Month: November 2021

To take my photographs, I decided to go on a walk near my house, to capture shapes and places in  my area. When I returned from taking my photographs, I realised my eye had been drawn to a lot of regular shapes – grids, squares, parallel lines etc. I had also taken several photographs of scaffolding, as I was interested in the depth that it created from the front of the building. I wanted to play on this, and began to place sections of different images into the grid created by the front of the scaffolding. I eventually realised I had a lot of images of pavement stones, grates and covers. Choosing to create part of a pavement over the top of the scaffolding, I filled in some of the gaps, but left enough of the building underneath exposed to still be clear what the original image was. I also removed the gaps in some of the grates so that the building beneath can be seen. I then moved out of photoshop and used a different app to change some specific areas of the values to make the pavement a similar range of values and appear to be the same level, and so flatter. Overall I was happy with how my image turned out, and would’ve liked to have been able to make a series involving different areas or different types of buildings.

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Rotation 7: Traditional Animation

For the traditional animation workshops, we had a number of task set over several days to learn how to work with different types of hand drawn animation; straight ahead, pose to pose, combination, and ease in and out. Beginning with the classic bouncing ball was a great way to practice the squash and stretch as well as work out timing, which is needed in every other type of animation. Drawing the pathway out on one page first was definitely helpful in visualising how the ball would move. I think I should have left larger spaces between frames in some areas, to show a bigger contrast in speed of the ball.

My personal favorite task was the straight ahead animation, in which I created a loop of a girl blowing away her hand. I enjoyed experimenting with how each aspect of a frame would move from the last, such as her face, hair, and hand all moving separately. 

https://youtu.be/4-rJOJ24xFI

One thing I found difficult in this project was time management, as I felt that some of the animations were difficult to complete in the small number of hours we were given, leading to me either rushing or having to complete them in the weekend after.

I began my motion graphic project by sketching out my idea in a storyboard. I wanted to use a moving fire and then have the scene pan up the chimney, following a spark to a scene of rooftops, where there are many sparks. The concept behind by video was the idea that everyone’s lives are as complex and unique as your own, but we all go through similar experiences and life events, with the suggestion that each building in the scene has a fire of its own. I had not worked with After Effects before and had some difficulty getting used to the programme, so began with very simple elements, including some hand drawn assets and a few lines of moving objects. One thing I would have liked to do was replace the fire lines with flame-shaped objects, to make it more realistic. The art also ended up having two styles – one with white outline and one a more cartoonish look, but I think they ended up working well together. I primarily used the position transform, trim paths, and opacity transform, so as not to overcomplicate the project. I also used sound from a copywrite free track on SoundCloud, which inspired the fire imagery initially, as it has the crackling in the background.

https://youtu.be/YdPKQdubug8

When creating my story world, I wanted to make a small garden that may be used for worship of a statue. I started by creating a base which I extruded and tapered to create a floating island base. I then made a second layer which I used the clay tool to add levels, making the ground textured. I added this inside the first island base, and then began to construct the statue in the centre. I used basic shapes which I pushed and pulled to create the rough shape. I originally planned to add texture later but decided I like the minimalistic look once I had added everything else. Starting to work on the trees, I made a simple trunk and branches, and the created stylized ‘leaves’ which were slightly transparent to give a more leaf-like feel. I chose to use very simple shapes for the rocks, and clumps of stretched cones for the grass. Working with Maya for the first time was a challenge since I had difficulty troubleshooting anything that went wrong. For example, a lot of the time the render view showed the camera off to the side. Near the end a lot of the shapes became black in the Maya default window, which I never worked out how to fix, and sometimes all my shapes would disappear, causing me to revert to previous saves. Despite this, however, I was very happy with my final model, and the style I managed to achieve was similar to my original vision