One Day Project – Flash Touch-Up

I drew out one of my designs of the detective into flash to practice getting to grips with drawing in the program.

One Day Project – Movements/Facial Expressions

Ive now drafted up a few character movements and some facial expressions including a few mouth movements. These are only in their early stages of design so these may not be the ones I use in the actual animation.

One Day Project – Character Design

Here are some sketches I have done to design the main character for my animation:

I will next sketch out some facial expressions and actions and movements for my character.

One Day Project – Character Influences

For my dark styled crime animation, I needed to create a main character who will investigate the scene of the crime. I wanted to make him look rugged and rough edged as to fit in with the styles of the Watchmen and Frank Miller comics. Therefore, I began researching darker imaged dective characters as to gain inspiration for creating my own character.

I then decided to create my characters persona, characteristics and dress style quite similar to that of the character Rorschach from the Watchmen comics drawn by Dave Gibbons.

I will now begin to sketch out my character and some scenes from my animation.

One Day Project – Style Research

Before beginning to sketch up designs for the main character and settings etc, I first needed to research various styles of animation that would fit into my idea. As I am aiming for a noir/dark style, I found a selection of images that I would use as a guide for the style of my animation:

I first found an animated film called Waltz With Bashir:

This feature length film took 4 years to create, therefore I won’t have the time to go into as much detail, however this style would be incredibly simplistic to recreate for my flash animation.

I also found some other exampels of effective colour use that I could use: These are scenes from some comic book strips:

Scenes from the Watchmen Comic:

Scenes from Frank Miller’s Sin City Comic:

Now that I have a mindset on the style that I want my animation to be set in, I will now begin to sketch out character designs and possibly set designs.

One Day Project – Animation Idea

As I had already decided to base my animation on a story being told but with interactive elemtns, I then brainstormed what the topic of the animation could be. I decided on creating a detective styled animation where as the main character progressed through a crime scene, the user would be able to progress aswell with various interactive elements:

-  Hover mouse over characters to listen in one their conversations through speakers and subtitles or speech bubbles.
- Two people having a conversation with one person’s voice coming out of one speaker and a different speaker for the other character.
- Mouse click to select different routes or objects.

Again, this animation needs to be approximately 2 minutes long and therefore I would need to keep the interactive sections running with the animation as to make it not feel like an interactive game, but an interactive movie.

I then needed to come up with a style that I would create my desired animation in.

One Day Project – Background Research

In researching different types of animation, instead of creating a list for different types of audience in age, I decided to create a list that was categorized into their purpose and content. Of course, with any categorizing, some of the animations overlap into other categories.

To Entertain and Storytell

-  Disney Productions: The Lion King, Aladdin, Robin Hood – Hand drawn and painted animation.
- Pixar Productions: Toy Story, Up, A Bugs Life, Wall E – Computer animation.
- Harman Productions:  Wallace And Gromit, Chicken Run – Stop Animation with plasticine.

To cause Discussion, show Ideas

- David Firth: Flash animations based on his dreams and ideas of society.
-  Pixar Productions: Wall E – American dominancy, Consumerism, Pollution.
- Waltz With Bashmir – Animated Documentary showing the horrors of 1982 Lebanon war.

To represent and show Culture

- Studio Ghibli: Japanese settings and locations, lifestyles of eastern society, follows myths.
- Dreamworks Productions: Shrek – Pop Culture references, fantasy idea incoporated into a modern setting/style.
- Family Guy, Simpsons, South Park, American Dad: western civilisation. Pop culture references. Celebrity cameos.

To Educate and Inform:

- Disney Productions: The Disney Channel – Use characters to teach young children how to spell, count, etc
- Nickolodeon: Dora The Explorer and Run, Diego, Run – teach children participation and interactivity with whats on screen etc.
After analysing some of these animations, I then decided to create a storytelling concept for my project, but include various interactive sections to keep the viewer involved and to cause them to feel like a part of what is happening in the story. I next needed to come up with a conceptual story for my animation.

One Day Project – Animation Details of Project

After having several workshops in working on Adobe Flash CS4, and being briefed our project for the end of March, I began to brainstorm ideas as to the synopsis and style of what my animation would be.

The animation I have to create must be approximately 2 minutes long and contain a form of interactivity within it. After viewing previous student’s flash animations and recognizing that the level of interactivity that they incorporated was simply a decision between 2 locations, and a start button, I wanted to aim my animation more towards different levels of interactivity.

Before I could decide which different levels of interactivity I could include, I first needed to begin to create an idea, concept and style for my animation to be based on. Without these set targets, my animation could end up a mix of several different styles and feel quite unprofessional and quite disjointed.

I then progressed into  researching several different variations of animation that could help me to establish an idea for my animation.

One Day Project – Animation Brief

Here is the brief of our current one day project:

- Develop a character/style sheet for a key ‘character’ in your proposed animation idea. Work onto paper if possible, unless your creation relies specifically on digital visualisation techniques.

Consider:
- Type and style of animation (e.g. cut-out, abstract, character-driven, Disneyesque vs SouthPark- esque, photo or illustrative, etc)
- Rendering detail vs Workload
- Character front, back and side views  if appropriate, and key poses.
- Movement testing (single frame fluidity vs keyframe ‘jumps’)

Ill be coming up with designs and ideas for my animation of which I will post on the blog.

My Portfolio: Site and Content Layout

I have come to the end of the first section of making my own portfolio site. After several changes, edits, redrafts and new ideas, the website at the moment currently looks like this:

As you can see, this is alot more polished and has a more cleaner look as opposed to the original designs I drafted in the past few weeks.

Another factor I have taken into consideration and has been raised is the way that the portfolio pages will be presented. In theory, this is the most important aspect of the design as it is what employers will be looking at to survey my work. Therefore, I have opted for this structure:

- Text describing what the page is showcasing.

- Title of project – Date
-Description of project, background on it, what I have learnt, what programs I used.
-Example or presentation of the final result of the project.

This layout is easy to use and navigate and highlights all the key information that will be looked for by the future employers and viewers of my site.