Hidden stories (I'm not great at naming things)

So It's the Christmas holidays huh?
I should enjoy my time off you say?

NAH! Being the busy bee I am, I have been taking full advantage of living in Edinburgh, for this terms arcing project : "Hidden Stories", in which our animations have to be influenced by an object from one of the Edinburgh museums, of which I have visited most of by this point in my holidays. Haha!

So I thought a quick update could be quite nice. I have so far visited the childhood museum and the people's story museum. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have done the Edinburgh museum and the writer's museum.
 In addition I have seen most of the monuments in Edinburgh as I live here.

I really need to stop talking now. Just look at the stuff I've done already! :D

They're in ranking order from my least favourite to my favourite. No offence art works... I feel bad now... I take it back!

The final Christmas Card

https://vimeo.com/81706138

TADA!!! Here it is! The finished animation. I'm actually pretty pleased with this one <3

Sound turned out great and ollie's voice worked perfectly. 

I actually bothered to see the editing through to completion so I'm pleased with my effort too.

The references

Alrighty, so before I reveal to you the finished piece I thought I'd show you a few more of the references I used.

So for my colour choices I had decided to go a little bit like the sketches from the end credits of Paranorman. In that I was interested in just two colours. I liked the way they looked in relation to the first half of my animation though I knew I would need to soften it up. After all it's a Christmas card and not a Halloween card. 

 This is the animated video for Giangrande's song paper planes. It uses cut outs and I considered the style during my original character inception. However I became heavily interested in the idea of just having a few colours throughout the animation.

This animation, quite frankly was a little weird, It's another paper cut out animation however this one is flatter than the Giangrande music video. I decided I thought that the depth was the thing I likes about paper cut outs after viewing these two films in succession.

I know I already showed you nightmare before christmas but it really does have a lot to do with my idea and it would have been very poor research if I hadn't looked at it.

What's up doc? The Animated Documentary

Ok so I promised I'd come back to this project and now I can.

In this particular project we had a chance to work with the first year film and telly students. We had to create an animated documentary that was a fusion of the two medias. So when I first met my group we had a few ideas to work with and eventually we chose to work on.

Infact it became rather convenient, we had decided on the topic of sleep paralysis and luckily Eli's sleep paralysis suffering brother was in town for the weekend. So they chose to interview him while he was here.

Then we discovered that his girlfriend, who he has brought with him, also suffered from sleep paralysis. Which was a great coincidence. So Eli and Alia interviewed them both.

Now the unfortunate thing for me was that they were highly animated themselves and I found it very difficult to input any animation. However we decided on a few scenes where it would be possible. So we finished the film and after our crit, Well basically I had a LOT of work to do hahaha.

SO! I re-evaluated which scenes were good and which needed tweaked. We knew that we would have liked certain things white on black and not black on white, however in the initial edit we couldn't find a way to work that. But after a week or so and some internet research I found a way to do that! Yet it only looked good on one scene. Then just to extra annoy me I couldn't apply any extra effects like a time stretch... so it made the scene short.

I'm going to shut up and just let you look at it now...

Just a very quick update because I'm sick and want to go to bed.

This is my rough cut and yes I now realise there is a lot left to do... Further explanations later. Night!

The first scene

Ok! So this is the first scene, I came up with this as a complete flook after scrapping my original first scene because it had a doorway in it, which has began to make audiences assume something is going to travel through them and as nothing did I felt it may be confusing. I knew I needed context and  a pumpkin is a typical sign that it's halloween so after prompting from Rachel and Anna I decided to do it this way. Or actually the original Idea was to have my character carve it so I could play around with the insides of the pumpkin, however, I decided against that idea. This is what I came up with instead.

Life Drawings

So I still have my Christmas card to finish but I thought I would share some of my life drawings as actually I'm not as bad at life drawing as I was expecting to be. So here are my favourites.

They are in no particular order but this final drawing is my favourite so far. I need to work on feet though. Can't really draw them well yet but I'll work on it. As strange as that sounds.

When I first started life drawing I was literally terrible hahaha but a short number of weeks later and I hit my stride (yay me). I quickly discovered that my strengths lay in fast sketches that I didn't think to hard about and also in the use of colour.

Soon I'm going to move outside the physical boundaries of the paper. Not sure quite how yet but I will. I also plan to take a sketchbook in at some stage. I have WAY to many large drawings of naked people in my room now.