This week were asked to make an art book for an exposition. Basically we got a space to show our pre production work and potentially get some feedback. We were shown how to use the print to resources as well In Design. I actually really enjoyed using InDesign because it was super easy to use, and I ended up making two versions of the art book. The first one I've done i was not happy with how it looked, and I thought it needed more concept work. So redid it and I was really happy with the final result. It was really nice to actually hold the printed out book in my hands. Here is the digital version-
Thursday 9 February 2017
Extended Practice: Idea Changes
During the christmas break I finding a male dancer. But nothing would come up. Since my search for the second half of the video was unsuccessful I thought to myself "how bad would it be if there was no male dancer?". Then I rethought the concept of the animation. Basically, there two people looking for each other finally finding what they look for. But that is a little cliche, looking for someone to fulfil you. What if the female dancer was torn in two and looking for the other half of her?
So then I remembered something. According to Greek mythologies humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces. The men were children of the sun, the women were children of the earth and the Androgynous were children of the moon, which was born of the sun and earth. It is said that humans had great strength at the time and threatened to conquer the gods. The gods were then faced with the prospect of destroying the humans with lightning as they had done with the Titans but then they would lose the tributes given to the gods by humans. Zeus developed a creative solution by splitting humans in half as punishment for humanity’s pride and doubling the number of humans who would give tribute to the gods. These split humans were in utter misery to the point where they would not eat and would perish so Apollo had sewn them up and reconstituted their bodies with the navel being the only remnant harkening back to their original form. Each human would forever long for his/her other half; the other half of his/her soul. It is said that when the two find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lie with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. However, this concept leads to the question of “Would the other half necessarily had to be another person?”
So I made a drawing in response to this. The dancer has more than one version of her, in the video there will be the live action character and animated one, overlapping and eventually meeting each other to become one. I made three versions of her in the poster for compositional purposes. I am not sure if I will keep it, but at the moment it will do for a place holder-
So then I remembered something. According to Greek mythologies humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces. The men were children of the sun, the women were children of the earth and the Androgynous were children of the moon, which was born of the sun and earth. It is said that humans had great strength at the time and threatened to conquer the gods. The gods were then faced with the prospect of destroying the humans with lightning as they had done with the Titans but then they would lose the tributes given to the gods by humans. Zeus developed a creative solution by splitting humans in half as punishment for humanity’s pride and doubling the number of humans who would give tribute to the gods. These split humans were in utter misery to the point where they would not eat and would perish so Apollo had sewn them up and reconstituted their bodies with the navel being the only remnant harkening back to their original form. Each human would forever long for his/her other half; the other half of his/her soul. It is said that when the two find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lie with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. However, this concept leads to the question of “Would the other half necessarily had to be another person?”
So I made a drawing in response to this. The dancer has more than one version of her, in the video there will be the live action character and animated one, overlapping and eventually meeting each other to become one. I made three versions of her in the poster for compositional purposes. I am not sure if I will keep it, but at the moment it will do for a place holder-
Drawing anatomy
With my test animation I have realised I need to draw the human anatomy a lot more. Basically I have the anatomy down for most parts, there a few things I realised I do not know how to draw. Well I could draw it i just would not be sure if its correct. Also following Fraser MacLeans talk I was really inspired to work on my drawing skills, since shading has always been my weak point. Also my teacher used to say I have very hairy lines. So I decided some practice drawing would do me some good. The sketches ended up looking really good, so I put them up on my art book. So what I have been doing is making at least one sketch a day-
Test Animation
Lately I have been a bit stuck with my work because I did not have money to book out the studio space for me and Katy to practice in, so i was not sure what to do. I decided to animate something just to move forward with something. So i decided to take the chorus of the song and animate it, see what happens. I animated the chorus because it is going to be the animated part anyway. So I just did my usual thing on flash, made key frames, in-betweens and played around with the lines. All in all Im really happy with how it turned out. I am seriously considering keeping this style, except maybe a bit more refined. The thing is the quirky fidgeting lines give it this dynamic feel which I love. Essentially this shaping up to be an extension to my first year self animation.
Tuesday 7 February 2017
First Choreography session
So finally Katy and I had our first choreography session. I picked because she has a few years of training in classical ballet also I knew she is a person I can trust. We started off by listening to the song and coming up with some moved we would like to do. The lyrics say " let me escape in your arms" Katy suggested the arms movement going around her head as if she is hugging herself, and when it came to "baby Im yours" I wanted it to look like she's struggling, like she's being vulnerable and hurting, longing for the missing half so I came up with this move that its as if she is hit in the heart and hitting her fists to the side and tilting her head according to the little sound in the music.
One thing we stablished was that Katy needed some practice with loosening up in some parts, her posture was like soldier and I wanted her to be more like rubber, just being the puppet of the music instead of controlling everything. We did some hip hop exercises to give her a feel of what I want when I say loosen up. But overall it was really good session. I managed to film the progress we've done and afterwards I was curious to find out what it would be like to animated on top of the footage-
This is actually a shot of the onion skin from actually animating those squiggles on flash. The animation looked not so cool but I liked the pattern it made. I figured It would be interesting to animating on the floor trying to animate in perspective.
One thing we stablished was that Katy needed some practice with loosening up in some parts, her posture was like soldier and I wanted her to be more like rubber, just being the puppet of the music instead of controlling everything. We did some hip hop exercises to give her a feel of what I want when I say loosen up. But overall it was really good session. I managed to film the progress we've done and afterwards I was curious to find out what it would be like to animated on top of the footage-
Basically I just uploaded the video onto Flash and then flash makes it into frame by frame by itself. So just make and additional layer on top and boom you're ready to animate. So that was fairly simple. It just took a lot of patience to animate because the movement in real life is a lot slower than when you animate stuff so I kept having to slow my animation by putting more in-betweens. I also did some brainstorming for the concept work and figured I might as well play around with some the shot I got.
Monday 6 February 2017
Research: animating dance
The key to animating dance is to let the tempo of the music drive the animation. Determining the tempo simply requires a watch. Count the number of beats in six seconds of music. Multiply this by 10 to get the beats per minute (BPM). When you have this, you can determine how many frames you'll need per beat of music. For example, a common BPM is 120. At 24 frames per second (fps), the frames per beat would be this:
24fps x 60 seconds = 1440 frames/minute
1440fpm/120bpm = 12 frames/beat
Of course, all this math regarding beats per minute is secondary to your character: You first need to figure out how your character will move. Dance steps can be as simple as shaking the character's hips to the beat or as complex as tap dancing.
The one thing about dancing is that it lends itself to cyclical motion. That classic 1970s dance craze The Hustle, for example, is a series of steps that repeat. So is that mid-1990s craze The Macarena. These two examples might be a bit dated and tacky, but they show that many dancers tend to repeat the same moves a number of times. You can animate a single shimmy or a hip shake, for example, repeat it for a few measures, and then switch to other moves. Of course, dancers will never repeat the same move exactly the same way twice, so be sure to use the cycles as a basis for bulding unique motions on each cycle.
Dance moves can be very trendy. What is hip and cool in dance clubs and music videos this year will be totally passe the next. If you're animating for a music video, for example, you might need to duplicate a specific dance move. In this case, it is probably best to discuss the moves with a choreographer or videotape them as a reference.
Dancing is a very primal activity, and most of it starts with the hips, the most primal part of the body. The simplest way to get a character dancing is to keep the feet planted and simply get the hips moving. The easiest way is to create two poses, as shown in Figure 1: one with the hip neutral and the other with the hip out to the right. Animating between these two poses creates the foundation of the basic dance.
One thing about dancing is that it needs to be fluid, not mechanical. Simply moving between two poses will not be very fluid and will give you something that looks more like calisthenics than dancing. As was mentioned before, no dancer can hit the exact same pose twice. These poses are simply a foundation[md]be sure to mix it up by varying the poses and overlapping the motions of the legs and hips.
24fps x 60 seconds = 1440 frames/minute
1440fpm/120bpm = 12 frames/beat
Of course, all this math regarding beats per minute is secondary to your character: You first need to figure out how your character will move. Dance steps can be as simple as shaking the character's hips to the beat or as complex as tap dancing.
The one thing about dancing is that it lends itself to cyclical motion. That classic 1970s dance craze The Hustle, for example, is a series of steps that repeat. So is that mid-1990s craze The Macarena. These two examples might be a bit dated and tacky, but they show that many dancers tend to repeat the same moves a number of times. You can animate a single shimmy or a hip shake, for example, repeat it for a few measures, and then switch to other moves. Of course, dancers will never repeat the same move exactly the same way twice, so be sure to use the cycles as a basis for bulding unique motions on each cycle.
Dance moves can be very trendy. What is hip and cool in dance clubs and music videos this year will be totally passe the next. If you're animating for a music video, for example, you might need to duplicate a specific dance move. In this case, it is probably best to discuss the moves with a choreographer or videotape them as a reference.
Dancing is a very primal activity, and most of it starts with the hips, the most primal part of the body. The simplest way to get a character dancing is to keep the feet planted and simply get the hips moving. The easiest way is to create two poses, as shown in Figure 1: one with the hip neutral and the other with the hip out to the right. Animating between these two poses creates the foundation of the basic dance.
One thing about dancing is that it needs to be fluid, not mechanical. Simply moving between two poses will not be very fluid and will give you something that looks more like calisthenics than dancing. As was mentioned before, no dancer can hit the exact same pose twice. These poses are simply a foundation[md]be sure to mix it up by varying the poses and overlapping the motions of the legs and hips.
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