Shadow Puffer

@shadow-puffer

MA animation student at the university documenting their work and having fun =^=

115 posts

Hello, I am an MA animation student and this is my first post on this blog.

In its entirety this page will be focused on my work as animator in University of Hertfordshire and showing my work and assignments that I will receive during this year of studies.

This blog is a combination of animation studies and context studies so everything will be divided with tags, so if you need to search anything regarding specific studies you can find the tag bellow this post.

New tags can be added with new materials and assignments that I will get.

There might be some self studies that will also be marked with their own tag

#MA Animation #Sources and Significance #Animatic 1 #Animatic 2 #Animatic 3 #Animatic 4 #Animatic 5 #Reader #Blog post #Critical analysis #Animation 1 #Animation 2 #LiveBrief #FMP Proposal #FMP

Final major project ending

Thoughts

The project was extremely fun and I made it more challenging for myself, by picking more time to animate. To be honest I definitely overestimated myself with this one.

I had big plans for this project, I wanted to animate it frame by frame with cool shadows, however I failed at almost everything. No, the Animation looks really good, but it is far from my expectations. The only good part is some places where I did frame by frame, and all the backgrounds look nice. However most of other things look rushed.

Mainly the problem was with two things. First is the amount of work that I needed to do solo, since I am too stubborn to ask for help, since then the project wouldn’t be just mine and there is no fun in that. Another problem was with me not having consistent art style. It always changes and I sometimes feel like AI, since I can’t draw the same picture twice. I lack a lot of practice and naively thought that this project could have help me with that problem. It made it worse. I had to redraw and redraw and redraw characters until they were at least recognizable as same characters.

To be honest, I think my major project is a complete disaster. However despite all the problems I still learned a lot and now I can at least maintain some consistency in my style, at least for a bit. Also making animation frame by frame yielded some interesting results that I definitely will save somewhere for future.

#ma animation #fmp

Promotional video

Well the promotional video I think is eh… No I don’t mean it is bad, but even with all my tries I think that it is not interesting enough. I wanted to animate parts of it exclusivly for this videy, but the animation took all my time and I couldn’t

All in all this looks good for the amount of skill that I possess in making these videos, which is small to none. Would I show this to my friends? Yeah absolutely. Would I show it somewhere else? No, I would be too embarrassed to show this to someone who is not close to me

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored 3.2

Stage

This is the first part that I animated in color, and it is still my favorite. While watching animation I revisit this part just to watch it again and again, since i really like the movement. It beels smooth and really good looking

I thought a bit about maybe making the background a bit darker but decided against it since it all still look perfect.

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored 3.1

Transformation

To be honest, even though I animated this fame by frame, I don’t really like this animation at all. The legs were pain to animate, as well as the perspective at some points.

Part where Solar is pinned to the wall seems to last too long, maybe I could have added something else there, but there sadly was no time for that so we have what we have. I wanted to say special thanks to my friend who told me to make punch quicker to make it more dynamic. I am somewhat satisfied with what I made, not fully, but it is a learning experience.

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored 2.2

Tornado

This one was a bit hard to color. It turned out a bit interesting, However for the longest time I debated if I should add eyes to tornado or not. Usually in cartons there are eyes in tornado, and they show movement good.However I decided against it, ending up with what I had

It was my first time ever animating something like this. To be honest there are no good references to teach me how to animate tornado properly, so I had to improvise. Good thing it all turned out well.

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored 2.1

Book

Easy enough animation, yet so interesting. I like how smooth the book turn pages. Frame by frame animation was definitely a great choice for this segment. I don’t think that animation with help of my app would have looked better. Definitely there would be no good ways to animate flipping pages

Although the second boot that is on the table looks a bit small as if it is not a book, but a journal. However I have no Idea how to fix it properly since perspective with boors is even tougher than that of a building

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored Pt 1.2

Running away

I like the Idea behind this running animation, however I don’t like how it ended up looking in the end. For some reason something feels whong with this animation, however I have no idea what exactly, since everything looks nice, and moves as it should.

I had to add shadows on right arm and leg, because without that animation would look confusing like it looked at line version. Even though there are shadows they are not that noticeable so the animation still looks good in my animation that is without shadows

#ma animation #fmp

Characters colored Pt 1.1

Intro

I added back the intro credits. To make them more visible I decided to add a layer behind them to make the intro stand out from the animation itself. I really like How it all turned out.

However If I will have more time I will try and add a bit more light that falls on the character from behind or from the sides to make the scene more epic. However since it is partially covered by intro, I might need to not do that for now

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 3.2

Stage

This is definitely my favorite scene. The movement is so smooth and so cool looking. However it was such a pain to animate frame by frame. I decided to make it on separate layers, like one hand one layer, other hand other layer, and so on and so forth. That helped a lot and made it easier to keep track of all parts

However it was the jigsaw puzzle that I never want to assemble again. But too bad, too sad I still need to color all of this. I just hope It won’t break when I add colors, since previouslu it was too sensitive to any changes around it, constantly breaking

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 3.1

Transformation

The perspective pains me to do this, but I chose it myself, so it is probably not idea to whine about it. The legs though will give me nightmares for days. No matter how many times i tried to fix them they looked like this is not a human but an octopus.

To be honest this is my best attempt in this part of animation so I am leaving it as is.

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 2.2

Tornado

This part looks interesting. I spend good amount of time on researching how to draw tornadoes like that, I finally I managed to find some examples. Althouh with this one the hardest part will be to color it properly. Maybe I should add eyes to tornado like they do in cartoons

I know the door is to dark and it is hard to see what did I animate, but trust me it looks awesome and when it will be colored it will pop well since all the colors a vibrant and bright. Perfect for dark background such as this.

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 2.1

Book

Page flipping was fun to create, although I ended up using myself partially as reference on how to properly flip pages. I like how this looks on this background with lots of colored books.

Although I do need to add letters on the first book. It would be weird for character to read an empty book in the library. Small details, but yet good ones

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 1.2

Running away

Umm I don’t know what happened but the first running animation looks weird. I cannot put a finger on what exactly makes me so unnerved by that. As frames they looked perfect, however when put together it looks like a mess. It kinda looks like arms are switching places and Solar is running only using his left half of the body

I now can only hope that all of this will be fixed on coloring stage. Maybe with a bit of color it would be easier to distinguish how exactly is he running

#ma animation #fmp

Character animation Pt 1.1

Intro

Don’t mind that the hands are white, I colored them in so they would cover the strings and the guitar wouldn’t look weird with see through fingers. I like the look that I managed to make with hand movements. I tried listening to the music and adjusting the hands accordingly

However I am not a musician, so I can only hope that actual musicians won’t start commenting that the hands is playing nonsense. Before that started, to any offended musician I am sorry for this scary thing

#ma animation #fmp

Backgrounds Pt 3.3

Stage

Yep, it is only one background, it seems unimpressive. But it was the hardest background to come up with. I tried many ways to make it look good at least and this one finally managed to do what I needed. At some point I thought maybe adding more lights with different colors, but decided against it since it would be an overkill

Also fun thing that I decided to include is that the beams of light in animation will be moving from side to side. This is the only moving background

#ma animation #fmp

Backgrounds Pt 3.2

Headspace

The hardest background in this animation is finally done. I am satisfied with how it turned out to be, however it is noticeable that I added some corners to it. It is just the couches are so hard to draw good in perspective so I decided to just make the couches blocky and it worked

This background is less overwhelming since we already saw similar background before. Here I just added the sofa snd called it a day. Sadly the image in tv will not be moving, so it is stationary forever

To be honest, I thought I will make backgrounds quick and start with animation soon, but I have to take my time creating each and every background so they look good and somewhat professional

#ma animation #fmp

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