BA7animation_research

[ba7animationresearch]

Facial expression of emotion was challenging and exciting for my character Mort, I enjoy facial expressions in animation, for my first animation I done was a character who went through a series of emotions, which was great to animate, I was struggling to make more look angered enough he just came out looking mildly annoyed and not ‘pissed off’ enough and he needed to look enraged, so I found good reference in one of my favourite graphic novels called Hellsing by Kohta Hirano, one of my favourite artists and writers, he majored in german war history and he creates a storyline based upon Europe and its second world war he involves and references historical figures, like the Nazi’s, the wild geese and also involves Bram Stockers Dracula into his story and does so in a creative war that works brilliantly, and the Art. Is. Stunning. his main character Alucard is always drawn superbly and his emotions are brilliantly portrayed especially his anger and surprise which I referenced for my character Morts expressions.

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FORCE Dynamic Life Drawing For Animators by Michael D. Matessi is another book I purchased about life drawing and the use of this in animation, the book has a large number of beautiful sketches that are propositioned correctly, with various poses, demonstrating directional force and its effect on a character, forceful shape and rhythm, a main sketch was inspiring for my character Mort where a human is using a long pole object similar to a hammer by way of the action and direction.

[ba7animationresearch]

Style of animation changed during my work, initially traditional hand drawn was the style I wanted to pursue as seen in my animation test but unfortunately the use of the rostrum machines was hard as a lot of the time they were fully booked, so I changed to using the flash software to help get more work done but I feel that problems still arisen whilst using the software but I tried to the best with what I could but I would love to go back to this project and complete it with the traditional style as I preferred the look of this style more than the ‘clean’ look that comes from digitally painting in flash, looking at the two different style I like the look of the ‘dirtier’ style more but I also think i made  a good decision switching because this would have resulted in an even more lack of work that I anticipated.

[ba7animationresearch]

Richard Williams; The Animators Survival Kit was a brilliant helpful guide in animating and proved fantastic when I found a section solely dedicated to lifting and swinging a heavy object, which I practiced and used in my tests and then later into the animatic and animation, the guide is simplistic to read and provides so many helpful little tips that can improve an image dramtically. 

I referenced this page for the movement of the scythe swinging on these images of a character  swinging a hammer.

[ba7animationresearch]

Before deciding on my animation theme I had an idea about doing a animation about the circle of life where ashes would fall into the water and be swallowed by a fish and then some would grow into a tree and go on in a train like this for awhile, although I choose my Terry Pratchett themed animation as my experimental project I want to use my first idea perhaps for my last project for University because I feel I have learned a lot from this project and a lot of ideas on making a really nice piece of work from this my original idea.

[ba7animationresearch]

 I practiced a lot of tutorials that Jazza produced for the drawing the human anatomy, he is really good at explaining things in a way you can understand, and even shows previous work he has done that he has improved in his new work to show and explain what went wrong and the improvement steps he went through.

One of the tutorials I practiced was about drawing the female and male anatomy, I will paste below some drawings that I did and one that Jazza done himself.

Through my practice I started to improve on my anatomy drawings females the above pictures are my own drawings that I produced, some are better than others but I felt that my skills improved the more drawings I did.

This drawing was the final sketch of many that Jazza drew saying that their are three big tips to drawing a women you have to think about; curves, hips and chest.

He talked about poses and that the arms of a women are a lot ‘meatier’ than what you would previously conceive them to be, that they are actually are just as meaty as a regular sized mans arms are. And that how drawing the chest is important and the stages of drawing from stick figure to muscle drawing and the the final line art.

[ba7animationresearch]

Throughout the project I have been watching a lot of videos by a you tuber named Draw with Jazza who is a working animator and character designer and is based in Australia, he produces brilliant online tutorials with a variety of subjects ranging from animating in certain softwares to studying and drawing the human anatomy and even how to get out into the world of animation and also help in buying equipment for animation and really influential and helpful books. I studied a lot of his flash tutorials and human drawing tutorials and found them immensely helpful, also he does great talks about demoralisation during work and life and how to endeavour to overcome it, which is something I fall prey to  lot in my work the think to his demoralisation video is here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsbJETtvg9Q&list=PLNaAcA0yN3KZ3JAnd4tC3XhKGSkkT5yKI 

found this information solo helpful and what he talks about in this video is so helpful to all  animators and non animators, I learnt a lot about myself from this video and my work ethic too.

[ba7animationresearch]

During my first character design of the Monk I wanted to create a character that looked but comical, without hair and that was anaemically skinny because of his occupation and age I thought his skinniness was appropriate, I was recommended a character from a film called ‘Salem’s Lot’ the vampire was very creepy and comical but because my character of the Monk was skinny and of course dead well a ghost his pallor matched the vampires pretty well, so I took further inspiration from the Vampires lack of hair, paleness, bags under the eyes and facial lines and slight coloration of blue and hints of purple which aged my character more and made him seem ‘unhealthy’ and ‘ghost-like’.

[ba7animationresearch]

Monk’s look was inspired by Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin when he was disguised as an old crippled man to fool Aladdin, the character design is brilliant his head shape and eyebrows were definitely influential to my character the Monk but I did not want to add too much facial hair

because I don't think Monks are meant to have facial hair but I thought to keep the eyebrows big and hairy to help make the character look older than he would without, also during the character design I battled with keeping the eyebrows within the face or so that they grow off of his head, so some of the drawings vary during this until stage but I finally decided upon him having his eyebrows come hang of his face to make him appear more comical and older than he seems.

[ba7animationresearch]

Someone pointed out to me that my drawing of Mort resembles a you-tuber called Danny from the team ‘the game grumps’ looking further into this I realised that yes my character and Danny are similar especially with their hair which actually helped me when designing the character further, generally Danny is funny and over the top sometimes which mad me ‘overact’ the emotions for Mort during there animation.

[ba7animationresearch]

Some further designs of the characters came from my later Character designs where I experimented with the use of more expressions for Mort and more body language for the Monk.

[ba7animationresearch]

Adapting the story I drew what I imagined the characters to look like, I though to make Mort’s clumsiness more recognised by him dragging the scythe across to make it seem that he is weak and cannot lift his own scythe, the monk laughs at the sight which in turn angers Mort, with his rage at its peak Mort manages to lift the scythe and severe the monk from is body.

[ba7animationresearch]

These are the original first sketches that I had in mind for my characters, I has largely inspired by Terry Pratchett’s book ‘Mort’ which is about the Grim reaper taking an apprentice named Mort who is a young teenage boy, extremely clumsy, day dreamy boy who often has his head in the clouds and is unwanted by all the other tradesmen as an apprentice apart from Death.

A section of the book was what I based my animation upon, where Death confident in Mort’s abilities sends the boy out to take some souls on his own, three in total he tries hard not to muck them up, but does anyway, the third soul was the one that stuck out in my mind, a monk who had passed away of old age waits to be set free but convinces the boy to let him run off and reincarnate in the next village over.