#practice1media

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Martha

Nostalgia and Memory: Project Development.

I decided to work further in my nostalgia and memory short. This film means so much to me that deserves all my energy. As I resumed this project I gave it a really good look at the end result from a couple of weeks ago, thus I had to take hard decisions along the way, like changing the end and redesigning the characters.

New Inspiration:

I found these great artists (https://gurihiru.tumblr.com) and decided to adapt my moodboard for the redesign stage of Martha at a young age.

Pic 1. Character redesign

I like this approach much better and proceed by doing colour testing with her face and body.

Pic. 2 Colour testing

nevertheless, after watching some pictures of my grandmother I decided to rethink or redo some designs.

Pic 3. Family portrait: Young and Adults

I also redesign my grandparents and looking at old pictures my heart started to crumble. We had SO much love from them. 

Pic 4 Grandpa: Antonio

Pic 5. Grandma: Martha

As far as I´m concerned, I redesigned all the film and I was a little worried not to finish it on time, but I reviewed the brief, it said “develop further” and that’s what I did. 

The Animation:

Probably the hardest part so far, because I took the hard route which I believe is the best one in order to learn more and this is the time to experiment.

Pic 6. Young Martha running with Teddy across the park

The animation was done in Photoshop and drawn frame by frame at 12 frames per second, in the animation world this is known as animating on twos.

Pic 7. Young Martha loop.

As I mentioned before, I wanted to portrait be the beautiful youth that my grandmother could have had, showing her innocence, and gracefulness the best way I could.

I also had the opportunity to work with great musicians such as my friend Aldo Tomitzi and he introduced me to a friend of his, Mari Davies-Barrett, which they created the music and sound design for the film and felt so complete after I put the image and the music together. 

At the end

I tried the best I could to complete the piece but I am still working on it. The learning is there and the experience gained so far has been superb, and I feel satisfied with the tribute I am creating for the person that gave me SO MUCH LOVE.

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Memory and Nostalgia Animation (advance Animatic)

Reflection on my work:

This is the approach for a much bigger project I have in mind. I want to start collecting testimonies of Alzheimer’s and do a small project of animation, with a couple of them and start to generate more social awareness of the disease. 

This will be the first of many testimonials that I will work on the near future.

I achieve an accurate timing in the movement of my character, focusing on the transitions, mainly in the part that Martha forgets her life. The lack of colours and background work was due to the vast amount of hours I spend in constructing the narratives and the 2D animation, but I consider the main story is told here and this will be definitely a film that I would like to complete by the end of this term.

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Places of the mind exploration

Exploring the main character:

Sooo.. here am I trying to explore more of the characters for my next assignment, and I found out that I want to place myself in this project, so I started to sketch some me in a character.

Does it look like me? well, at least I tried :) 

Next, I sketch or explore the way ‘’my mind’’ is going to look like, and here is the result of this.

I kind of liked it, but it’s so much to do and so little time in one week, plus I have tons of things to read for other classes and making an appealing story that makes proud of what I’m doing.

Next is starting to make the sketches come to life, and here is a brief animation of my main character.

This is it, for now, hope to continue working to achieve something that I really like.

Reflection on my work:

I applied some of the colour palettes I found in my references in the LRC. I used the same contrast in the lines to explore the character and it seems to work for this project. I believe this is a safe path to continue working this way.

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It’s all about transitions

Reflection on my work: I tried to challenge myself here. In this project, I wanted to do things that normally wouldn’t do in my daytime job, because of projects budget or time. For me, transitions give the sensation that audiovisual pieces are well planned from the beginning. Whenever I see animations or films with great transitions between scenes or locations indicates me that the directors had planned that from the beginning.  Intended transitions reinforce the story and make you say… ‘’wow, that’s cool’’. 

I planned this transition to short time and space between a far distance (samurai looking from a mountain) and a village (Confrontation between two Samurais). The camera movement makes the sensation that the red Samurai covers a great distance in a few frames, ending up in a tension with his counterpart.

Was harder than I expected, but I really liked it and paid off the effort.

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Animation test. 

Reflection on my work: This would be one of my characters and I wanted to test some human movement with the sword. Looks a little sloppy on the movement but for me the timing is right. The line works good and seems that colourless is the way to go for this part. This test helps me to visualize the character acting and the interaction with the sword.

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Red vs. Blue: The development

When two opposites collide.

This is the first project I picked to develop further for my Practice 1 assignment and I am excited to work even further on this film. I dedicate tons of hours at the beginning of the module to this project, but I know it has unfinished scenes that need to be completed.

Premise: Two samurais facing each other. One wants to fight to defend his honour. The second refuses but is not willing to die.

Inspirations:

I am a martial arts practitioner. Samurais have been a subject matter for my art, inspiration and motivation throughout life, thus this task was an easy case for my research but vast nevertheless. 

I explored all over my sources for traditional and modern samurai’s art, in movies, games and illustrations. I came up with a moodboard for each character backing up the profile I wrote for these adversaries.

Pic 1. Moodboard Red:

Red: Violent, eager, short-tempered, passionate, honour, family oriented, heavy on the feelings. 

Pic 2. Red Character Designs.

Red in this story represents the eagerness of youth, looking to avenge his betrayed honour.

Pic 3. Moodboard Blue:

Blue: Spiritual, centred, open minded, free spirit, peacefully, his destiny on his own hands.

Pic 4. Blue Design concepts:

Blue represents the elder wisdom. The experienced warrior that has seen too many battles and want to retire in peace with himself, not willing to die just yet.

Animation technique:

I did most of the 2D animation in Photoshop, but After Effects was the final software to compose it. I focused mainly on transitions to give it a dynamic look. Was quite a challenge to make it look powerful yet smooth at the same time.

Pic 5 Animation transition:

A personal reflection on my work:

I believe this is the starting point of my new way of doing animation, I really commit to my research and my character development. I like what I learnt doing this animation and I am content but not completely satisfied. I will only improve from now on. 

References:

The Last Samurai, 2003. [DVD] Edward Zwick, United States: Warner Bros.

NERDO. (2018). Far East Festival - Opening. [Online Video]. 16 April 2018. Available from: https://vimeo.com/264965734. [Accessed: 8 January 2019].

The Golden Wolf. 2019. goldenwolf.tv. [ONLINE] Available at: http://goldenwolf.tv/. [Accessed 8 January 2019].

Animade. 2019. animade.tv. [ONLINE] Available at: https://animade.tv/. [Accessed 8 January 2019].

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Character Design References

Galleries, tutorials, interviews, reviews and animated shorts for your daily dose of inspiration! Discover the most gifted and influential artists working in animation, comics and illustration, today.

A great place I can inspire my designs. I will definitely use more this source as a starting point before I start sketching my characters and environments. 

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Hand drawing Animation Test 1 Clean up

For me going back to the basis is the key to go forward with my animation technique. Finding my own line helps me realize the animator I want to become.

Reflection on my work:

This exercise will improve my technique in 2D animation adding value to my audiovisual pieces in the near future with better timing, spacing and acting within the sequences.