Life Drawing

I think that my life drawing this semester hasn't been that good. I have never really done life drawing before, and thankfully I saw a small improvment. This was more to do with the technical principles of how to measure bodies more than anything, however it has made me want to practise more. I also think it wouldn't hurt to be more inventive with my medium. Pencil is quite safe, and it is clear to me that I have stuck to that to much. I prefer my life drawings done in chalk anyway, and I think that with a chalk it is easier to be more expressive and sketchy and more unafraid of making mistakes and being neat. As we only had a short amount of time on each pose, I think that speed is definetly something I should work on, however, I'm sure this will come given more time and in reguards to how confident I feel. The pictures below are what I can remember as roughly being in date order, however, to be able to track my progress more fluently, next semester I will be dating each piece straight away.

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Animated Reality

 Animated Reality collaboration between Arban Severin & Sara Riley for Second Year Animation programme @ ECA.

Out of all the projects I found this the most enjoyable to work on, however, because of our approach, it has also been the least useful to me in terms of learning software. Documentary style videos are not something I would have honestly considered ‘animation’ or thought to do on an animation course, however, I suppose in a way it has helped me broaden my concepts of film making.
We were initially paired up with someone from our year, however, we were not required to stay in our pairs, and after seeing that my partner had already had ideas of which direction she wanted to take the project in, and who she wanted to work with, we decided to swap partners. This gave me the opportunity to work with a student in my year who I didn’t really know, as she wasn’t in often. I really enjoyed working with her, we got along well and had similar ideas with how we wanted our project to be realised.

We began by sitting down and discussing any ideas or concepts we had thought of already for the video, eventually we concluded that we wanted to create a piece of film that was very relaxing, slow and calm, we thought this would be particularly nice as we were making the video during the exam season; with deadlines looming, our video could bring some peace among all the stress. We also agreed to incorporate an element of textiles within our project, the rhythmic nature of stitching can be very therapeutic, and we thought that if we recorded our experience in a physical matter, it would also be as if we had brought the calming environment back with us, to the city.

We also agreed that a good place to gather footage would be at a beach, especially in winter it would be fairly remote and deserted, away from large crowds, giving us space to film. We took a day trip to Yellowcraigs, we decided to go a little further afield than Portobello, as Yellowcraig seemed just far enough outside the city to seem remote and peaceful, whilst still being within reasonable reach.  It was certainly a beautiful beach, and as we were filming I thought that the ripples of the water, particularly when the tide was rushing out, looked like stiches and thread, so we really focussed on the patterns the water was making in detail.

 

 

We decided to time lapse the footage of us making the blanket, as we were filming it for over two days. We also have a segment of us filming on the streets, this was to enforce the message of bringing the calm tranquillity of the sea to the centre of the city. I like to think of it as us possibly being travellers from distant lands, making our way across the ocean, however, only to end up on the streets, a very real scenario in the modern day. As we sat of the street we wove the tale of our journey into the blanket. 

Ultimately, although we had similar ideas and I enjoyed our time working together, I would say that because it was edited together without me being present, I perhaps didn’t have as much input of the outcome than I’d have liked. I think the beginning shots are wonderful; we agreed to have long drawn out shots, it made it seem almost as if the moment was frozen in time, however, personally I am not sure about the connection between that and the time lapse at the end. I raised my concerns with Arban; I thought that we should try to continue the theme of relaxation running to the end of the video, as this is something the blanket brings with it, and should never lose. Although we were having fun whilst making the blanket and it might have been difficult to fit slow music to a time lapse, the sudden change of music seems rather jarring. I would have suggested instead, using something like Jack Johnson -Only the Ocean, which is quite chilled, or, my personal favourite, Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) -Enya, which is rather upbeat, whilst still being relaxing. Arban believed it was good practise to try to do things properly and legally, especially since many festivals will not touch a film without the proper clearances, which is fair enough, however, it’s not as if this is being entered into a festival, and there is plenty of royalty free music we could have considered using.
 

In the end, I feel that that was just down to the interpretation of the video, Arban explained that for her, this one made her laugh and she thought it went perfectly with the jumpy movements of the animation and that the ‘jolt in the music reflects the reality of coming back to the city. We were able to bring some tranquillity with us, but the truth is that we were back to schedules, agendas, time constraints and busy student work to do.’
 

I also considered taking the blanket up Arthurs seat, rather than simply rolling it up, so it’s as if we were presenting the blanket to the city and spreading the calm across everything, but, I knew that even whilst suggesting it, Arban felt as if the video was complete. I don’t particularly mind, I think it’s important to be able to make sacrifices and compromises when working collaboratively, and I still think, although our video is rather abstract, it fulfils its intended purpose.

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World In A Room

WIAR was a good introductory project to both stop motion and 3D animation. As my first solo project and after a disappointing outcome in the group project I was wanting it to be a success. To some degree I think it was, however, it remains unfinished which is my main regret. I began by brainstorming ideas, at first I didn’t have any particularly strong thoughts of what I wanted to do, I just knew I didn’t want to do what I considered a typical scenario of the two characters conveying feelings through the door that separated them, I wanted there to be more of a narrative behind it. We were encouraged to put together an animatic, but to save time I got my flatmate to act out the story board, then just filmed him, however, I would like to do a proper animatic in a project soon.

 I eventually decided that I wanted one of the characters to be a father, waiting for his son to come home from war. I thought of the character left with his feelings of worry and anxiety could be conveyed strongly. Unfortunately, what awaits him is nothing but his sons uniform, that the other character has the sombre task of delivering.
Whilst we were being shown the armatures for the stop motion, we were shown two, 3D printed heads for the figure; an older lined face, or a smooth young face. I thought that even though the armature was stripped back so that we focussed on just the motion, I could make the younger face the ‘son’ of the older face. This helped me to confirm my idea with more confidence.

Not only in the design of the characters but also because I prefer and enjoy more ‘hands on’ animating, and am not used to the Maya software, I decided to do the more complex motions of the father in stop motion. I do rather like what I’ve managed to animate, although at the time I didn’t realise that the armature could be tightened or slackened, so I found the legs incredibly stiff to move, and the arms not stiff at all, I think the more experience I get using armatures the smoother the motion will be. The stop motion was put together using dragon frame. Due to the bouncing ball, I know the vague principles of this software, but I am sure there is more to explore on it, and I think it is a piece of software that I could become fairly confident in.

The bouncing ball project also introduced us to the basics of Maya, except this time we had a character rig set up for us. After a quick tutorial, we began it animate, luckily for me, my Maya character had all but a simple walk cycle, and I decided on close camera angles, to disguise the fact that the character walking was not the son. It would only be realised at the end that the son had not survived. During the editing process though I became worried that I hadn’t shown enough variation in the Maya parts, and so, by trying to show something new, gave away the ‘punch line’ of the narrative by showing the uniform. When I return to this project I will be changing these shots so it will be just the feet that is shown.

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3D Bouncing Ball

We took the principles we had learnt from the tradition 2D exercise and applied it to the programme Maya, which teaches skills using CGI software. I have never been particularly interested in 3D animation, but was not willing to dismiss it without first having a go. I think that once you become familiar with the software, the interface isn’t that difficult to use, I simply find it a challenge because I forget the many steps you must take when animating a simple process. Over all I am fairly satisfied with the ball I managed to animate, although, it clearly stops to abruptly, so an extension of the last arc was needed.

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Bouncing Ball

The bouncing ball is one of the first lessons taught to any animation student. Dealing with the principles of Squash and Stretch, Arcs, Timing/Spacing, and Volume, it is one of the most important lessons to learn. We began learning this through traditional 2D hand drawn medium, although the principles could be applied to all forms of animation. I enjoyed the bouncing ball, even though after putting it together it really made you aware of just how much work goes into just a few short seconds, and how time consuming it is. It was my first time using a light box and peg bar, but the process for both these things was smooth. I have never animated under the principles of key frames either. For the bouncing ball, I found it easy to do, however, when I went on to draw a water balloon I completely forgot to key frame. I supposed when you’re copying a very simple exercise it is easy to remember, but when doing your own animations, having to think about your own key framing becomes more of a challenge. I will be continuing with these exercises.

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Edinburgh Perspectives

This was my first project at ECA so I was rather apprehensive about it. Ultimately, it’s fair to say that the end result was not the desired product that we set out to achieve. I think we worked well as a group however, we all got along, supported each other and each other’s ideas and shared the work load. We began the project by first discussing and evaluating the brief, we were especially focussed on what seemed to be the most important and stressed issue of including 20 places or sights of Edinburgh. We decided to take a walk as a group, scouting locations, this was particularly helpful for those of us who were new to Edinburgh, and we managed to form a vague route, which would incorporate significant areas of Edinburgh.
We still saw including 20 places as being quite a challenge, particularly if we did each place individually, so we began to think of more unusual ways we could explore each place. We eventually took ‘sights’ of Edinburgh to mean not just the places but also the ‘perspectives’ and thought it would be an interesting way to follow a route of Edinburgh through the perspectives of different people and animals, something that would also make it easier to get to 20.
We set off individually to which ever location we wanted to explore. I began by taking a walk in the meadows, and thinking of the various perspectives that could be found there, a child, a dog, and insect and so on.

We later reassembled and all assigned ourselves a perspective, myself for example was assigned a bird, so I decided to conduct research atop Arthurs seat.

Before setting off to do this research we discussed story boarding and how each of our segments would flow into the next one, however, as we still worked on our story boards individually, even after collectively bringing them together, it seemed that our parts didn’t marry up quite as expected. For example, the fish segment came after mine, so we agreed that the bird's perspective should 'swoop' down, although, I realised the camera just couldn't get close enough. But when it came to seeing the fish segment, the fish was just swimming normally, even though we had agreed on it jumping out of the water to meet the bird. So I suppose time constraints affected the undiscussed alteration within our story boards, but collaborative story boarding is something to consider for future projects.
After the first week, our group diminished in size, our fourth-year student was working on her final project and one of the third-year students, although was still working on his segment, had another project to focus on, which left four of us. As myself and another member of the group had never actually animated before we agreed that a live action film might be the quickest way to gather footage, we could then animate over the top layer.

This is the bird I drew then animated using dragon frame. For the final animation, it turned out to be quite difficult and time consuming, as to overlay the bird on the footage, I was required to roto-brush around each image. I like my drawings of the bird, however, upon learning more about the processes of animating, realise I should have key framed it first, this may have made the wing movement more fluid.




Edinburgh Perspectives - Group C from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

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