Study Task 2 [PP1] - Who Am I?

Why you chose to study on this course?
- Being inspired by a lot of cartoons and animated films during my childhood has me becoming deeply interested in this specific art form.
- The feeling of having a set of still images creating motion when put together brings satisfaction
-  I have an interest in telling stories through visualisation rather than words
- Animation is one form of art that I wasn't able to touch on in my time of study from middle school to high school, which I am deeply interested in.
- To discover my passion for different types of animation (mainly choosing between 2D and 3D animation)

What do you want to learn during your time on the course?- Learning Animation fundamentals that will greatly help me in further pursuing this Art form
- Learning how to use various softwares that are used to animate in animation industries
- Various animation techniques
- 3D modeling and animating
- Creative story telling

What skills do you think are your strengths?
- I know my weaknesses ;^)

What things that you want to improve?- Time management (Mainly my work speed)
- Drawing skills (mainly consistency of a character/image + proportions) and speed
- Software knowledge
- Expand self creativity
- Designing skills; mainly digital (environment/character)

What ways you will evaluate your progress?
- Peer criticism and evaluation
- Compare and contrasting my work; self reflecting on my strengths and weaknesses through blogs and my own work
- Teacher feedback

Task 3: Timing

Timing

- The timing in animation in which specific actions/movement happens in specific amount of frames to create emphasis, exaggerated movements or realism in relation as to how it would've happened in real life.

Blinking Animation

The blinking animation was done through 6 different frames. To make the motion of the eyelid closing quicker, less frames were used and more in-between frames were used to make the motion of the eye opening seem slower.

Challenges that I faced with this specific task was the outcome of the animation; it looked a bit static as only the eyes and eyebrows moved during the blink. Applying the motion of blinking to real life, blinking in essence only requires your eyes to move, therefore I have applied that concept to the blinking animation, however the outcome wasn't as what I would've hoped for as it seems a lot more static and unnatural.

To improve upon the animation, I believe making the mouth move will greatly improve the current issue of the animation, as the direction and the pose I have the character shown in the animation really focuses on the whole face of the character and not only the eye aspect of it. Therefore having a small area of the character move whilst the other stays still greatly impacts the outcome of the blink as a whole.

Storyboard Animation

                                     

For the second task, I chose to use scene 2-3 in my storyboard done in task 2 to make the animation for this part of the task. The motion is of the character getting up from the floor; lying down to upright state. I chose to use this scene as it shows a simple movement of the character.

24FPS 

Edited

The outcome of the animation again, didn't come out as what I thought it would be. The scene chosen has a simple action, however the animation did not really illustrate that smoothly. I tried to use 7 frames of drawing, 3 from when the character is lying down to the mid-getting up position, and using the remaining 4 frames to animate him getting up to the upright position.

What I found challenging for this part of the task is to get the consistency of each frame of the character right. Reflecting upon my process, I believe drawing key frames helped, however I believe the consistency issue occurred due to the lack of in-between frames of the animation, which made each frame's movement different enough so that it was difficult for me to refer each frame back to the previous state.

To improve upon this, I would make more in-between frames fro each movement so that it would look a lot smoother and that I would have less tough of a time to get the character sizing consistency right.

Task 2: Appeal & Staging

Appeal:
- A drawing or character design that can attract and plead the audience 
(A design that can communicate to the audience of the character's personality/motive) 

For the first section, we had to sketch out various designs of character elements, which included eyes, mouths, ears, limbs, and torsos. 

This task was somewhat difficult as creating various designs for each character element with distinctive characteristics was challenging with the amount of time we had for each character element. 

After this practice, I was aware that my range of variety was hugely lacking and somewhat uninspiring, as a lot of the elements were generic and not really stylistic. However, after reviewing my designs, and coming up with the character face/head, I simplified my character facial designs to create a simplistic and more stylised character.

After finalising my characters' design, I experimented with various colour schemes of the character.                             
                 

Originally, I planned on using the grey/purple colour scheme, however after comparing it to the other colour schemes, I decided to go with the purple/pink colour scheme as I believe it is a more unique colour scheme compared to the rest.

Further into the task, we had to draw out the designed character with various poses, and a character pose chart which featured the view of the character in the same pose in various angles; front, back, side and 3/4 front/back.

Staging:
- Illustrating a narrative which presents a clear direction of the actions of the character and tells a story/action with the designed character

In the second section of the task, we had to create a simple story through a storyboard with the designed character. To help with the story board, a mask was created so that we can get into character and create poses that we wanted to help with the drawing later on.

In addition to the sketch of the character in the storyboard, camera shots had to be added that would help direct the story visually.

Utilising and visualising how the story could be delivered visually was extremely challenging as I have never learnt or looked into what the purpose of the shot types were in film making. Moreover, creating a suitable background for each scene was also difficult to visualise as it had to make sense along with the shot types that were used. 

Task 2 PDF: Appeal & Staging

Task 1: Solid Drawings

Line of Motion:

- Visually depicts how force is applied to a character/object

- Illustrates the direction of the pose

Line of Action Motion Drawings

We had half a minute to quick sketch a total of 10 poses given by our course leader; we then had to use a pen/marker to depicts the line of motion in each pose.

Fleshed-out Motion Drawings
From the 10 poses, we had to choose 5 and create a character / scenario with the poses.

Refined Motion Drawings

Our course leader then gave out some more poses, using them we had to create a refined drawing of the poses through inking techniques.

Developed Motion Drawings
Wanting to draw more dynamic poses, I used online resources for this section of the task. Instead of fully inking the drawing, I added watercolour to the finelined drawing. This gave me a sense of how lighting functioned and how shadows and highlights can be depicted through colour.

Rendered Motion Drawing
Wanting to explore more upon digital medium, I used Photoshop to paint my fully rendered drawing. I used the same online resource for the model as I did with the developed motion drawings, however I picked a female model as a reference this time. 

Having a better understanding of lighting and colour, I did not use the existing light source on the reference image and decided to create my own. Deciding to fully focus on the essences of the pose itself, I decided to not draw out the hair nor apply as much detail on the face itself; and mainly focused on the structure/composition of the female form.

Using the pencil tool, I traced out the main structure of the model; then started to apply the main colours that depict the light and dark shade.

Going more in depth with the colourisation, I added two more layers of colour in which depicts the highlights and the middle tone of the structure. This gave the pose more depth, making it more realistic. I found the mix brush to be a huge advantage in blending and smoothing out the gradation of colours.

Overall, this task was somewhat challenging as I did not have a lot of experience with digital medium, nor was I that good at illustrating the human figure. One thing I could improve on is exaggeration; in the aspect of still poses, I could push the arches or bends more and aim for exaggeration instead of accuracy. 

Link to PDF file → 20 Solid Drawings

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Welcome to my animation blog, I'll be documenting my animation process throughout university!