characters

This week as a minute project to help us with hidden stories we've been looking at character development. Creating the original conceptions through random objects then developing them by changing  a small aspect at a time. Here's one of my current favourites.

I started off by drawing him from the wheel on a chair. I saw big eyes and a head and ended up with a lizard then I extended sections of him or changed the tail or something each time till he's beginning to look like a crocodile instead of a lizard hahaha but this is a system I'm having a lot of fun using and I'll keep you updated on the next few creatures

Ok so here's two more characters! yey!

This waiter I made from my door handle in my room. It's a gothic door handle.

I made him with my tablet just being a bit sketchy and I actually really like him this way

This one here is from my wallpaper in my room. he's a jellyfish and he's really adorable. I sketched him a lot in my sketchbook. Lots of different versions which resulted in a felt toy version on my bag hahaha. Love him

storyboard 2

So in addition to that storyboard I made this one that which is a really unusual take on the story of david and the stag...

So this story centres on the idea that the stag painted himself white to conform to the human ideology that a white animal is magical and he was sick of king David hunting the woodland creatures. So with the help of the other woodland creatures he tricks him to which he completely overreacts to...

It's a weird one and I can't help but feel it doesn't hold it's own as a story so I've discarded it just now.

It's comical but a bit random which might not help me get a good mark or win the competition. It just feels ill-considered and a bit last minute. however for a shorter project I might consider it. just not now.

storyboard 1

So storyboarding then... this is where my story grew arms and legs. So here you go. This is the original story board cut up into individual scenes.

SSSSOOOOO the reason this story needs to be reworked is because it's just wayy to long. I haven't filmed it through yet to see how long it would be but I'm sure it would be ages. There's also way to many characters that aren't really relevant and who can be bothered making irrelevant characters? I spoke it through with Jared and we both felt it was too much and would be more like a feature length than a short.

Now Jared pointed out to me that a good story is shown through the ability to remove elements and it still makes sense. A quality which as this story stands it does not posses. So I need to tweak this a bit... OK so a lot. I would like to focus on the part of the story where someone dresses up the pigeon statues in little coats and things in the winter. For this I don't need the pigeons to be alive which benefits me in many ways. I wont have to explain why the statues are alive or develop a half real half statue like movement for them. It also means I can develop different emotions towards the pigeons from the point of view of the community that are entirely projected apon them, Turn them into real personified  characters. Which will be different from things I've done before.

Ideas blergh

So for hidden projects I have now, visited as many of the museums as I wanted too, I have made a lot of sketches of things that have interested me including:

• A pane of broken glass with Sir Walter Scott's signature on it which was blown up during the war.
• A representation of the deer from the story of King David and the stag.
• The pigeons from the top of elm row
• various dolls in the childhood museum
• etc.

So from these ideas I began to research a few and develop story plots for theme. Right now I'm still leaning towards the idea of the pigeons however I will plan out a few more ideas before being definite about it.

I developed some concept art for a few stories.

The first is for a story I have since thrown out for use in the project. I thought about having two completely different dolls from different periods (both housed in the museum of childhood obviously) fall in love and go on a date in 21st century Edinburgh. Then they'd just do cute things.

The only proper piece of the story that was coming together in my mind however was a scene where they were dancing in the Ross fountain in princess street gardens and she's being very glamorous and he's having to squeeze water out of his leg as it's just absorbing it.

I very much like the idea and I believe I will keep it however I might wait until I have enough skills under my belt to pull that scene off.

This one I have shown here before. Since then I have had some developments in this idea but this image is a concept from when I thought that the story would centre around Edinburgh's statue's secret night life and these pigeons would be alive, casually causing trouble and steeling chips... to which I made a gif to check out the functionality of that.

It worked fairly well although I needed to reconstruct it's neck on both sides between shots which was a little counter productive. However I liked the overall look of the sequence.

I really liked the idea at the time but since then the idea's grown arms and legs, shot off in different directions, gone a full 360 and now I have no idea where it is. Haha

"A Leith Walk"

So like I said I would I have visited more places... well place. I went back to the city art centre. To which I wandered around for ages apparently. I found everyone elses animations which was really weird actually hahaha. But it was nice to get to see more of Marks research and development, as I had already read through his blog posts. (Sorry Mark).

So the exhibition I was particularly taken with is one that is VERY close to home for me. I live in Bellevue of Edinburgh's Leith walk and this particular exhibition was on Leith.

Now, I should interject this here before I go on. I maintained the view point, from the beginning of this project that the perfect object would be obvious to me and I really hoped it would happen. So imagine my surprise when it actually did! I new it when I saw it, well ok that's not quite how I knew it.

I had entered the city art centre with my mum during the holidays I had only made it as far as the first floor when she came and found me after looking round the whole gallery (oops). Then she said to me "I got quite excited when I saw the pigeons up the stairs" and from that one short sentence I knew exactly what pigeons she was talking about. She was talking about these pigeons. "A Leith Walk" by Shona Kinloch

 Photos thank to Edinburgh Museums and Galleries Outreach

These pigeons are it and for the first time in this project I have a developing idea! Hooray! I have so many and I'm so pleased. So I followed up my discovery of these brilliant birds by thinking about sculptures so I sketched out the other sculptures I could find in the exhibition and by complete coinsidence it was a monument on the list of places to concider the "Marquette for Manuscript for Monte Cassino" 

At this point I had many an idea forming about statues about these pigeons in particular and I realised I'd really enjoy animating a pigeon! They move very funny and they have tones of personality. I knew where these pigeons used to sit and how much I loved them as a kid and how gutted I was when they were removed. As a fan of the pigeons I was happy to hear they plan to put them back. woopie! sorry. That was unprofessional. 

This then lead me to think about the people of Edinburgh's relationship with them. Being from Edinburgh I thought I could use my relationship with and knowledge of the city to help me in this competition so I am going to do so. I began to research these beautiful little birds and form a story. Which I shall put of for you once I've storyboarded and worked at it into a first draft.

Here's a piece of concept art to keep you guessing!

I will re post and explain this, for Jared, Alan and Rachel, :)

Sea Change

 I've found myself getting increasingly bored across the holidays (this has been the first new year I haven't had a game to waste my time completing in the weeks before returning to school, ugh) so I found myself at one point in an exhibition. Woo. (sincere woo btw).

 The exhibition was called sea change, it was influenced by Scotland's Northern and Western isles. It is work brought together by 60 artists and scientists and took all together 3 years across 28 of the Scottish isles. I have to say it wasn't the scientific prospect that drew me to the exhibition. Haha, no, I was drawn in by these little guys...

Hahaha I don't apologise for my childishness, not at all.

So here's a close up. This one was sitting at the entrance to the exhibition. 

Here's the rest of the exhibition too.

These ones here. I have a funny story about. So I stood in front of these for quite some time trying to decide how I thought they were made. After searching and finding no description anywhere close to the pieces. I decided to keep looking till I came up with a hypothesis to which began to interest others. Amongst my family and I were several other interested art enthusiasts trying to think our way through the artists' process.  As far as I remember we didn't get much further than water and ink and some sort of expanding paper were involved. We're clearly not that good at this.

I adored these. I loved the beautiful shade of blue that's the only colour used in these illustrations. They're a little unusual for an illustration in the way that the proportions are stretched or elongated in almost crude manors where as typically illustrations are very pretty. However this slightly unusual animal appearance works to help create the details here. 

This was a perfect piece to have in the botanic's exhibition space as it's very similar to botanical plant drawings, which I myself am fond of.

(really sorry that you can see me in this one. There's a lot of light in that room)

Love these as well. Something simple and beautiful about them.

This series of pictures took my cousin a very long time to figure out. They are very simple pictures of trees and bushes. But they're very nice trees and bushes.

Accompanying these collections very films, documentaries, scientific experiments and one video that was just a bit odd... 

Unfortunately I can't tell you who did any of the works. I couldn't exactly figure it out from the plaques around the works. A lot of them didn't have plaques and those that did often didn't give me a name. Never the less I did find their website which I have been browsing for a little while as it really isn't that easy to work.  Found some stuff about the bird yarn. Damn they're cute. Here go check it out:

http://www.capefarewell.com/seachange/