We got introduce to another useful piece of software from the Adobe family- Illustrator, to be more specific- the pen tool. To be honest I tried using Illustrator before and I found it useful that it works vectors, rather than Photoshop that works in pixels, but I just never got around to figure the programme out. As for the pen tool, I have came across it before but just didn't understand it and found it annoyng because I couldn't figure out how to stop it. But after this exercise I actually like it.
So we covered how to do straight lines, curves, curves with corners and such. Afterwards you can have some fun with the strokes by using the select tool, there is a variety of brushes you can select and play around with, so that's really useful. This might come in handy if I ever had to design a logo, poster or any that type of thing.
Moulin Rouge! (2001) is a cinematic masterpiece directed by Baz Luhrman, as it's usual for Luhrmans movies, in the center of attention is a love story, but what keeps it from being cliche is the creative approach. It is fast paced, a bit chaotic in montage, colorful, and character actions are well exaggerated, it has everything: it is extravagant and settle where it needs to be.
Moulin Rouge! is one of my favorite movies, therefore it was interesting to look into its pre-production. The storyboard artist for this movie is none other than David Russell. He is one of the top Hollywood's concept and storyboard artists and in all fairness he's the perfect artist for such a complex movie. This is the storyboard for Satine's (leading female character) entrance scene in the movie (which by the way is my favorite scene in the whole movie). It is really apparent that Russell didn't shy way from portraying complex camera movements, character action mapping and compositions. The drawing style is clear, the ruff lines bring more dynamic feel to the panels. It is just mind numbing to me, trying to image how he came up with such genius physical sequences.
I know I might be repeating myself a bit by blogging about Ryan Woodward again, but in all fairness his work is exemplary. I guess it is safe to assume that there is really only a handful of people that haven't seen Iron Man yet, that's why this might seem interesting even for those who aren't necessarily into animation or storyboarding.
I personally am not that fond of action movies and all Marvel comics seem the same to me (sorry), but for some reason I actually liked Iron Man, maybe it's because the main character doesn't have any supernatural powers, he's just a genius, and for once there is a Marvel character that has some what realistic abilities. But anyway, my creative crush did the storyboarding for this movie so I am obliged to blog about it. Woodward is really consistent in his drawing style which is really dynamic, simple and some what cartoon -ish. Usually there isn't a lot or anything written on his storyboards, but there really isn't any need for captions. The panels are clear and have all the information needed- lighting, composition, camera angles. In fact, I believe they are so well drawn, you could pass them off as comics if any color was added.
This storyboard was created for a TVC commercial and I am honestly am not sure what is advertised in it because there wasn't much info I could find about it. But still, I chose to blog about it because it had an interesting style to it.
It is created by Abed Marzouk, a Saudi Arabian creative director. What attracted my attention was the idea of animating origami figures. In the storyboard it seems crazy, because the animal figures he chose didn't seem that dynamic because of the structure they might have if they were made from paper. But actually it was created in 3d animation. The drawing style is really like basic academic drawing- strict single lines, clear shading, good composition, the first plan is visually separated from the background so that the most essential components would gather the most attention and it's not all over the place. It's just clean, clear and understandable. There is also a noticeable variety of camera angles. Overall it's understandable even though it has captions in a language I don't understand.
I was really excited to blog about this, because this piece is really special to me. It motivated me to stick to animation and it is something I wanted and still want to do- animated choreography.
I have danced hip hop for three years, and during that period I constantly wondered what it would be like to animate choreography, especially contemporary, because it is so fluent in body language and it just shows off the maximum capability of dance as an art form. My favorite choreographer is Sonya Tayeh, because her contemporary and jazz routines are not only award winning but she usually touches really delicate subjects and always brings out raw emotion. For me her pieces a greatly inspiring and always keeps me wandering if I could animate it one day.
And not so long ago I came across Ryan Woodward's Thought of You. It was exactly what I imagined when wandered about Sonya Tayeh choreography being animated. Ryan Woodward as an animator is really well known, he has done storyboarding for various companies like Disney, Warner Bros., Marvel entertainment, animation for Pixar, animatics for movies like Spider Man 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Looney Tunes. But working for these big studios and projects doesn't leave space for his creativity to flourish at its best, whereas in the making of Thought of You he had the freedom to change, tweak or add something as it was created. I honestly think, the the amount of passion and sincerity put into an art piece, always translates to the viewer. But Thought about You in particular is the best thing ever animated because:
It doesn't hide behind any tricks of cinematography like camera angles, close ups, changes of lighting. It is raw in its simplicity and provides this genuine experience to the viewer. What ever you feel while watching this animation, its not because it is manipulated through special effects, it's because it is actually sincere.
I love the way the animator plays with timing, weight and silhouettes. One moment everything is quick, the other it is in slow motion, one moment something has weight the other it's weightless, there you see a full drawn character and there it's just a line. These diverse features create a surrealistic and light image.
It is created on Flash. That fact alone gives me hope that I can actually do something like this in the future.
It has contemporary choreography in it. I guess I don't need to explain why that is a great plus for me.
In a nutshell, this short 2d animated film is something that I keep coming back to, because it is the niche of inspiration and motivation and every single time I watch it, I see something different. For those who haven't seen it, SEE IT-
This time we're kicking it old school!
I was looking forward to this, because I never had a chance to do proper hand drawn animation, and it was everything I expected- a lot of work but satisfying as hell. I love to drawing on paper, and in fact, I believe most of animators do, because why else would you draw the same thing for a hundred times. Anyway, the process is very simple- plan out and start drawing. We had to do the pendulum exercise, which was very beneficial because it's the most basic as it gets and it helps you understand the importance of properly planing out the timing and spacing. We were asked to make 12 frames of the pendulum going to one side and 12 to the other in total making a one second animation. Well I managed to fail with that. Instead I did 24 frames to one side, which meant I made myself double the work. But instead of animating the other half I just duplicated the frames and reversed them on Flash, and changed the frame to 24 fps rather than 12fps. As a result the animation turned out more smoother and now I'm actually satisfied I made that mistake.
For the other half of the pose to pose exercise we had to animate what ever we wanted as long as we applied the principals of animation and planned out everything beforehand.
I made a jumping cat-
I'm really satisfied with the out come, but I guess I could have changed the frame rate to make it a bit quicker and put a couple more frames in when the cat is in the air with extended arms just to make it a bit more exaggerated. But basically everything I wanted is in there- squashing and stretching, anticipation, overlapping.
Overall, pose to pose animating isn't easy, mainly because you have no idea how the animation looks until it's actually rendered, but if it is planned out properly, it is satisfying to see the exact out come you hoped for.
Today during our session we were introduced to the ins and outs of animating on Photoshop. We learned how to use onion skins, layers, frame rates and how to export the file afterwards. I have never tried animating in Photoshop before so it was a pretty new thing for me. Although with my experience with Flash it seemed kind of similar, maybe more difficult and time consuming but the principals were the same. The differences that seemed most striking to me were that it is frustrating to animate on Photoshop unless you have been shown multiple times how to. You have to look for certain tools or actions in the menu bars (like for instance onion skins) whereas on Flash you can just point and click- everything is there on the screen. And what frustrated me the most was the fact that if you want something to stay the same for a few frames, you have to copy and paste it in every single frame, whereas in Flash you just press F6 and the new frame obtains the same content. And working with frames is impossible- deleting a frame, swapping, or inserting more frames without having to re-draw the rest of them… Well I did not come across these options. But don't get me wrong, animating on Photoshop provides a lot of good features- variety of brushes, blending options, etc. those can help produce a really good result and it is more efficient then drawing by hand. Well you can judge for yourselves-
The first one wast an attempt of getting used to animating on Ps. Basic pendulum, squash and stretch kind of principal. And the rope situation… well I don't even… eh.
The second one was a task we had to do- animate the four elements- fire, wind, earth and water and try to plan out our process before hand-making idea notes or sketches. Like this-
This was a third attempt to come up with an idea. And as I probably mentioned in previous posts- ideas do not come easy to me!!! We were told to just write down all the random words or ideas that come to us and work on the ones that we like, creating sort of an idea tree. To me, this was probably the most useful thing we learned today…
To sum up- Photoshop has some great advantages, but comparing to Flash it's unnecessarily difficult and a bit primitive as an animation programme. Well at least, now I know how to work on both, just in case.
This one was fun! Our first animation skills lesson taught us the importance of storyboardining, and how to create a storyboard to begin with. We had to pick out a nursery rhyme and make a storyboard for it. It was fun to see everyone putting their individual twist on a well-known nursery rhyme, but above all else I learned to think about the camera angles, camera movement, composition. And in general storyboarding is new for me and I found it to be a more structured and clear way of working. So here's my story board for Little Miss Muffet-
As you probably noticed I couldn't help and put my own twist on it as well. As the spider approaches Miss Muffet, she realizes that she is intoxicated by the mushrooms in her curds and flies away. After this I made a colored version and a black and white version to experiment with tones-
In the colored one I used a combination of blue and pink to exaggerate the surrealistic experience and just to make a dead give away for the "being high" twist. In the black and white version I tried to work with tones and shading to work out what kind of lighting I wanted, whether it's soft lighting or make a greater contrast towards the "realization" part just to add more drama feel to it.
To sum up, this process was really useful because it helped me to understand how to organize my work in the pre-production stages of animation.
I finally had the chance to have a proper photoshop induction. It was pretty informative and I have learned some new stuff. I had worked on Photoshop before, and the nuances of layers and brushes wasn't all that new for me. However learning how to make mask and what they are for definitly helped me to become more efficient on this particular program. At first we were trying out all the blending options and combining images together.
It was pretty fun to try and mess up images but it turned out pretty decent if I do say so myself.
Afterwards we tried blending images one into another using masks and adjusting them to create a single image, I also discovered Multiply and Overlay tools that really help in combining imagery. As and end result I'm really proud to present my Photoshop masterpiece-
