Happy Holidays

For the Christmas holidays I thought I'd create a simple animation to get in spirit of the season
So Happy Holidays and hopefully I'll finish my ruff animatic soon.

Life Drawing

Earlier on today I had an email which got me thinking that I haven't done life drawing in a very long time.
I know that it is very important for an animator (or any kind of artist) to draw from life on a somewhat regular basis. So today I spent a good hour or two doing some life drawing and below are a collection of what I think was today's best drawings.

Episode two finished backgrounds

Today I managed to complete all the backgrounds for my next animation (apart from one which a friend of mine is doing). With those done I'm moving onto the next step of creating the animatic with audio I already collected.
I could of created an animatic without the completed backgrounds (which part of me wishes I did) but for some reason which I can no longer remember I wanted to have finished backgrounds first.

Below of the backgrounds in full colour and even though they are finished I might have to revisit one or two just encase something I didn't see comes up.

Coach Penelope and Mr Pug

I haven't posted for a while so I thought I'd give some information on what I've been working on. Firstly I'm in the middle finalising my backgrounds for my next animation (which I'll show in later post when I got a good number of them done, if not all).

But I've also been working on two characters which I call coach Penelope and Mr Pug. I've drawn a lot of new characters lately but I've ended up scrapping them all because of one reason or another. These two though I feel or good enough to finish, so when it's done I'll post the final thing in a future post.

Storyboard of Spooky Scary 2

I finally finished the storyboarding of spooky scary 2 and here it is.

Episode 2 Concept Art Update

Just a quick update on Spooky Episode 2, at the moment I'm doing concept art on the backgrounds to which I've settled on a exterior house design but I haven't finished a detailed version as of yet.
I'm currently working out the interior of the house, making sure the room locations linked up together to watch the outside shows.

As soon I finished all the backgrounds I'll post them up here, for now here are some of concept art I have done.

Creating Spooky Scary episode 2

For a while now I have been trying to motivate myself into animating this idea I had in mind but I found myself constantly struggling trying to get it started. It was a more serious plot about an orphaned cub in which the story would reveal parts of his life as he grew up.

The problem was, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get anything to paper or at least very little.

In the end I decided to drop the idea and return to writing a comical script.

As soon as I made that decision it was if a barricade that was in way got pushed aside. I am now in the middle of writing the script for Spooky Scary Investigation episode two. But I wont scrap the design I had already completed from my first idea, instead I'm going to implement him into Spooky scary episode two.

Below are some of early concepts of creature

This is the final design (with what was going to be another character on his back)

I have also drawn up some character interactions and soon as I finished up writing the script and storyboarding it I'll post another update.

 

Annecy Animation Festival 2015

This summer I took trip to the Annecy Animation Festival with a number of my university friends and from my previous post I promised I'd elaborate more on the experience.

It was an amazing experience to go the festival, being able to see how many talented film maker there are and watch so many spectacular film ranging from a vast majority of styles and techniques.

The two films which stood out the most to me had to have been the “The Long Way North” and “Mune”.

“The Long Way North” has a very beautiful animation style and I was amazed in how much they could do with such a limited colour pallet for a film set in the Arctic.

The second film which caught my attention was “Mune” I instantly fell in love with character designs and I don't think there was any character which felt “that could have been design better” or “that character was rush”. But also the world was breath taking see, for a world which had one half rocky landscape and the other half to be a rainforest it's strange to see in how it just worked and you don't question it's existence.

With films aside the amount of new technology and hardware that was shown at MIFA event was incredible, I wish I could of taken the Cintiq's home as well as the Oculus but maybe one day I will.

When I came home after the festival I felt inspired and if I'm lucky enough it would love to go again next year.

What have I been up to?

Sorry I haven't posted here for a while I'm going to try and keep this update on a more regular basis from now on. In less then a week I will have graduated with a Honours First Degree, so shortly after the day (the ninth of July) I will write a post about the day with a few photos.

I also went to the Annecy Animation and Film festival a few weeks ago which was for a lack word was amazing.

 (A photo of inside one of Cinemas)

 (A group photo of me and class mates who also went on trip)

(A photo of me with Richard Williams, the author of the "animator's survival kit")

Lastly I have also been working on personal project. It a short film (around 4 to 5 minutes long) about a chimera which seems to be last of his kind, not exactly the most original idea but my main goal is to push myself in what I can do and also really getting into program TV Paint which till now I've only touched every now and then.

(Character Concept)

I know this post is short and I plan to make longer post detailing my Annecy trip later on. For now I only wanted to cover what I have currently been up to and give an idea on what my future post will be about.