Art Gallery adventure

We set out to Waterstones to attend a display of 'Nancy Farmer's' work, after reaching the 4th story that is. I was not aware hoe much artists actually earn until I saw the price tags... approx £250 a pop and also sometimes up to £1.5k per painting. The amount of detail that went into this persons work was quite impressive - on first inspection I suspected it was water colours and later after looking on her website confirmed this (Well, thats about all I learned to do on the art course I took over the last holiday), This person uses a technique where she wets the paper, allows it to expand, then tapes it to an easle and waits for it to dry again... the reason? so when she paints on it again with water colours the paper wont 'puff' up as it normally would. before painting though everything is done in pencil (with some pretty damn impressive detail) - I liked Nancy's effort and dedication (as she has done a lot of these detailed paintings) but unfortunately the style and content was not my taste, don't get me wrong as there where very impressive paintings there but they didn't really make me feel anything - I guess the only pixies and mythical creatures I appreciate are the ones on computer games that I can go toe-to-toe with. Anyways, here is some of her work - I hope you enjoy it more than myself

Click here for her website - you may also be interested to know she is a member of 'The Guild of Erotic Artists'

Video Editing lookup:

I have been looking around on the internet to try and find something that is professionally done but yet you can see how the shots are planned out and where the editing has been sneakily used (but not too sneakily or we wouldnt see it) - I uncovered this gem here




You can clearly see in the first few shots how editing has been used to create a specific effect - when he is getting ready the camera shots have been continued from specific 'Powerful' points (for instance, you dont see him walking to a table , getting his shoes, seperating them, undoing the straps, putting his foot in and then only strapping them on again... You just see him with his foot in, closing the strap with passion - Giggidy!)

On later scenes we see where scene props (Does a puff of steam count as a prop?) need editing to create the effect intended. The lighting was also very well done in this clip - it remained dark and eery (like all famous batman movies) yet you could clearly see what was going on.

I found a nice example of a lighting technique in 'Cracking animation - Peter lord & Brian Sibley' - here are a few photocopies.















Please feel free to click on the pictures to enlarge them and get a better view.
All is explained in the black and white pic.

I shall now wrap it up and say this look into editing has wanted me to play around with lighting more... and how fortunate am I that the animation lecture today was about creating lighting. lucky, lucky , lucky - I must definitely be a sign.

Start of a character


I have now started the development of my character for my 30 second animation due by Christmas. this started out by a quick doodle drawing I did. Just a basic concept of an idea that definately needed improving upon to even become slighly usable.

the character looked pretty evil (due to the fact he had serpent eyes) but needed to represent the human form more in terms of body. I decided I would like my character to be chubby (sort of like a little chubby dwarf like thingy) so I started to look for those types of forms




I then started to look for this form and found it in a book called 'How to paint and draw children' by Viola French - I chose this book as I was pretty sure that a Toddlers form was what I was looking for in terms of body proportions but to my surprise found that the 1 year old form was better (Much more chubby like the fat little drawf thingy I was trying to create) I put the two together an bam!!! here's what I got



Of course this character did not look 'Stunning' but the chubbiness and body is just fine - of course the fingers, feet and legs need refining along with a whole overhaul of the face but the basic concept is there. I now had something to work with.

I was browsing on the internet and found a way to import your drawing into 3D max and work with them, I did a little test and the result can be seen below... pretty cool little tip. I will be using this process to create my character when I have enough time to do so, unfortunately I'm quite a busy little fellow as of lately so I expect to attempt this in a day or two.

Walk Cycle

Here we have two example of the walk cycle I did from the exercise sheets provided by Andy Love, of course we had to do the movement ourselves but the rigging was all done to the specifications of the worksheet (and a well written one indeed) I hope to incorporate this with the hand rig and then the face morphs to finish my character I am in the process of creating.

Anyways, heres the first one.



And the Second view is from behind, wish I had tweaked his/her butt to look better (it's all about the sexy bums)



I also found a nice demo reel of character walk cycles and actions which you can view below



And another one with decent facial animations, I suspect these to have been done in Maya

Comments of 'Holding pattern' clips

This has been a very interesting exercise, this task was the commetns we had to make on (firstly) what the character did to illuminate his/her character? and what the 'film maker' did to illuminate his/her character?

Team - Lez, Sherry (sorry didnt catch the rest)

Actor
- Looks around a lot, always looks uncomfortable
-always wearing a suit, looks out of place.
-does not speak making him seem more out of place
-always looking in dictionary and various books for words

Film
- lots of cuts
- excellent use of camera angles
-Fantastic use of lighting in every scene

Team - Cat, Alex (sorry didnt catch the rest)

Actor
-looks slighly out of place
-Constantly sitting and observing

Team
-lots of far away shot making the character seem distant
(Most shots I found to be a little bit too long)

Team - Glyn, Holly and Dave

Actor
-wears good realistic clothing
-acts appropriately in all situation
- is a bit sneaky

Film
-Music rises and dips at appropriate times
(I found the sounds to be overpowering at most point)

Team - Adrian, Emily , Zaid and Richard
(My favourite one)

Actor
-Acts very out of place
-Really like the comedy
-Acting was very good
-Actor made the clothes work well and to his advantage

Film
-Good props
-Highlighted immigration (used newspaper to highlight this) 0- which gave a clear explanation of what was going on.
-Again, really like the comedy
-Football scene was really well done
-Like the little sub plot with the Family tree on the internet
-Music was very fitting
-Very good use of camera angles

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And there we have it. I would just like to congradulate Adrian, Emily, Zaid and Richard again for a very well done piece of work. I think it matched the professionality of of Lez's group (who has the benifit of Lez's years of experience) and I really enjoyed how you made the character out of place while using comedy.