two of development would have made it great. But alas, it was not to be. Shiftylook went bust. And it dragged all of its work with it. Numerous webcomics vanished. Lost to some corporate idiot's lack of business sense. It's pretty tragic. At least Bravoman got a nice enough finish. And hopefully they'll finish publishing the Bravoman books.
GO--GO--BRAVO!!!

Spotlight: Last Stand Of The Wreckers by Nick Roche and James Roberts (and Guido Guidi)

This one's been a long time coming. So welcome to my favourite comic series ever made.
It's no secret that I have a lot of love for Transformers. Whilst the films are mediocre and the TV shows usually good, the one part of the brand that really captured me and continues to amaze is the IDW comic series. They got off to a slow start in 2005 after the previous license-holders went down in a storm of bankrupcy, but after a few years they rebooted the series with a something of a year-long romp, before starting another series with a different author. Around that time an up-and-coming Irish artist and writer Nick Roche pitched in idea for a five-part miniseries. Last Stand Of The Wreckers was born.

Transformers is a brand with some thirty years of history. During that time many new iterations of the brand showed their faces, but the cast of the 1980s cartoon show would be the most endearing and the characters would always inspire those to come. The IDW continuity is specifically based on those characters so this comes across even stronger here. Y'see with transformers there's a very nasty habit of always having the spotlight on that particular group of characters. Part of IDW still falls prey to that. But Wreckers was different. It set out with a simple aim: to make the reader care about a series of new characters as much as they did the old, established ones. And then it set about one of the most brutal plotlines in transforming robot history. It is a story of courage, heroism, and good people dying in stupid, pointless ways.

Quite frankly it's bloody brilliant and even if you don't know Transformers you'll probably get a lot out of this story. The art is really expressive and the writing is so on-point and relatable you'd forget it was robots talking. And that's one of the true merits of Wreckers. It's not just good transformers. It's just good everything.

Spotlight: Danielle Corsetto and Girls with Slingshots

So as I still have a little bit of time before all this is due to be handed in, I figured I should do some short talks about artists that have been important over the course of the year. So here goes.
Girls with Slingshots is a webcomic. One of the best too. It ran for over ten years and ended this January. The strip was mostly daily and has amassed over 2000 pages in its duration, telling the story of Hazel Tellington, and her friends. It covers all kinds of topics and doesn't shy away from the more taboo issues of sex and sexuality either. It's a really good read.

It also proved of excellent assistance during my stead of working on the final project, as I decided against using my usual style in favour of something different. So I borrowed a couple of aspects from the girls with slingshots art style, as well as reminding me about different body types and shapes.

A Setback

Well, this isn't good. I appear to have left my memory stick at uni. And yeah, it included most of this term's production afternoon work. The stuff that was uploaded to vimeo is here, but I haven't updated the blog recently so yeah... hopefully I can find that. Or I'm going to have A LOT of work to redo.

An Update:

As it turns out that rather than submitting the posts that should've existed over the last couple weeks, I've been saving them into a huge pile on the server. So instead I'll condense all that ramble into one big one here.

Firstly, an overview of where the City In Flux project is headed. As cities tend to be rather grey, drab, unemotionless, and not really terribly interesting despite being someone who is yet to live in one. So rather than trying to tell a story through the medium of neatly cut blocks of concrete, I created a batch of characters to tell the story instead. As they've not been scanned or anything yet, I'll upload those at a later date. Basically, it takes place over something like 150 years with 5 characters from different generations telling the story. It's also based around a house. Maybe a bit of the street too. It'll probably have five distinct versions of the house. After speaking to Sarah, she's suggested I focus on animating one of them in particular to a really high standard. Maybe set one of the characters as a centerpiece? It'll be the teacher if I do.
Animation-style-wise, I'm thinking of working in Flash with motion tweens for a large bulk of the basic animation. It'll have a faux-traditional feel too. Not quite sure how far I'll take that. Chris Ware is probably the big influence here. There'll be a little bit of Mattias Adolffson here too. Initially Martin Langford and Italo Calvino were going to be influences too but they got sidelined as the story took a different turn.

Next up is the studio sessions. I'll try to be chronological here. Emphasis on 'try'. Firstly we did a photoshop poject (after the week I set up this blog at least), which was fairly cool. We had to photoshop a tree into a glass bottle. Sadly the file has been deleted however. I forgot to save it onto a format other than ones at the Uni. They must've been doing some work on the IT systems and formatted some memory or something. Either way, it's gone. I might try to reproduce it at some point, depending on how much time I have.
Next was the physical tutorial. It's going to be a lot of fun. We cut through newspapers and tried to piece stories into a narrative. So yeah, Paul McCartney is teaming up with an inflatable crocodile scientist, and a chicken with an ASBO, and being criminals. I said it was silly.
Then came the aftereffects workshop, where we pieced together a whole load of photos to make a trailer. I'll upload that later if I can find the files. Just going to re-iterate: The computer sytem here is appalingly bad. Just saying.

Afterwards, a lesson on Illustrator, and Vectors. We're making Marlyn Monroe. Well, trying to. Did I ever mention I'm bad at drawing people who don't have eyes the size of grapefruits? Well I am. Still, it's going OK.

Finally, is the incoming essay. Not looking forward to this really. Not a whole lot planned for it either. Probably based around the city in flux thing if possible. I'm going to need to throw a lot more time at this.

Anyways, that's all. And when I say all, I mean a giant text wall with no remorse.

Process and Production - AfterEffects

This is what a text post looks like it.

Notebook 'bot 1 - Work In Progress 1