Gareth Rees NUA Work BA1a

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Character Essay Research

My project will involve my personal favourite science fiction universe and easily the best to explore in detail, Warhammer 40,000. The essay will need to be about the game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and Captain Titus’ journey of discovery throughout the games story.

Making an essay about my favourite setting for any story has been great fun, even with my dislike of excessive writing, I can quite happily talk about 40k for hours as I have a great knowledge of the lore and universe’s history and how this impacts the unrecognisable state of humanity in the grim darkness of the far future.

I will produce a short summary to help provide some context to everything related to space marines below, but keep in mind I will be skipping thousands of pages of lore to get to this very short conclusion.

In the 41st millennium human society has degenerated into a theocratic monarchy in which a God Emperor is worshipped by the galaxy dominating Imperium of Man, a xenophobic militarised civilisation set in a state of perpetual war against endless foes that are seemingly unstoppable in their own unique way with varying goals that pit them against one another as much as the Imperium.

Titus is a space marine of the Ultramarines chapter, which originates from the Realm of Ultramar, the capital world of which is MaCragge. The Ultramarines are a much less restrictive space marine chapter, being led by the charismatic Primarch Roboute Guilliman, one of the Emperor’s sons who remained loyal to him throughout the civil war that took place around 30,000 AD against Warmaster Horus, heir to the throne of the Emperor and the first to openly defy the Imperium with help from the four Chaos Gods.

A great source of influence is “The Lord Inquisitor”, a short 40k animation made for YouTube but one that really captures the essence of the life within the setting for humans and also shows off some great space marine walk cycles to compare with Captain Titus.

Another great source of inspiration for animates space marines is another short film called “Astartes” to which there are two parts as of writing, both showcase some very nice animations of space marines in a different setting to Titus but nonetheless are both very nicely made.

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This was a second iteration I only half made for the walk cycle. The idea was to add some secondary animations to the walk cycle by changing the character to a Death Korps of Krieg Guardsman from Warhammer 40k as they have many different loose pieces of clothing on them such as their trench coat, gas mask tube and backpack.

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This was my first walk cycle which I created using the Dragonframe software and paper sketches. The cycle was a very important lesson for me as I will be using the walk cycle to create future animations a lot, especially since I have a keen interest in character animation. 

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This task was for us to showcase anticipation using a simple jump animation, I however over-complicated it by making the character too small. The image quality is also quite low to to light changes in the room but the actual animation is of a reasonable quality. My spin on the task was to make the person jumping have a jump pack that would launch them into the air and land really hard but I should really have made it a simple jump as that would have been much clearer.

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This is the second part of the ball bounce task, we simply had to add a secondary animation part to the ball bounce; I of course decided to make the ball a flail and have the chain and handle be the secondary part of the animation. One problem with it is it’s too fast and bouncy and the chain doesn’t react correctly.

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This short sequence was made as part of a task involving a display of ball bounces and how objects react with gravity. The ball loses momentum with each bounce, making the bounces quicker and much smaller each time by adjusting the frequency of frames in each part.

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This is the second part of the pendulum task that I was assigned to do early in the project, it was to essentially use the first part to create a pendulum swing that would need to be interrupted by something. I decided to recreate an imperial lasgun that would shoot the tether and release the pendulum from the swinging motion it was in. 

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This is a test for pendulum swings that I made as part of our dynamic animation project early on. This was the first time we used paper to animate 2D sequences and had us learning much about momentum from the creation process, in future I will absolutely make sure to use more frames in these sequences.

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Character Research

The research of a character is a very important part of understanding what makes characters so good as it offers us insight into how we could use the best parts of characters to create brand new ones from similar concepts.

It also helps us gain credibility as a practitioner and shows that we are willing to do research into an existing character, which could become helpful if we were ever tasked with adapting something into and animated format.

Research can also help you avoid doing something that someone else has already done before you and encourages added creativity and originality when working on projects and is a very clear way of showing your influences and can often make you more employable as potential employers can see your dedication to researching topics.

Another great benefit of the research is that it helps you to understand and use criticism to your benefit, something that many people cannot seem to do and studying topics massively and consistently can easily lead to better results.

Don’t make second hand things, use the things you love to make something better; perhaps use real life sources and people and use your experiences to make unique characters.

It is very important to be open to outside influences and to not be narrow minded and ensure that you assimilate any influences as to increase the quality of your own work. Never plagiarise or make poor imitations of other people’s work, let ideas grow organically.

Stories are their characters, they rely on the characters within them to push the plot forward and audiences usually remember the characters of a story much better than the actual story. Characters need to be relatable to the audience, a character should not be utterly unrelatable and never required to struggle, this makes a character too perfect and can often cause audiences to despise them as they will never earn anything.

Villains are very important and are often responsible for making a story much better, sometime the villain can be even more popular than the hero when the writers make use of moral grey-areas and gets the audience to question who the villain really is.

All protagonists have human qualities to help relate them to the audience, these human qualities apply to characters that aren’t even human, such as with anthropomorphic characters who have many obviously human traits. Many stories have a deeper meaning to them and teach us or make a commentary about the human condition, perhaps letting us see things from a different perspective or viewpoint.

Who a character is as a person fundamentally affects the way they speak, move act and behave; this is crucial in the development of a believable character as they must be consistent to be relatable and believable. It is also a good idea to keep most of the character hidden from basic observation and make them more complex than how they first appear to be.

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Dynamic Animation Research

Frame rates are important in animated sequences, it is best for 2D animation to stay at either 24 or 25 frames per second; most 2D sequences are later changed to be “on twos”, doubling the frames and slowing the animation down in a smoother way as the eyes notice the extra frames as a sort of smoothness.

The point of animation is to create the illusion of life; it is important to make any animations believable but not necessarily realistic; realism can often be boring and doesn’t always fit with things that aren’t real, however the correct way to animate things that aren’t real is to make them move in a way that looks as though it would be right for the object or character. Cartoon characters don’t move in a realistic way, that would just look silly in most circumstances, we all recognise natural looking movement.

It is also important to consider observation and the application of life drawing when creating animated characters and planning their movements as real life is often the best source of knowledge for how things move; life drawing is also an excellent way to learn about posture and gestures in humanoids and how to correctly shape illustrations of humanoid characters.

Inertia is yet another critical detail of character animation that is responsible for believable characteristics in movement as this is responsible for the illusion of momentum and similar important parts of animation.

Extremes are frames that show a change in direction and the end of an action, most of the time these frames are known as key frames.

Passing positions are the middle frame of an action and is between two key frames, these are also known as breakdown frames.

Inbetweens are the frames between two images that create the illusion of movement.

Easing in is very important and the simple way to do this is to just add more frames in places where they are appropriate.

Timing is the speed or tempo at which something happens, rhythm is also important.

Different materials have varying properties and to keep the objects believable it is critical to adjust timing and how you use the framing to make an object reflect the traits that it should have; spacing is the easiest way to do this, faster objects have greater spacing and slower objects have less spacing; the spacing can also show whether something is accelerating or decelerating.

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This is the final part of the initial group project, it demonstrates two pendulums colliding with each other. 

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This is another part of the group project I was a part of in my first week. This showcases our use of an interruption to the pendulum swinging motion.

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My first stop motion test which used Dragonframe to animate it, this was made as part of a group project.