What?!!

It is time to be creative!!! For our main project for this term, my group and I have decided to work on the 'what' brief, and have come up with an idea that works well with the requirements that are stated on the brief. The plot of our animation will tell the story of a little girl who has found a book about old wives tales, and doesn't understand that the information inside the book is just rumours.. therefore she becones sucked into the 'book' as she imagines herself with, for example, carrot eyes to see in the dark etc. We will use the 'whats' to express her disbelief and gradual sense of horror and she starts to believe that the information in front of her is truthful, therefore we are focusing on the themes of misunderstanding and misinterpretation between adults and chldren. We have decided to focus on a cut out style, with lots of textures and patterns to create a really visual and 'homemade' feel to the final animation, and here are a couple of rough character designs that I've done this week:

New term agogo!

Sorry sorry sorry! As always its been yonks since my last post, I deserve a slap on the wrist for my lack of committment! Well we arrived back in good ole Falmouth to be met by glorious sunshine, so for the first week we pretty much basked in the rays and packed in a few bbqs and beach visits before the clouds came over and the work piled up. But we have now been given our projects for this term, all of which look pretty cool! For the main group project of this term we were given a few choices of what brief we wanted to work on, which ranged from quite strict guidelined story lines to more vague options. And im a huge Whale. In the end my group decided on the less structured brief which was titled 'What!'... which was pretty much a script consisting of 5 'whats'... which pretty much allows us to do whatever we want, as long as we carefully craft the 5 'whats' into the storyline in an original and inspired manner. The other projects we have been given are sketchbook-based. The first one is group based, where we have to think of a 'rule' each week and stick to it, eg only draw blue things, ask a stranger for a object to draw, etc. The third project is called 'Animal Firm' where we have to create a world/ scenario that is made up of ganster inspired animal characters that has a unique twist to the plot. So... here it goes!!

Final Ident

Here is my final ident!! For a while I couldn't upload it onto here because blogger video is a pian in the bum, but I have finally got myself a youtube account and managed to get it loaded onto there :) heeeeeere it is!...

Ident Project

I have just realised I have not put any of my ident work up on here! Once again I have abandoned my poor ole blog, I must give it the love and attention it needs!
For the final project of our second term, we were given the task to create an ident for the new virgin music channel 'Red Room.' Virgin sent us a brief that speicified that we had to make an ident that incorporated their new and 'fresh' ideas in music (seeing as the music channel was focused on unsigned bands and new music.) Apart from a few small boundaries, the brief pretty much gave us the freedom and oppurtunity to pretty much do whatever we wanted!
I chose to do a pixallation animation for my ident, because I hadn't really experimented much with this technique, so this project gave me the chance to try out something different. For some reason (that I still don't really know why!) I chose to do a pixalation with a breakfast theme since I thought it was something everyone could relate to. In the end I decided to have slices of toast appear on screen, each with a different music note drawn onto it with breakfast related materials e.g jam, marmite, peanut butter, etc. The slices if toast would then gradually dissappear as chunks of the toast get bitten away, revealing the words 'Red Room.' To do this, I hired a tripod from the media centre and set everything up on my kitchen table. I was going to do the animation in the animation studio, but decided against it due to the fact that my ident was pretty messy with all the jam and everything!
The animation itself only took a couple of hours to do, and although it was quite fiddly it was actually easier than I thought. After I had all the images I loaded them into Photoshop and adjusted all the colour filters to make the images brighter. I tried putting the images into flash and premier to make the final animation but the images would not load into the programmes, so in the end I had to use the line testers to make the pixallation since I was running out of time. Bu this reduced the quality of the animation and made the colours look dull and bland. Although I like the idea behind my ident project, I am not happy with the final outcome since the colours do not stand out, and the music that I chose to accompany the clip doesn't suit the animation itself.
After all of our idents were complete, they were screened in the cinema for the entire group to view, and they all worked really well, but I kinda thought mine looked quite childish compared to everyone elses seeing as they all looked so proffessional! So next time I am going to spend longer on the animation and get to grips with the programmes I am using before the deadline creeps up! Here are my initial design ideas, and also my final ident.