Honours Project: Creature designs

some sketches for creatures I've made for one of my characters in my short film

Honour's Project: Concept art

For my honour's project I've decided to create a final animated short. The story I have so far is a diver who descends to the bottom of the ocean to this valley to discover a portal which leads to another dimension. Typing that out I kinda realise that MAAAAYBE I was a bit inspired by pacific rim. Oh well!

doodles from the past week

Break drawing

today's sketches

Honour's Project: CTNX Animation Expo

Two weeks ago I attended the CTNX animation expo in Burbank, La. I had an awesome time meeting my favourite artists, animators and other CTNX attendees in general. Maaaan what a great time :)

While I was there I was able to chat with people from Nickelodeon, Disney, sony animation and freelancers regarding my University work. I asked around about their opinion if a physical performance in animation can convey a visual narrative without the use of dialogue? The response was quite interest. A physical performance and dialogue both play to their strengths and play as powerful tools in convey a story. But in animation a physical performance plays a large role in conveying a story.
Animators can produce a performance by listening to the audio and interpret a dialog, but without a visual performance can an animation still tell a story through a dialogue influenced performance?

The experience there at CTNX has given me more direction and consideration to how I will approach my final outcome.

Hungarian horned Dragon Concept

My friend is in the middle of his honors project and asked a bunch of people (Myself included) to come up with a design based off his description; Black skin, yellow eyes and bronze horns and spikes.
Most people did designs based off Bearded dragons with wings but I tried to do something a little different.

2D animation Test (Still working on it!)

For a week and a half now I've been practising my 2D animation skills. I've taken a audio clip to practice with phonemes and to get out of my comfort zone more.

Here's my progress so far,

it's been taking myself to animate this 5 second sequence for almost over a week and a half. I feel at this point it's taking a little longer than I hoped for.

So far I'm happy with what I've made so far, the pose to pose and the character motion to the audio compliment one another quite nicely.

I'm hoping I can finish this soon so to focus on other work in the future. Preferably 3D animation

Warm up drawing refined

I did a warm up drawing the other day and decided to go back and flech it out a bit. Inspired by Ghost Rider.

Baseball Doodles

Honour's Project: Horay for Presentations

This week I had a presentation to show the progress of my work. I went over my projects aims and the areas I researched to back up my statements.
For my Practical research I showed my previous animation from my last post (http://graythestranger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/animation-practices.html) and a 2D animation I produced along with the presentation.

2D animatated baseball player

Overall the presentation as a success; I showed my research and explained my ideas and intentions across accompanied with small little animations.

From here I plan to produce volcalised animations to compare and contrast to my previous animations.

Here's a little version of myself dancing for you. Enjoy

Honour's Project: Animation practices

After much thought and feedback for which path I will take as my 4th year study. I've come to the decision to focus on character acting and performance, the aim is to develop a showreel showcasing character performance from studies and animation disciplines through research and practical research.

Last week I created a very rough blocked out animation from storyboards I designed. Although the animation is very rough the aim was to focus on timing, pose to pose and clear silhouette form.

While researching animation techniques I came across a maya tutorial which described the use of the "Editable Motion trail". This feature allows the user edit the motion graph in a 3D space as to oppose a separate motion graph window.

A link to the tutorial: http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1176-Introduction-to-Animation-in-Maya#play-28620

Honour's Project: The 4th year at University

The final year at university has arrived, this year I've been given creative freedom to choose what I want to do as my honers project.

For this I've chosen two routes to go down. These two project revolve around animation,

Idea one will involve creating a showreel which demonstrates character acting and performance. For this I plan to research into animators to learn theories and techniques they use to create a convincing character performance. For my final submission I plan to create a demoreel which demonstrates my practices and lessons in animation. By creating a showreel not only will it be a stepping stone into animation but I will have something to showcase my skills.

Idea two is creating an animated short. The aim is to design and create a short film which uses visual narratives to convey a story over to the viewer; this will be made using animations software. 

For research I plan to look into directors both film and animation, from the research gathered I hope to have a knowledge and understand of film techniques and theories on visual narratives to create a short film. 

you want some of this?!

Sticky Note Milestone

Recently 2 days ago I succeeded in creating over 500 sticky notes for each day passed.

So to celebrate I created a facebook page where I post a daily Sticky note drawing. Come on over and like the facebook page!! you won't be disappointed :)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sticky-Note-a-Day/308019806045126?ref=hl

houston, we have a problem

warm up drawing

doodling away

Some sketches I've been doing while watching Double Fine's Broken age documentary. Watching the documentary and seeing their game take shape and form really is inspiring to see, it makes me want to go out there and work with other talented people and share a truly unique experiance.

Morning sketches

Anytime now

Summer rains, you can never predict them

Just working on my painting skills more. I think this illustration worked out well 

Some character sketches for a personal project

So yesterday I went to Aalborg University in Copenhagen to attend the Shayla games. I had a great opportunity to play some amazing games while there and attend great talks from "SuperHot" games and Sony's project Morpheus.

While I was there I got a great change to whip out the sketchbook and start drawing!

I had a great time there and I hope they hold another great event next year.

blog entry 8 - trouble ahead

After finding out last week the entire production was behind schedule towards completion of alpha stage for all projects, we had to pull our figure out and race to the the finish with all assets complete in time before beta.

This week involved me creating a lot of character textures for organic characters. For space team I was required to texture the two protagonists Alex and Ali while for Free World I was tasked to texture the main character "Oliver".

It was important to keep in mind these textures for all models and props only required base colours as place holders therefore when the beta phase starts, more details can be applied.

The week also marked my end as a concept artist for project Space Team, it was very sad to depart from the design I had a lot of fun creating character designs and logo design for their film and game. Leaving Space Team also had its positive side; this meant I can focus more on the production team’s tasks.

I did get to draw some awesome cereal boxes for Space Team’s brand.

At the end of the week we were delighted to know all assets for alpha phase had been successfully accomplished and ready for Beta phase which will soon begin at the start of week 9.

Blog Entry 7 - All by myself

-        This week I was left as the only 2D artist for the production team while the lead 2D artist was attending GDC (Games Development Conference) in California. The week involved myself taking on all 2D work from User Interface to UV texturing. This week involved me creating UI designs for the project FreeWorld. FreeWorld still had a lot refining to fixing so creating the UI was a very long and tough process. The UI designs theme were a cross between futuristic hacking equipment which kept close to a 80s feel of technology, I used tones of blues to give with slight highlights to give an overall appealing design which is not intense on the viewer’s eyes.

Other work created this week involved more UI designs for project space team’ game; the game required myself to created small icons which would be used to manipulate the game’s environment. Not much work was required to complete these tasks thanks to my lead 2D artist starting the base of the icons which only required myself to colour and export to the game.

 Space Team logo design 

For my Concept artist role project space had given me the task to redesign the logo for their project. I took the original design and created small thumbnail renditions of the letters found in the centre of the logo. After much feedback from the story world director and production manager I soon started work on colour variations from the pallet used from the original logo. The new logo design was soon sent off to one of the other concept artists from the team for refinement.

Overall this week had been incredibly tough as the only 2D artist available this week, I am disappointed my workflow gained too big to carry on completing Space team’s logo however I had to prioritise my work.  

blog entry 06 - Let's get started

So!!! this week finally commemorated the beginning of actual production. We were presented with three projects which required to be developed, these project will require both the contribution of the design team aaaaaand the production team.

Here are the the projects:

Project 01 - Melt Down

Concept art by Jack Stollery 

Film – This project follows the story of a Polar bear named “Gus” whose home is melting around him. To stop his home from melting he goes on a hunt to assassinate big corporations threatening to melt his home, during Gus’s adventure he teams up with a tree loving hippy to take down the corporate fat cats.

Game – The game involves Gus reach a Bar in order to complete the level, The player will be responsible of guiding Gus through the level avoiding penguin, tourists and any other obstacles which stand in his way. 

Project 2 - Free World

Free World concept art

Project Free World film follows 2 main characters Oliver and Erika in a futuristic setting where society has become full of rules and norms which suppress people’s emotional outbursts i.e. expressing intense emotions. Citizen log into a game world where they can channel all there suppressed desires and emotions through their avatar.

The objective to the game is to guide the player through the hallways and reach the end. The player can activate traps, tamper with cameras, distract guards and hack computer terminals. The game if viewed from a top down perspective allowing the player full view of the entire map.

Project 3 - Space Team 

Space team character art Ali and Alex

Film – Space team follows a young alien girl named Ali and a human boy called Alex. These two go on adventures around the universe together trying to stop Ali’s evil aunt from taking over the throne.

Game - In the game the player can contribute to the TV show by creating planets, the player creates and customises their own planet adding foliage, mountains, rivers and cities and other items which allow their planet to stand out from the rest.

-          This week I had been painting textures for the Project Melt Down. The textures created this week were for props and characters who could feature in the film and game.

-          For the Space team I created ship designs for Ali’s ship, and Pilot seats. The production manager and story director really like the concept of a floating chair and wanted me to continue down this concept for the ship too. I was very happy they appreciate my concept designs.

So that's this week done and dusted. Next week is going to tough being the only 2D artist available since melead will be depart for the week. Let's hope I survive!!

Blog entry 5 - The end of prologue

Today marks the end of the prologue phase, unfortunately the end products were not complete on time. It saddens me we did not finish the film and game before the end of this 5 week phase. Despite not finishing on time it did help production prepare for the actual development. I felt I learned a lot working as a 2D artist. I learned how to pass content on to the next phase of production and most import; I learned how to work to very tight deadlines.

A lot of other exciting and interesting things happened this work too on the design side. I spent a lot of time design villain characters for one of the projects, basically I had to create a octopus character inspired by the Disney villain Ursula.
I worked on concept for a space cowboy planet, the planet itself would act as a mercenary hub where the toughest of the toughest come together to share stories. Here're the results!

The aim was to have half the planet to be shrouded in shadow this half would be the dessert while the other half would be covered in cities which would be in the light at all times.

On the production side I helped the modelling team adjust textures for character models for both game and film tie ins. It was a tedious job due to visible seams, but I did triumph!

Overall this week was useful teaching us valuable information relative to the production pipeline i.e. naming conventions, File management, working with other smaller teams. I did get to learn new skills Unwrapping UVs and to mention speeding up my workflow.

blog entry 4 - Multi Tasking

This week I worked on a variety of texture styles for the characters roles. I created 2 examples to show to the modellers; the first texture was a very clean gradient from one tone to another while the second texture had a painted texture with a painty style. The Painted texture was much favoured over the gradient due to it's more stylistic approach.

This week was also a very special week for myself, I was brought onto one of the design teams as a concept artist, I'm still working as a 2D artist for the production depart despite being a concept artist now but I'm still very excited. As a new concept artist, first role was to design and create character and environment art for a space cowboy planet for the game’s universe.

Now that I'm part time concept artist I couldn't be more thrilled about the new role! I look forward to the coming weeks producing both concept art and 2D art for both Design and production. It'll also be very interesting to have a incite how both departments communicate and run

. 

Environments!!

This week I spent a majority of the time creating environment designs for the film and game versions for the project. I also made reference sheets for assets which would be implemented into the cross media project.

The project itself is a dummy run getting the production team ready for when the actual production starts 4 weeks from now. This project aims to create a film and game tie in explaining the production and design pipelines and how communication is spread from on department to another.

This week I was made the lead design team little concept artist, my role included creating concept art for environments  and finalising character designs. The workflow was becoming too much but luckily I had assistance from 2 animators to lighten my workflow, they helped greatly to keep on track of deadlines.

Overal I enjoyed this first week on production; working as a personal concept artist for the lead team was refreshing, it felt nice getting back into concept art rather than 2D textures. The work also produced was exciting and challenging however deadlines were difficult to meet due to tight deadlines.

blog entry 2 - Prologue!

-          For next 5 weeks, the production team will be designing and creating a film and video game. These 2 different mediums will illustrate the production pipeline and its working methods. The creation of this film and game is an exercise to prepare the production team for the official project starting 5 weeks from now.

-          The film shown to the students was an animatic produced by the design team, the production’s team task is to create a final film and Game which will be shown at the end of the 5^th week. In the film Brunhilda is used as an example to help illustrate how a project is managed and completed by the team.

-          The production team is made up of six different smaller team working together to create this final product, this teams include:

-          Modellers

-          Riggers

-          Animators

-          Programmers

-          Technical artists

-          Level designers

My role as 2D artist will require myself to work closely with the design team and Modelling team. For the next 5 weeks I will be producing 2D assets such as Character and environment concepts, 2D textures and reporting to the design team for more tasks.

This week I worked with two 2D artists generating character concepts and reference sheets for Brunhilda and character who will represent each role in the production and design team.