life drawing

It feels like a while since I did something bizarre like post naked people on here so how about we do that!!

I admit to having a bad semester. so these are three from my better sessions. This semester I tried to do new things and they literally didn't work. It's not that I got a life drawing I was just generally displeased with, it's that I didn't actually get a life drawing haha. These ones though, I liked.







other things I have done

Now that all my projects are over I have some other things to share with you all, other things I have done at college but not things I've shared here yet. I'll kind of briefly explain them as well. So I'm going to start with symposium which we do twice a year woo. Erm I'm only going to show you the last one because it's actually film related. This semester we were allowed to create our own response from a group chosen strand off a topic that we were given and a bus route as well. We were given no. 35 and the topic decay so we decided to look at specifically social decay. So I took a part of the route I know well and I happen to know has changed - Leith walk. (I feel like I'm always looking at Leith Walk).

It's been a while since I actually did this projects so I can't really remember my thinking too much but I know the idea was a synthesis of time. Almost like time was breaking a part and their were flashbacks to different events in time and things. The thinking was to present two different versions of the same area presented in a dream like time distortion which allows the viewer to decide if a modern society is the decayed or non decayed side. erm so here it is.


And here's a link to the blog the group had to keep explaining our pieces and our collaboration - http://decay-illustration.tumblr.com/

Ok so next. During innovative learning week I signed up for another collaboration but this time with neuroscience and psychology students. The aim of the project was to create a piece, any piece that synthesises all these areas. It didn't have to be art portraying science or art accompanying science. It could be whatever we want based on whatever we want. So the way the numbers turned out it meant one artist to around 3/4 main university students. It was actually very good fun and I really enjoyed working with areas of the main university because they actually want to help you create the art. We picked an interesting topic that was in the news recently and one that everyone can relate to - dreams. Recently both the Japanese and the Americans have been working on technology to allow them to pretty much reverse engineer peoples dreams to they can see them. Which has amazing potential in terms of medical research but also a great risk for privacy invasion. So we wanted to look at this by creating an instillation where you could scan your dreams and see pre constructed dreams that display these benefits and concerns in a dream like display of images and sounds. It was a project I was excited by and here's the sample of the film we made to explain our concept to art-neuroscience -

Ok so turns out it's gone from my home computer but I shall upload it once I've re-exported it from the uni computer, promise.

Reflection on A Leith Walk

Today I'm going to post my reflection on my hidden stories film as I have this in my sketchbook but I thought it would be nice for all of you to get an incite into my mind.

Ok so starting with the good I think.

Here is my opening scene -


So I decided to follow a leaf down across the Edinburgh skyline so it became obvious that this story was in fact set in Edinburgh ans not just in a city somewhere. I also thought it opened the actions nicely, instead of just opening straight with the pigeons. It's my establishing shot I suppose. The viewer now knows this is Edinburgh and with a competition like Hidden Stories I think that's very important. So I feel this was one the successful elements of my film. It's actually one of my favourite parts of the whole film so I think one way I've captured my audiences attention at the very beginning of my short film.

Moving on to another successful points -


This scene I feel worked well as it helped me establish the  pigeons as statues and not just ordinary pigeons. I had already put them on bases so you could see they were screwed to the floor. However I felt having them interact with real pigeons was a very successful way for the audience to see these pigeons are infact statues. Which is why I had it happen early on in the animation because it's an important factor in the rest of the film. So this was one part I was glad I included because without it I feel the film would have lost some of it's quirk.

Ok so this scene is a little different -


This scene I have included as a positive for my film because of the classmate's response to him. I wasn't really expecting him to be so successful. Initially when I thought about this character I believed I would have his fingers moved when he played because I couldn't think of another place that moved when a person played the bagpipes. Maybe the foot but then I realised that giving him a moustache would be a brilliant solution as it would allow me to limit my animating, as I could loop it, and also be an effective movement. Really I was being a lazy animator but people liked him. Whenever someone asked me if they could watch what I had done so far they would comment on his moustache moving as they enjoyed it. It was slightly comical. So this is a point I thought was good because it went down well with my audience, which is exactly what an animator wants.

The next positive was a recurring motif in my film - 


So to show the passing of time in my film I used leaves. As the film was around the winter I use autumn leaves to show that these events aren't following on from each other that closely in time. There are parts missing between. It was a necessary part of this film because other wise it would appear very messy and confusing. So I am thankful that it worked well. I also feel like it's interesting to watch from an animation point of view because of the way leaves twirl in the wind. So actually there's a lot of animation done in these ambient pieces.

of course this success - 


Obviously this scene would be here. This scene was really just a perfect success. I have no idea how I managed it because my plan was to take a lot of materials I could make snow out of into the department with me and just go for it. And refilm and refilm till I thought "that's the one". By this point in the production I had gotten really sick of planning and I just wanted to do. But luckily this was the first one I tried out, I assume because my hypothesis was that this would be the most successful material choice. So in that way I would call it a success because it really was a production success.

The other way I would have said it was a success is because it feels like a storm. You know what's happening and you feel it. But it's different from the pencil rendered characters and backgrounds which I think works to break it up just enough for it to be striking. 

Lastly -


Ok so this idea I came to me right at the beginning of the project and stayed with me right until the end. I wanted to bring the real life of these pigeons in and what better way to do that than actually have them in the film. The real them. I had been building my technical skills a lot this year and I wanted to use some of them so this fade worked well for me. People seemed to enjoy it and it was often commented on when played in the department.

Now to move on to the bits that I didn't like, or there are errors, or could be improved, or didn't quite work.

To start off with one that isn't quite as bad as some of the rest and only really a minor problem -


This scene here was a night time scene that didn't really feel like night time. It was pointed out to me that because the sky isn't visible in the shot because of the tight frame it looks as though the scene just gets darker instead of the sun going down and it becoming night. I did myself think that it didn't quite look right and something was wrong with it, even after I changed to a bluer light which would be more indicative of night. But it hadn't occurred to me that seeing the sky would improve the situation. So although this scene could be improved I know for next time that when it comes to night scenes, seeing the sky helps convey that.

Nextly a filming error that actually kills me a little inside every time I see it - 


This one really annoys me because it's so conflicting. The way I filmed this scene means that I had drawn and rubbed out the face of the character which was difficult to undo. But just one cell moves. The corner in which I myself leaned on to change the character bounces up and down. Which infuriates me because I know if I had noticed it before I began rubbing out and changing I could have fixed it. Grr! I thought if I had enough time I could have changed it but I didn't and because of the camera being fixed I amn't sure I would have been able to line it up again anyway. I would rather have this small moving section that the whole thing moving when it shouldn't. 

Lastly the cursed walk cycle - 



This I really wished had worked out because when people watch my animation they comment on his quickness of disappearance. I had originally planned to have him walk on pick them up and walk out with them. However because of a previous walking character that I had to cut completely from the film I didn't feel it was a good decision to have another one. But this scene was important and I couldn't cut it because it explains where the pigeons go and if I cut the scene completely I thought it would be even more confusing. I also loved the character. He is the only bad guy in this film and he looks like it! He's clearly a basic civil servant with an inflated ego and idea of self importance and authority which I really wanted to keep.


On reflection I feel I have a handful of good bonus' and things to work on in this film. Some things to take forward with me. I don't feel like there's any points that worry me about my future in animation. I learnt some things and got some good advice which I think can only make me stronger at this point. To be honest I'm kind of relieved I can look at my projects like this and see that the things I liked weight out the things I think need work. I never thought that would happen.


9.88 films - My film

I thought you might want to actually see my 9.88 film so I've got you the link to it here.

My friend told me the other day that she can't stop watching it because she loves the male character's facial expressions. So a successful film all in all I feel.

http://bit.ly/1tmamcf

please let me know if the link doesn't work

If it does hope you enjoy it

9.88 seconds

This last few days has been very VERY stressful and I'm so glad it's over. The project was to make a 10 second film in 2 days. "Doesn't sound too difficult" I thought to myself at the start. (complete lie, I was very ill I was really thinking "aw buggar!") anyway after 24 hours I had attempted two different techniques to similar degrees of failure and was beginning to feel a bit disheartened. But Abigail Lamb has not given up on anything yet! So with a little bit of a bruised ego I soldiered on completing the film in just a few hours on day two of the project. Thank heavens! On Friday the film goes down well with my tutors and my peers and in the end I was very please. :)

BUT on sunday evening I noticed a broken cell. One that had not rendered as it should have. Panicked about what I was going to do about it I hatched a plan to fix it this morning and resubmit it before the competition checked my entry. Sleepless night for me last night.

"Is that it for stress?!" I hear you ask? Well of course not. I ran home very late that day and uploaded my film to 9.88's competition page immediately and continued with my weekend till this afternoon when I received an email rejecting my film from the competition... As expected I was completely gutted and read on to find out why. Turned out the moderators had though it wasn't in a high enough definition and required a minimum of 720p. Which I was offended at because my film was rendered in 1080p. None-the-less they had given me a chance to resubmit my film once I had fixed the issue. Now the problem was how was I going to do that. 

Urgh so first day of my holiday and I find myself trudging through the horrible Scottish weather to college to fix my film. The annoying thing about my broken cell was that on the computers at college I couldn't see the problem with it but I could when I took it onto a different one. Which meant that I spent an hour colouring in bits of a cell where I thought the problem might be and then moving it onto a computer where I could see it to check if I had gotten rid of it or not. When I eventually did I put my film back together and began the annoying process of trying to make it better quality. Which I had no idea how to do really. I found the bar that told me what render quality it was currently in but wasn't allowed to change it. However it did say it was in 1080p which I knew it was. So I tried the codex. I know as much about codex's as I do about slugs... which I have to admit isn't very good but usually I just annoy Neil with my tech problems. But he wasn't in today so I had to trial and error the situation. Eventually after several failures I exported in the preset and it is finally a much better quality.

I'm just dreading getting another rejection letters tomorrow morning considering there wasn't really a problem today.

Anyway here is the film.