CINEMATIC :: 24/06/16 - Finalizing and Finishing Up

Its been over two weeks since I last updated, and I unfortunately can't say I've been up to anything different outside of mattepainting the backgrounds.  I've had quite a few external issues that slowed my progress, and I was struggling to keep on top of these backgrounds and work on assignments for the other classes, but overall, the past two weeks have proven to be enough in terms of completing the mattepainted scenery for our final animation!

I realize my efforts seem quite minimal compared to the contributions from the rest of the group.  Still, working on all these backgrounds really gave me a feel for painting scenery in general, and encouraged me to try out a lot of new techniques and brushes and it was a good experience overall, minus the looming deadlines.

There are 10 background plates in all, and Tea ended up helping me with the last two shots - I couldn't figure out how to angle the islands for the intense low and dutch angle shots, and she ended up sketching the positions for shot 8 and giving me a really rough paint of shot 9 to clean up.  A lot of shot 9 is reused assets, just warped, in order to save time.  I would like to think that it doesn't show unless you were specifically looking for it.

Here are all the final plates for our assignment hand in, and the shots that they are used in!  Some of them like the complete dark world and a giant version of the dark world's tree weren't used in the final production, but pieces of them such as the islands and bits of the tree branches will be used for other shots.

SPIRIT SHOT 01 - Establishing Spirit Shot:

SPIRIT SHOT 03 - Low angle Islands:

SPIRIT SHOT 04 - Birds eye of Islands:

SPIRIT SHOT 05 - Close up of the Spirit Tree:

SPIRIT SHOT 06 - Low Angle Phone Shot:

DARK SHOT 07 - Extreme close up of Tree branches:

DARK SHOT 08 - Low Angle Dark Island:

DARK SHOT 09 - Dutch Angle of Island:

ASSET 01 - The complete Dark World:

ASSET 02 - The Dark World Spirit Tree:

LIFE DRAWING :: Reflective Statement 02

Just as with term one, I feel that the weeks spent in life drawing this term were really helpful, and that I have gained another set of useful skills from them.  It was wonderful to come back on the first day, remember the lessons about line of action, exaggeration and form that we had learned previously, and immediately apply them to our warm-up drawings.

I really enjoyed the classes on drawing from imagination, trying to get an idea of how the figure would move and how sketching out 2-3 poses from imagination helped to convey the way the body moved and gestured.  It was also quite enjoyable to turn the model into an animal.  A lot of my sketches for that week still look terribly anthropomorphic rather than a posing animal, but I would like to practice this more in the future.  I feel references of actual animals would help in getting a sense of accuracy - the shapes of the bat I had to do for homework for that week really gave me an idea of how megabats are shaped and the kind of silhouette I should be trying to aim for.  Things such as my tiger and dragon from week 10 look ridiculous in comparison as they come across as generic cartoons, lacking an understanding of anatomy and shape.

The points on drapery were particularly striking.  Though my practice is lacking in that area, it really helped to know where folds should lie and how they are created in a garment.  I'm quite pleased with the later drawings I have, though by drawing from sight I overestimated the length and size of a lot of the garments.  It is not particularly noticeable, but I am frustrated with my own shortcomings and feel that further research and practice is necessary for this area in particular.

The lessons on construction were my favorite.  My base sketches have always been flat and two dimensional, I had never considered applying 3D aspects in order to achieve a result that would be closer and more accurate to life.  Drawing squares was a lot easier than drawing softer organic shapes, but when we combined the two, I found that my proportion control had improved significantly - it worked especially well when I applied it to my own personal drawings.  With construction I am finding it much easier to recognize instantly when my legs and torsos are too long.

Faces and rendering are still difficult for me, though I am getting a better understanding of imagined lighting.  When rendering I noticed I struggle a lot creating lighter shades and my shadows tend to become very dark very quickly and do not represent the lighting at hand very well.  It may be an issue I have with how tightly I hold and press with my pencil, in spite of the way that I hold it for this class.  I am noticing that I have gained a little bit of control over tone and shade which becomes apparent in week 13 and 14's work, but I still have quite a long way to go.  Looking at the rendering of masters such as Da Vinci and Carravagio, I'm amazed at how such light shading can make the form look so soft yet so defined at the same time, and how thicker outlines imply weight and tension.

Overall I feel where term 1 taught us the basics, term 2 has built on refining our form and figures to bring them closer to life.  Its unfortunate that we only have life drawing once a week as I would like to practice and hone what we have learned this term further, but lack the free time to do so.

CINEMATIC :: 12/06/16 - Long overdue updates

The past two weeks has been a bit all over the place for me in terms of productivity and development!
After the decision to move me into animation, I was placed in charge of in-betweens for shots 4 and 7; the creature circling the island from overhead, and the creature turning its head to look at the screen while twitching its spines menacingly.  Tea's keyframes for the idea were amazing!

Shot 4 was tweaked a bit from last time, making the creature's movements a lot more evenly spaced and fluid.  It now moves in 3s, the purple lines being the parts of the animation that I added.

Shot 7 needed to be redrawn, with barely any of tea's original keys left in place.  Keat told me to straighten the creature's pose when it turns to the camera to show its attentive state, and the movement of its spines is now keyed in ones.  I spent longer than I wanted to on making them move convincingly, as the angle was one I found difficult to work with.

Both shots have since been passed onto Oscar, who has done a wonderful job of cleaning them up!

Since then, I have been placed back on backgrounds, and I'm now trying to get as many of them up as quickly as possible.  Over the past week I've been working on the dark world, a larger dark world tree to be used in several of the later spirit world shots, and the three remaining pre-glitch backgrounds of the dragon flying towards the tree, the dragon landing on the roots, and the dragon looking up towards the ipod.  There is potentially a third dark world island that I will need to attempt for one of the shots Jo was working on.

I was told to tackle the dark world and its tree asset first, as the islands and tree can be reused in many of the dark world shots.  I had to scale the tree up significantly and repaint it in order to get rid of the pixellation lines, and made the mistake of painting of the pipes on the original small tree.  I lost a day re-painting them for the larger tree, and ended up scaling the tree's island down to insert into the full dark world scene.  

Having updated the large tree's shading, I shrunk it down and added it back to the original spirit world pre-glitch background for the sake of consistency.

In addition, I also completed one of the spirit tree shots.  Hilariously the branches took me a long time to do, while the leaves which are mostly texture took under half an hour.  The branches don't have the right contrast level on them at this point, but if I have time once the rest of these shots are done, I'd like to go back and adjust them so they stand out a bit more.

I hope to at least get the other spirit tree shot done by the end of tomorrow.  It might be a bit of a long shot, but I'd like to have all of these backgrounds finished by next weekend.

LIFE DRAWING :: 07/06/16 - Week 14