#sequential practice

[piecesofgzaltan]

13 reasons Why- S3 E12 : One sequence :

So, even if I'm used to draw an adaptation of an episode of Degrassi, I was really willing to draw this sequence from 13 reasons Why. It really thrives me in, mostly after everything the character of Tyler went through. I really love the message behind this scene, about how rebuilding yourself could be a long process, one where you will probably not recognize yourself at the end, thing who can be scary, to be fair. Here, Tyler took the time to capture every step of his own journey through pictures. I read before that in all these pictures, there is only in the last one where he is smiling. But after redrawing all the shot, we can see it's not true. For some moments, Tyler is back to smile and sometimes, you feel how bad was his day through his face on the picture. And it's means a lot about going through depression or a trauma. Somedays are better than others, someday, you feel like everything will be better now, and some others, you feel like you will never make it. But that's the thing, even in the bad is always there, sometimes, waiting to come back, the good also is waiting, and will be back. On how you see it, it can only give you hope of a brighter future.

I also very love the friendship built between Alex and Tyler. Where Tyler would be a kinda dark version of Clay (notably in season 1 and 2), Alex is more of a character who shares the same sensibility than Tyler, and kinda completed each other. This incredible moment and sentence "Are you okay ?", only by looking at the face of his friend also prove how Tyler learn to use his empathy to help people around him. Because he's been through hard stuff, he learn himself to recognize the signs. Like he said to Jessica : "May be it's different with guys." May be it's why he is able to see that Alex is suffering right now, only by a look on his face.

There is so much to say about this sequence. My relathinship with Season 3 is complicated. I feel like the direction taken, with the murder mostly, was going too far for being really realistic for a teen-show (but hey, it's a drama, and sometimes, it needs a strong red line, I was still curious to know who was the killer). But this season is probably the one with the most poignant scene. For me, it really revealed how Devin Druid was a skilled actor, notably in emotional scene.

And I'm stopping here, because there is so much to say. And I love tumblr for that. Instead of Instagram, we can really write and write and write about our favorite subject here.

I hope you enjoy this tiny hommage. I really love doing it, even if it took me so long to do it (one year). Still, I'm willing to do more scene, from other serie. I already have some ideas. I will post them here of course, but also on my instagram : Gzaltan_gonera - if you want to read them on it, or discover all my silly little adventure in travel =).

Thank you if you read until here.

[erikscourseblog]

Puppet Project - Research

My puppet was based off the Snowboarder Zeb Powell, as winter sports is something I have an interest in and is something I thought would provide interesting opportunities for movement in animation.

Winter sport clothes tend to feature bright colours and bold designs and I thought this would be something interesting to emulate.

Although I started off research with a snowboarder, I looked at snowboarding culture as a whole as well as skateboarding culture. Snowboarding was seen as a rebellious response to the dominant skiing culture when it arose, and the subculture are embraced some elements from punk amd hip hop subcultures. In my research I found parallels between skateboarding and snowboarding subcultures.

I decided to make the puppet a skate boarder rather than a snowboarder because of some shared qualities between the two sports/ subcultures. I also thought that skateboarding would be more flexible and better to work with in terms of what set design and animation can be made for it.

[ocean104]

After the experimental animation was over, we were given our first live project with a client; 9Trees. For this project, we were instructed to make a poster related to a certain national day, and I chose National Bike Day. I was working for some time trying to come up with a good concept for it, until I finally reached a bike wheel made of trees.

From there I expanded the concept and explored it further, until I finally reached my pitch draft. 

I sent it in and it had received praise, but there were a few issues with coloring. Once I fixed those up though, I was able to send it in for the final submission.

[ocean104]

The first work we went into doing when we returned from Winter Break was experimenting with stop motion, as that was what we would be doing for our puppets. For this, we worked on three different aspects of stop motion; a collage piece, 2D in the real world, and pixelation. 

For the collage piece, I worked with one of my classmates to cut up the people from a magazine for the animation. We built a background out of the magazine as well, making it look like a stage that the magazine cutout people were dancing on. We experimented with cutting up and moving the different pieces of each cutout like puppets, which definitely informed us on speed and movement for later in the project. 

For 2D in the real world, we had to make a moving gif/video of a 2D animation in a real world background. For this, I took a video of the rooftop and animated a flying witch going through the air. It was a very long and arduous process, especially when the character was still and the background video kept moving. But I managed to make it look smooth and make the video flow well enough. 

The final part of the experiments was pixelation, and this experiment had me work with a group of others to make a stop motion film out of ourselves. It was hard, and we found that holding in the right poses for a long time tired us out after an hour of work, but we managed to get all of our work finished and went in for editing next. This wasn’t nearly as long, and was more finding the right sounds than anything. Our final submission was above satisfactory to us.

[ocean104]

Over winter break, I was given an assignment to research a local figure from where I lived. This figure would help create a puppet we would go on to build later on in the year. The figure I chose was Ayanna Pressley, a Boston Representative in the House of Representatives. She is an outspoken and progressive government official, and the kind of person there should be more of in Congress. From a character standpoint though, Mrs. Pressley has Alopecia, which would help differentiate her from many of the other puppets.

[robertvblog]

Tris- 2

Week 14 (Final puppet animation)

For the final animation for the puppet was a lot of fun overall. Playing with the lighting was a challenged and finally able to have that very late afternoon dark kind of vibe, it really added to the story behind the film.

However, I could've improved the different camera angles in my opinion such as - camera could've been more dynamic and more closer to the character in combination with the background music/ sound effects.

As the sound effects really sells the emotion giving off from the meaning behind the story here. The character resembles Cromwell himself affected by the death of his daughter Elizabeth, on top of inflected by a disease himself.

Next time, I wish I'll be able to add some digital effects to enhance the situation the character was in. Coughing heavily, this could've been improved with the use of blood using digital effects, or even with the use of red paint which I had not thought of it at the time of shooting the footage. This could've drastically added a more dramatic tension, connecting the character to the audience. To have that sense of empathy a lot more.

[erikscourseblog]

Sequential Practice: Experimental Animation PT03 - Pixillation

For this brief we had to work in teams to create a stop motion animation using ourselves as props. This means that we had to take a photograph for every time that we changed position. This technique can be used to create magic or impossible motion or action, such as objects of people suddenly appearing or dissapearing. In a team of four people, we planned out a fight scene to animate. We drew a very rough storyboard of all the actions we would need to do. At any given time, at least one of us was operating the camera. We had to be thoughtful when directing eachother, thinking about the timing and when someone would enter or leave a the shot. We kept the camera in the same position the whole time.

[erikscourseblog]

Sequential Practice: Experimental Animation PT02 - Animation in the real world

For this assigment, I had to record real life footage, and then animate a character over it to create a seemless loop in which the character appears to interact with the real world around them. I recorded footage of a location at the university where I thought there would be "platforms" the character could interact with (in this case, the scaffolding) and foreground elements that the character could be behind (the people walking by) to make them seem like a part of teh environment.

When animating the character, I tried to keep in mind the principle of Squash and Strench, so that my characters movements woudl apepar to have weight and momentum.