Light

This is the animatic and final animation for the Light animation. This shows how the animatic represents what is happening in the final but is not a finished and polished piece and has less movement in it. This is done as it is cost effective. These examples also show how an animation changes, more animatics would be produced to show these changes as they are requested by whoever is commissioning the animation, until a final animatic is agreed on to take to animation for final. Again this cuts the cost of producing final animation when changes may be made, it saves time as well as money.

Gorillaz Animatic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJmCWeyRlpo
Unfortunately the embed utility is disabled for the above video. However it is an animatic for the Gorillaz song Dare. This shows how an animatic is used to pitch an animation, without going to the cost of producing the animation before it possibly being turned down - which would be a loss. The animatic is simple but shows more movement then a story board, it is also set to the sound track used for the animation. This gives the viewer an idea of what the animation will look and move like. This animatic also introduces some colour, showing the night club like lights again giving the feel of the animation to the viewer. Animatics are supposed to be fairly cheap to produce as the animation is not necessarily going to be commissioned at this stage and fully animating would cost too much for the risk of a loss.

Honda Diesel Ad

Earlier I blogged about Nightmare Before Christmas and how that shows part of my personality. Well I feel that this represents another, contrasting part of my personality. I also really like colourful, bright things. Perhaps child-like at times. It shows the bubbly, friendly, somewhat outgoing side of my personality. Maybe I could some how use the juxtaposition between the two in my work.

Jamie Dean

I really like this stop motion animation. I love the old feel it has through the grey scale and jittery, achieved through the use of super 8 film. I would look at using filters and effects to recreate this style in my own work.
 The items used within the film also add to the old look of it. I really like the simple animation and the jerking movement of the obejects. This reminds me of old childens stop motions such as Camberwick Green and Trumpton and could be recreated through playing with the frame rates and/or shooting fewer frames.

The animator has used focus settings to create parts of the animation that started out of focus and then focuses in. I like this effect, it is surreal and really adds to the effect of the film.

The music really adds to the effect of the dark feel of the film, the spacing between the bass and the treble within the song and the contrast within this. The slow, lingering tempo of the song adds to the creepy effect as well.

The overall feel of the short film is Gothic and Surreal. I really like this. Again it shows the side of my personality that really likes creepy, strange things.

Erica Russel

I really like this animation by Erica Rusell, the smooth movement and the complex dancing that they do is amazing. I also really like the way it becomes abstract, with simple shapes making up the human form.

The materials she has used seems to be pencil crayons or pastels, ink at times, graphic markers or similar and possibly some computer based animation at times.

I could perhaps use abstract shapes, and ideas to communicate meaning in my work. I can also look at experimenting with different materials to see what works.

Nightmare Before Christmas

I think that the smooth motion of the puppets is great, especially the spider like way that Jack moves, very creepily. I think that the way they achieve in stop motion is amazing, the skill and patients that it must take.

Zero the ghost dog is created through double exposure (source: the DVD extras for Nightmare), which is now something that we can do through computers and take for granted. I think it is great that they had the manual skill to create the effect, which looks so much more interesting then a computer generated effect may look.

I generally really like Tim Burton films, I love the dark feel to the films. The shadows, creepy figures and strange buildings. It all adds to the feel of the films. I think that this represents part of my personality, I love the strange, the horrific, and dark, creepy stories, images, films etc. This is something that could think about including in my work.

Stop motion puppets have been used to create this animation. Lip syncing is created using different puppet heads, which are replaced to create the mouth shapes of the vocal sounds. Many of these have to be used for each sound to create realistic, smooth motion between the vocal sounds. The puppets joints will have hinges or ball joins which you are able to move but are stiff enough to stay in place so that each small movement for every frame can be captured to create the smooth movement of the puppets.

Slicing

Although I have done some web design in the past no one has shown me how to slice. I'm please to say it's actually pretty easy! Here is the tutorial I followed:

Create guideline where you want the slices to be.

Use the slices tool to convert guides to slices. Then combine the slices that you want to merge. Then save for web.

Ta-da finished website in Safari :).

Web design research

This year I am doing web design as a module at college. The first brief is to create a personal portfolio site (...finally I can upload something that will impress universities, designers, agencies etc rather then on that just serves it's purpose!)

I am starting my research into what makes a good design.

The first website that I looked at is http://vermeersch.ca/

The website is based around a 1:1 ratio picture of the artist. You navigate around the website using the buttons at the bottom, which then make you travel around his body to find out different navigation. The website is simple and easy to navigate as the navigation is always visible as the bottom of the screen. It is clean and easy to take in and navigate around. The idea is strong, the artist says that he puts a lot of himself into his work which is why he has created the site as he has, creating a strong idea for the basis of the website.

There is also an explore option in the navigation bar that allows you to look around the site freely.

The portfolio section of the website is displayed in this box, with its own navigation for the projects. Each link causes the box to move to a different part of his body - so that you explore the whole of his body. As you hover over it the information about the project is displayed at the bottom of the box.

Overall the website is simple to navigate, clean, clear and serves it's purpose.

The limitations of the site is that it could easily become cluttered if more content needed to be added. Also it is slow to load on slower connections, over my broad band wi fi at home it took considerably longer then on the wired network at college. However the target audience for the website are more likely to be people working in offices with faster internet connections on wired networks, making the loading faster. The final limitation is that some of the links to his work are now dead, this looks unprofessional and is something that I would need to keep on top of on my website if I was linking to externally hosted projects.

Representing myself with my website is something that I should consider with my website, to show universities and potential clients who I am. Also a simple navigation system is useful for users of a website, meaning that they would be more likely to want to use the website.

I have also looked at http://positivehype.com/

I really like the design of this site, the bright colours on the dark background. I would really like to create something like that. I think that it shows my personality, with my friendly, bubbly side in juxtaposition with my like of darker films, stories, myths, imagery etc.

This front page is clean, simple and easy to navigate. Everything fits in the browser screen, meaning that you ca take everything in easily.

On their "our work" and "blog" pages the navigation bar disappears which is annoying as you have to go back to the original site to be able to navigate to other pages.  This is poor design, the navigation should provide a continuation between pages for consistency and also ease. I fell that people are going to find this frustrating and are less likely to want to use the website. I will need to make sure that my navigation is easy to use and consistent for my website users.

http://equation.laptop.org/

This is the website for a charity that believes that a lot of the worlds problems are down to education, and that the solution is for every child to have a laptop to support their education. This is a simple campaign website asking for people to become part of the equation for change. You can add yourself to the chain, selecting your colour, name and equation that you would like to add. The scrolling is simple, just move the mouse left or right and the chain scrolls through, it also animates up and down as a chain and plays a musical note.
You can then click on one of the icons to load up a box with information in. I really like this idea, it is something that I would like to use for my portfolio, however I am not sure if it would be practical. For one it would be hard for people to tell what is going to load what in my portfolio (although perhaps I could get around this with different icons for web design, illustration etc and captions explaining what they are). It is also hard to accurately click on the different icons to load the information you want. This could be helped with larger icons and slower scrolling.

http://www.dinghyinsurance.com/

The web design for this site is awful, to the point where I am struggling to find anything nice to say about it. And I have no idea where to start criticising, so I will just go for it. Firstly the links are the same colour as the background colour, this makes them hard to read, and would be impossible for people some people to read. The website is not very accessible. Secondly a lot of the text is underlined, meaning that it is easily confused as being a hyper-link. This is annoying when you go to click on this text. The three images, which I can only assume, should be in line with one another are not. They also cause conflict for the eye as they are all brightly, coloured competing for your attention. The colour also clashes with the rest of the website. No consideration has been given to composition.

Basically the only thing that I can take from this to make my design better is to avoid all of the mistakes made by the designer(s).

http://www.karimzariffa.com/

I really like this website, which centres around a simple, clean menu bar which floats in the centre of the screen. The layout is clean and easy to take in, the large text is easy to read.

As you click on each of the menu items they unfold upwards until you are focused on the top box. From there you can click on the lower box to scroll down, or in the grey area to zoom back out to use the menu bar again.

I feel that the simple, clean design really works. The website is easy to navigate and find your way around. Using one page helps people to be away of the orientation of different items.
For my design I could look at a simplified, clean navigation system to make it easy for a viewer to look around.

http://www.havenworks.com/

This website is awful. The designer as clearly put very little thought into the design. This is shown in a few ways. Firstly the website doesn't fit on the screen horizontally (and I am using the standared 1280 by 800 resolution) and vertically you need to scroll a long way. Secondly there is far to much information on the page. The eye is unable to take it all in and the information gets lost on the page. I don't think a visitor to the website would know where to start with taking in the information, and you are likely to miss the information you are looking for. Poor layout adds to this with far to many columns on the page. Too many colours have been used, including colours that clash. Again this makes it hard to find and take in the information on the page, as it causes a conflict for the eye.

Lightwave

I have had my first 3D modeling & animation lesson today. We need to research, develop and create our own world of the future using the Lightwave software. I have come up with an initial idea which is actually drawn from an activity I did in a science lesson about 5 years ago in Year 9. We had to create a way for humans to live on another planet as the world was being destroyed. My idea was to build a large dome on the moon and use large air tanks to supply the air until a self sustaining environment was created, through the growth of plants. I am using this as my starting point and initial idea and developing it further from there.

Here is my first design sheet, it isn't very big because the college scanners are not working so I have had to take a picture on my phone (5MP so decent size) but then send it to Wordpress (as blogger doesn't have a UK mobile utility) and then save it to upload it. My life story over, that's why it is only a small image.

I have started to look at a couple of different ideas for developing the design.

I am quite excited about this project. I am now off to do more research!

Brecht Follow Up

This is part of a documentary, you can see clips from his plays - as directed by him and see some of the techniques "in action" also his wife and others that worked with him and in his theatre. Talking about the man and his techniques etc





This is from Antigone as adapted by Brecht (originally by Sophocles). It isn't in English but is a good example of getus and I think know being able to understand what is being said helps this to become more apparent.