The Selkie Animation

Welcome! This is a blog about my 4th year animation project. The Selkie is about two young children who discover the existence of Selkies; a mythical creature present in many stories around the British Isles and extending into the Scandinavian regions. There are also some hints of them being in Icelandic stories. In all stories they are harmless creatures who are seals while in the sea, but when they come onto land, they remove their seal skins and become human. They are probably most popular in Ireland and the Islands around Scotland. So far this is just a personal project that I'm doing, possibly with the help of my brother who is a film student.

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Hello all!

I just thought I’d write a wee update. Now that uni has finished, I hope to continue working on Selkie over the summer, and beyond if it needs it :). However, I’m taking a bit of time out for now. But hopefully I will have updates in a week or so :)

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This is still needing tidied up, but I’ve been working on this for 10 hours solid today and I’m shattered. So I just want to get this up here and not think about it for the rest of the day. But I shall be working on Shot 3 tomorrow which will probably take me longer than this one. 

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The etching took a lot less time than I thought it would. It’s still rough and blotchy, but I don’t mind it being that way. So here is today’s work. Clean up, Colour, Shadows, Highlight and Etching. Was pretty fun, but also knackering :)

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Accidentally posted this on the wrong tumblr page. But here it is, back where it belongs! :P

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Been working on this all day. It’s finally done EXCEPT for the drawing on the stone. I’m about to start working on that. :)

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Visit Original Link

This is the music for my film. It’s not what I was looking for to start with, but it’s ended up like this and I love it. Originally I wanted something rather... up beat.. But the more I work on this film, the more haunting I want it to feel. I feel my mum managed that pretty well in this. 

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I coloured the splash. Hopefully I’ll find time to clean it up a bit more. Make it all purdy. I still have to add the selkie skin and work on her hair a bit more. I’d love to get this scene cleaned for the degree show.. but it’s not looking possible. 

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I decided to do some more work for finishing a scene. So I picked the easiest and shortest scene I had. Still have a lot of work to do on this. But at least I have block colours and some shading. I have a lot of ideas for this. Need to try some of them out though. 

Rendered in low quality.. beecauuuse I forgot to change it back to high after doing some previous tests... :D

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Made a poster for Selkie. Got lots of different variants of this image. Might be printing it for the degree show, depends how finished the film be!

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Trying my hand at water animation today. Here is my first attempted. I only did three arms to the splash to make it easy, but I think I need to add more. 

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Finally done the animation for this scene. I still have her hair and the skin to do. But now I have the exact timing! :)

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Thank you!

Wow, over a hundred followers now. Thank you everyone for taking an interest in my project. :)      <3

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This shot will have colourings going into sunrise, like the transition shot I did, but backwards. But I’ll only do that if I have time. 

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Nyah! So close to getting all of these done. I’ve left the two largest for last, the opening shot and the credits. So I’ll probably get one of them done today, the other will be tomorrows task. 

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So the plan is that the rocks in the foreground will move to the left, and the Island will move to the right, to reveal the selkie. Shouldn’t be too difficult... right? xD

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Another background done. I’ll hopefully re-key the animation for this shot, I’m really unhappy with how it is at the moment. 

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Background done for the stone skip scene. Part of me thinks I should spend a long time getting the backgrounds really pretty, but to be honest, my specialisms aren’t backgrounds... so why should I at the moment? lol. I’ll work on backgrounds once I’ve finished uni! I like how the sand came out on this, and the water is kinda nice. 

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Backgrounds done. Here are some of the easy ones, though I couldn’t decide exactly what I wanted when I started, so it took me a couple of ours to get this. I think maybe I’ll need to bring in some brighter, lighter colours but at the moment this is feeling pretty good :D