James Fennell - BA2A - Animation

[jamesfennellba2a]

One major inspiration for my performance piece was the “Blank in Blank” YouTube channel. The channel features sections from obscure celebrity interviews with animated visuals. The animation is fairly basic and simply serves to illustrates the audio. I tried to so something similar, simply illustrating and supporting my chosen audio.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/user/blankonblank/about

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 17 Summary (Character Performance)

This week, I decided to change my style of animation. working entirely on two’s is taking far too long so I am now drawing at a much lower equivalent frame rate. Next time, I will plan ahead and consider time constraints. I can always animate the body less than the mouth, as 2D dialog is often done.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 17 Summary (Character Bestiary)

This week I filmed and began compositing my work. Capturing the frames of my stop-motion work gave me a new-found admiration for stop motion animators who worked in the era before “Dragon frame” and computerised assistance. I relied heavily onion skins and the ability to see how my past frames differ from the current frame. Although I had some difficulty getting soft enough lighting due to the shininess of my puppet, I am pretty happy with how the chroma-key is looking.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 17 Summary (Story Adaptation)

This week, I wrote most of my script and analysis. Although it was difficult to begin with, I quickly began to enjoy writing. I am glad that the theme I chose to write about was something I already had an interest in. I also found out how helpful it can be to have a good idea of the plot before writing it down.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 16 Summary (Character Performance)

This week I progressed with animating my performance. It went smoothly and as expected.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 16 Summary (Character Bestiary)

This week, I completed my stop motion puppet and began preparing for the shoot. I was originally unhappy with the paint job as it looked flat and dull. I added some spray lacquer varnish and this helped create a more interesting and realistic patina. I also used a black acrylic wash to add definition in to the darker areas.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 16 Summary (Story Adaptation)

This week, an individual tutorial with Lindsey helped me significantly with the progression of my work on this project. I had a rough idea of my plot but no real resolution. With her guidance, I picked out elements of the novella’s original plot and used them to help complete my narrative in a meaningful way. I am now happy with the direction in which this project is going.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Bestiary Narative arc

In terms of my narative arc, I considered the most basic structure of a begining, middle and end. The charcter leaves the water, loses his shell and then returns to said water when escaping. This creates a simple circlular structure.

[jamesfennellba2a]

This image shows a shot from my film before and after the addition of colour grading and foreground elements. I used these two things to help blend this with it's background and I think the results were pretty succesfull. It helped to even out the colours and cover up some unusually flat looking shadows as well as adding a sense of depth.

[jamesfennellba2a]

My character peformance piece features one character kicking another. This is a difficult movement to get right so I looked at a multitude of video clips for referance. The above gif is a good example.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 15 Summary (Character Performance)

Once again, this week was simply a matter of getting the animation work done. Having spoken with the tutor for this project, I may attempt an artificial "camera" move, when the animation is complete, in order to highlight and correctly frame the two characters.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 15 Summary (Character Bestiary)

This week, I completed the main structure of my model and began painting it. I also captured some background footage for the chroma-key. This will really help when deciding on the movements that my character will make within it's specific environment.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 15 Summary (Story Adaptation)

As well as recaping the next few chapters of the book, we discussed the reflective essay during this week's session. It was made clear that it is important to draw links between our text and the source in our essays as this will help to justify and explain our creative process.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Today I completed the paint job on my character puppet for the bestiary project. I looked closely at the textures and colors of real animals to get add a sense of realism to the puppet. This will be important when trying to place it convicingly on a photographic backdrop.

[jamesfennellba2a]

This page shows my rough design process for the the main character performance. I tried to go for something that would be possible with my skill level, achievable within the time constraints and still be expressive enough for this project. The geometric theming allows for simple lines and repeatability when drawing many similar frames.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 14 Summary (Character Performance)

This week I simply worked on completing the practical side of the animation. I decided on a simple yet expressive character design to allow for ease of animation as something more complex would take far too long to animate for this project. I made the rough animatic vague enough for me to decide on the designs later on.

[jamesfennellba2a]

Week 14 Summary (Story Adaptation)

This week we looked at the next few chapters of the book and covered how to structure a screenplay. The scripts that we will be writing must be written to be read as a complete descriptive story rather than a purely technical document. This will allow the reader to imagine the visuals of our adaptations in an accurate and detailed way.