animal firm finished!

finally the animal firm is finished!!! over the past week i knuckled down and got my act together with this project, seeings as i was pretty unenthusiastic about it to start with! but after quite a few struggles with understanding the brief, i am pleased with the results, and fingers crossed il get an alright mark! here are some piccies of the final images :)

Final 'What?!' Animation!

'What?!'... the finale

Hurrah! Our deadline for the 'what?' project is now over and we managed to get everything done in time, so we can all breath a sigh of relief! We are all really pleased with the animation because it works well and captures the cut-out look and style that we wanted to encorporate into the animation, and I adore the accordian in the background (good choice Insa!) Sasha deserves a HUGE pat on the back for being so patient with animating, and with the dreaded programme After Effects! But in the end it worked really well, especially the lighting effects that were added after animating. Once everything was completed, including our individual evaluations, Sasha put all our work onto a disc which was then handed in at the studio, and we uploaded our evaluations onto moodle. I've really enjoyed working on this project with Sasha and Insa, because its the style and technique of animating that I have always wanted to try out, and we have all worked really well together as a team. Cut-out animation is definetely a style that I would like to explore further, so I will try and do some experimental animating over the holidays :) Here is the original animatic for our animation, the storyboard, some stills from the story and also the final animation. Enjoy :)

Oops the last image didnt work so well! You can have a look at thr whole thing, just click on it :)

What!!!! its nearly over!

My goodness these last few weeks have flown by! My group (sasha, insa and myself) have been busy bees getting everything ready for the final 'What' animation, the deadline for everything to be completed by is tommorrow.. eep! but I think we have all done well in keeping to our weekly scedule, all we need to do is render the final animation and voila! We will be done :) This past week Insa has been busy gathering all the sounds we needed for the final animation (I had to be the voice for the 'whats'... my voice sounds really strange on the recorder!) Insa is also friends with a guy called Mike who plays the accordion, and she managed to get him to play a wicked little tune for the background of the animation, and it works really well with the cut out style. Sasha has been a saint and put the whole animation together on flash, where she completed all of the main animating and sound syncing. She has now loaded the animation into after effects to add some special lighting effects, and will render the finished animation in this programme seeing as some of the quality is often lost when rendering in flash. So far the animation works really well, and I think w are all pleased with how it has turned out :) This week I completed the titles and credits for the beginning and end of the animation, and I also had to make some more in-between cut out pieces to make the motion of the characters look more fluid (for example when the main girl character shuts the book in suprise.) Tonight I am going to gather up all of the concept art and cut-out pieces and scan them all into photoshop to touch them up for the deadline tomorrow. Here are the extra bits and bobs I made this week, and also a still shot from the animation. Take a gander and have a look :)

Week Cinco of Experimenting!!

I have chosen to focus on continous line drawings for my rule this week, which sounded fun initially, but I found it hard to get into the style. Therefore I do not like my drawings this week since I think they look pretty weak compared to my previous drawings in my experimental sketchbook. See what you think...

Animal Firm.. here we go!

Right, I completely admit that I haven't been as keen of this project than the other two, and I have been putting it off for a while because I couldn't think of a good idea and inspiration had run dry! I have been worrying too much about trying to think of a good story therefore I haven't got stuck into the project. But I have finally decided what I am going to do and I've got cracking on some character designs! My initial plot was going to be the cliche 'experiment gone wrong' through the process of cloning human and animal DNA, and I was going to have the creatures that were created from the cloning rebel against the scientists and start capturing human beings (therefore creating the 'Animal Firm') But this did not fit to the brief very well seeing as the characters had to have a British link. The brief also stated that we had to consider how the animal firm characters fitted into our British culture and their impact on our society. Therefore my story is still going to have the scientists create the 'Animal Firm' by merging animal and human genes and cloning the results, but the scientists let the animal firm loose into the city as an experiment to see how they fit into our society and how they live their lives differently.
So the past couple of weeks I have been designing characters that have specific characterisics and personalities to suit their 'animal side,' and this week i am going to work on some concept art that shows how their lives have turned out from living amongst humans. Here are some initial sketches and my characters so far! :)