Simulated client project

Mission: To create a 20 second animation about the consequences of file sharing and when it's illegal.

How I'll tackle it: First, by looking into cases of file sharing and think of an interesting way to create the animation.

At a glance, I think Ed Byrne sums the piracy warnings before DVDs up brillianty.



I found an editorial about American anime licensor FUNimation telling people to remove their dubbed content from the site.



While I agree that from an American standpoint, this argument makes sense, but from a UK standpoint, the legal content mentioned is unavailable and not released until at least half a year later. Those who wish to buy the titles when they're out can at least get a 'sneak peek' at what they will get eventually along with getting rid of the long delay.

So, my idea for the animation is something with little movement (as I've said before, 3D animation is NOT something I get along with) with split second imagery and effects that would hopefully mean the viewer would want to see the animation more than once. I find that videos where I've missed something and need to go and watch it again make it stick in my head a lot more.

Sketches will be posted later.

Slow down

So I went to read the article we were asked to go through for next tutorial and I hit a bit of a stumbling block; fancy fonts + black text on white background = I can't read it properly. I spent about 5 minutes on one paragraph trying to understand it but it wasn't working. So now I have to get some coloured paper to print it on, since I end up working better with that.

First week wasn't too bad. Still a bit miffed that I can't create a 2D animation for my mock client project after they pretty much said 'we'd rather you create an inferior 3D project than anything 2D'. That put me in a sour mood. I might be able to make my idea work, but it'll be about 5x more tedious and not as good. Geez, thanks for letting me be creative in my own way.

Here's what I honestly want to do, animation-wise.

A fun colourful style based entirely in 2D. I know we're meant to expand what we can do for our portfolio, but I don't think I've even been given a fair chance to create a 2D animation while at uni.

I'm going to animate this idea in 2D when I've got my ideas together, and I can't wait :D

Character overhaul

Remember Malletgirl from the first year interactive narrative project?

(Click here to see the actual flash)

I decided to give her a comic book style redo, so after referencing some Marvel and DC comic images (I'm not too big on comics, so I missed a lot of subtleties to the style), I got this as a result.
Definately an improvement on the first design, wouldn't you agree? I had a lot of fun with the shading, most of the colouring I've seen in comic books look like gradients more than anything, so I tried to recreate that without actually using gradients (I love smudge tool).

Messing about with styles again

So the last few days I've really gotten into trying to draw more styles, and since I pretty much always use teenage girls as a style base to get the main idea down, it's mostly gonna be females in this post.

I really like the designs at the bottom, they seem so much more lively with more personality than the other sketches (although I do like most of those, too). I wanted to experiment more with proportions.

And I got this. Well, these. It's the same character but with different clothes. I'm VERY proud of how this turned out, and I'd love to try working with this style some more, maybe making a project of it sometime :)


In other news, I finally started a portfolio using deviantART's new system. Most of it's anime so far, but that's because I'm working on something good enough to post in the other sections.

You can view it here.

Just remember it's still in progress.