More wowy stuff

Global Warming from ivan oviedo on Vimeo.

And some claymation reference I picked up

Old people in animation

Some reserach into likable old fellas in animation. I went through them to inform myself a little about the visual style I wanted to represent

Alternative animation.

I wanted to make sure that I get the animation part of the project right. So I've been doing a lot of research - watching a lot of Keith Lango tutorials. Keith recomended watching Treasure Island just for the animation in it.

Watching it did me a lot of good - It reminded me how much I hate this style of animation. How I vowed that this is not the kind of animation I'm going to produce. When your whole course is based on that style of animation, and when your tutors mark you on those principles, it's really easy to forget that this is not actually want to do.

I've emailed big brain Mike Hirsh, asking him if he knows any links to different, other styles. Either way, I'm definitely going to try and research it myself, and learn how to apply the same principles of animation into different styles.

Wow, I want to get into stop motion animation now.

Not my kind of music, but very possibly the kind that'll fit with the animation piece

Preproduction

I've decided to go with the 3rd brief, the Zoo project. The original brief suggested taking two characters and choosing two stages of production (the selection was from 2d character design, design [modelling and rigging] and design [texturing], as well as animating), and then applying that into the two selected characters.

This brief faced me with a few issues. Some of them I can even think of now.

The first one was the selection of two areas; I'm coming to this project with the intent of imposing what I want on the brief, rather than following it and doing what is expected. The problem, however, is that if you choose to animate, you also have to model and rig. Otherwise you don't really have a character. But if you want to model, you have to have a character setup, on which you can model. On top of that, in order for this to be any good for my showreel, I want it to look presentable. That's where texturing is involved. I would have prefered to just focus on animating and maybe modelling/desiging of two characters, but I don't think that viable at the moment.

So the choice is to do one character, that of the grandmother, and focus on all aspects of her.

Another problem was, as I mentioned earlier, how to get out of this project what I want - to animate. I'm worried that i'm going to spend to long a time at things that are necessery but not of much use of interest to me. I don't want to have two weeks left to animate by the end of this, just like happened to me in most other projects. I can see myself having plenty of modelling/rigging issues, and getting too caught up with that.

A big part of me is a bit disappointed with this brief, and with the lack of opportunities it presents to people that know they just want to animate. The other part is saying just get on with it and stop worrying, I'm trying to listen to that one.

Another issue is how to make the style fit with what I'm aiming for. As of the moment, my animation is going to be mainly a character piece. A lot of it is going to be based on facial expressions. The style of claymation, however, does not leave room to a whole lot of subtelty. I'm really worried that either my claymation-stlye character is not going to look very expressive. Or that it will, and then it won't look claymation.

I realize I need to explore some of the claymation genre special effects. like how easily one thing morphs into something else. If possible, I might make my background with more or less the same concept (meaning that a chair will turn into a table, for example, as the story requires different props.)