I’m taking a very challenging character design class. The design theory is always interesting, and it’s always nice to have an insight into the industry pre-production stage, but I find it hard to apply the design language onto a character.
I normally struggle to simplify the character into something that can be easily animated, and the class is forcing me to think more about exploring different shapes rather than styles, and go for what is more appropriate to the character rather than what looks more aesthetically pleasing.
I feel like I’m making some progress with gesture drawing. I still find the 30 seconds poses quite challenging as I’m never sure what marks to chose. I always manage to get the torso down, but hardly ever manage to put down anything else.
The 2-3 minutes poses are getting easier to draw but I still have to improve on anatomy as some of the drawings are not accurate with proportions.
Here’re the results of a stop motion tryout session, working on a lift and push exercise.
I had never worked with an armature before and it felt both interesting and challenging at the same time. I was initially having issues with the stiffness of the arms, and when I got to loose them a bit, they became really unstable.
I gave the push exercise a couple of tries and I was impressed to find that the timing was not too off. I would have probably wished to fix the end step, but the fact that the armature’s arms where really stiff at this point helped me convey the weight of the ball (hopefully!).
It’s another story with the push exercise. Here I struggled a lot with the hands and arms not staying in position, so I felt extremely limited when trying to convey the movement. I think I started shooting at least three times before swapping puppet with my classmate, as his had stiffer arms but weaker leg joints. Still, the puppet was falling half way through so I just decided to embrace it and made the character fall in a very dramatic way.
The overall experience was both frustrating and rewarding: I found myself thinking more about the actual movement compared to when working on a 2D software, and I was acting out the movement more to understand the key poses.
This is my first attempt at a simple follow through animation. I think I’ve come to understand the basic principle of it, but I think I’m struggling with something with a little bit more body mass than a string attached to a ball.
I want to give it another go with a slightly more complicated character, but i also don’t want to go too far with it, in case the movement gets compromised.
I made a couple of attempts at a bouncing ball and a sliding ball. For the first one, I tried to recreate the bounce of a ping pong ball and for the sliding one, my reference was a bowling ball.
I felt I could understand the dynamic of the bowling ball better compared to the ping pong one. For the latter, I found it quite hard to get the arcs right. Also, before approaching the exercise I thought there would be more squash and stretch involved into the animation, but after the first try, I realised it made it look quite odd, so I refrained from using too many of those frames.
I’m in the process of finalising the research for my upcoming presentation.
I was struggling to find an Italian animator I admired or at least felt close to. There is a movie I’m really fond of but couldn’t find much about the actual production, so I decided to focus on a historical period instead.
I grew up hearing my parents and grandparents speaking fondly about a certain tv advert space called Il Carosello. It was broadcast between 1959 and 1977 and over the course of those 18 years it launched the career of many Italian animators. It also represented a great opportunity for independent animation, as the demand to advertise new products on tv rose in conjunction with the post war economical boom. Carosello became one of the most popular and loved programme in Italian tv due to the unconventional way advertisement was presented. Instead of having an invasive approach the spots were usually dominated by a 2-3 minutes narrative which would later end with the advert of a specific product.
Some of the characters became so famous that shows were created after Carosello was terminated. My favourite has always been Calimero, the black chick. Originally created to advertise a brand of soap detergent (as you would always find out he’s not black, but just dirty), he later became the star of his own show, though the animation production was moved to Japan.
I appreciate the simplicity of his design and even though I still haven’t found what artists influenced the Pagot brother when creating the character, I still think there’s a great resemblance to some of the mainstream animation cartoon that were broadcast in America at the time, such as Hanna-Barbera.
Some results from the first life drawing class of the year. Needles to say, I felt very stiff from the lack of practise, and I struggled to put down lines which could convey a sense of the model and her actions.
Looking back at the drawings, I can clearly remember some of the poses from my 1 minutes sketches, but not so much when looking at my 30 sec ones.
Going forward, I think I’m going to try to use a different kind of pencil (either soft graphite or Col-erase). The Conte Pierre Noir is great, but I sometimes felt like I was working against the size of the tip. Also, it makes really dark marks which are hard redefine or fix once they’re on paper, and I find myself constantly having to adjust the size of the legs and torso.
