Widecombe fair - finalised characters

It looks like my design for Jan Stewer has been chosen for the Widecombe Fair film. The first one I drew was the most popular but she looked too young in it. Our course leader also like the hair on someone else's design so I had to incorporate that. The result now looks like this:

We have also decided on a design for Peter Gurney. We thought he should be a farmer and also not very smart. I based him on Stan Laurel because he just had the perfect face for the kind of character I wanted to go for and also because any excuse to bring Stan Laurel into anything is good. However I started out by giving him ridiculous body proportions for some reason. 

Clearly that body had to go but I liked the hair on the left and the costume on the right.

So this happened:

I think these proportions work a lot better and I also tried a version with a different costume:

 

Ascii loop

I made a little loop animation using one of my ascii images. This was my first time animating in Photoshop. I had so far always refused to do that because I am not a massive fan of using Photoshop in general but it turns out it wasn't so bad and actually the best way I could think of to do this animation.  Maybe I was just a bit prejudiced...
I will try to do something more elaborate with it later on but I think this works as a test to see what I can do with this image.

I think I want to make all the letters around the characters move around a bit more, so far I struggled to do that in a way that doesn't make it look like static on a TV.






 

Rigging a dead horse in CelAction - Widecombe fair

I am in charge of rigging the dead horse character, which was designed by one of my course- mates (you can see more of her work here) using CelAction. Most of the animation will be done in CelAction which makes me quite happy as it is the software I am currently most familiar with. We also got Harlequin Toonz this year and I really want to learn to use that too.





I also just got an image of the horse from a different perspective and I spent today trying to rig that although I haven't animated it yet. Once I get more angles I will put them all together into one giant dead horse rig. I can't wait! 

   

Sketches

Just a couple of sketches I made today. Including a first attempt at Peter Gurney

The Ascii Project

One of our smaller briefs is to create a character using ascii art. At some point we will have to animate that character but at the moment I am just trying to focus on things to explore within that seemingly very limited medium. To be honest, I thought I would hate this project when I heard about it as it was very far away from anything I had done before and didn't look that interesting but I am enjoying it now. It feels a lot more free than I had expected and doing something so different is actually quite relaxing. 



I used photoshop to make these as it made it quite easy to use layers to create shading but I would like to experiment with a typewriter too. I was really inspired by this BBC News broadcast about Keira Rathbone, who works solely using a typewriter. Her work is astonishingly beautiful. 

Widecombe fair - Jan Stewer

Jan Stewer in the 1947 animation by Larkins studio

 I can't remember when we decided to turn the character of Jan Stewer into a woman but the idea has been around pretty much since the beginning of the project. I know it was our tutor Tony's idea and we were happy with it. Everything is nicer when it is not just a large group of one gender. 





Our main  inspiration for her design came from this image of the BBC show "Land girls":

 

The dungarees and headscarf are something we particularly wanted to keep. I really like this design idea, mostly because of my personal fondness for dungarees but also because it's not a look I have seen in a lot of animation before. I also think it fits the setting of Devon and the fair quite nicely given that we are primarily exploring a farmer's world.

These are my iterations of the design so far:

She is quite young and fearsome although I like the idea of keeping the gun from the 1947 animation and turn that into a silly weakness she has. There is a tendency for female characters (especially in male-dominant groups) to be too perfect. I believe that is a symptom of the artist's/film-maker's desperate attempts to not appear sexist. This fails of course, as the inability to see women as complex characters (which has to include flaws) is in itself sexist.
I hope we won't fall into that trap. This is a subject for an entire essay but for now, suffice it to say that I believe things need to change and one of the things I want to do as an animator is work on that change and make it happen. If Studio Ghibli can do it, there is no reason why we couldn't do it too.

Sound module character design

First drawing of Mister Raddish

The brief for our sound module this year, is to make a 10-20 seconds animation which, obviously, includes thought-out sound design. I have decided to stick with a very simplistic visual approach because I think this will encourage me to use sound as a way to enrich the story and make it come alive. Also, I won't have much time to focus on this module so I probably don't want to go for anything too complicated. I'd like this to be a relatively quick turnaround.  

My idea is quite simple as it just involves an odd-looking couple having a baby. It came from a scribble a made a few weeks ago about which my friend said that it looked like a radish and that he could imagine someone pulling it out of the ground. I thought that's probably where radish people come from and decided to use that as an idea. You see, radish babies are born in the garden.

I would like the backgrounds for this to be as simple as possible without just being white space. I may just use splashes of colour to indicate where the characters are and then let the sound do the rest. As a stretch goal, I'd like to use music but I'm not the best musician so I'll see how it goes.

These are some design ideas I played with. The ones on the left are probably the final designs. 
 

Today's sketches

One of my favourite things about studying animation is that the thing that used to be considered rude or a bit naughty is now work. Here are some of the doodles I did today.

 

Thumbnails

In the spirit of never underestimating the power of a scribble, here are some thumbnails I drew using a brush pen.

Tom Pierce facial expressions

I doodled some facial expressions as well as ideas for character design for the Widecombe fair character of Tom Pierce, owner of the old grey mare.

 

Introducing the Widecombe Fair project

In a little town in Devon called Widecombe-in-the-Moor, every year on the second Tuesday of September thousands of visitors come to enjoy the Widecombe fair. It is a very old tradition that can be dated back to the 19th century, which features many attractions including displays of livestock but also  a sheep-shearing competition, terrier races, rural arts and crafts and many more. 
The fair is well-known as the subject of the folk song of the same name and it is the story of that song, that we have decided to turn into and animated short film.  




This isn't exactly the first time that something like this has been done. In 1947 there was an "animated" film accompanying the song. 


I quite like the look and feel of the drawings. They are very playful but still feel quite dark and the charcoal look really lends itself to the kind of story this is but we are clearly not remaking a classic here. There is a lot of room for modernisation and making real animation rather than something that looks more like an elaborate animatic. The lyrics of the song can be found here.

The making of the film will involve everyone who is currently in the second year and we are collaborating with a few music students from the university. The College of Art and the University are working together! This is one of those things were we are supposed to feel like the two institution are arch enemies and we are defying all odds by working together but really it's just an obvious choice: they have musicians, we need music so let's work together. No big deal. 

Before the semester started I went to the Widecombe fair and took pictures which has earned me the title of researcher. We are still very much in the development phase. Character designs are up on the walls, various roles have been set. Some people are drawing horses. I am in charge of facial expressions. 

Introducing the RSA Student Design awards

The RSA Student Design Awards is an annual competition for higher education students which is run by the RSA (Royal society of Arts). The briefs are focused on real life problems and students are challenged to design ways to tackle these problems. This is their website:
http://sda.thersa.org/en/

I am really excited about this competition, it seems like a great opportunity to do something meaningful that could reach a lot of people.  
This year, the "moving picture" brief is about creating an animation to accompany one of two audio files. I chose the file called "live with less", which is an excerpt from a speech by Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology at the London school of economics. You can fin it here:

http://sda.thersa.org/en/challenge/rsa-student-design-awards-2016/phase/rsa-student-design-awards-2016/track/moving-pictures-en-1

My friend Ra'ees approached me very early on in the process and asked if I wanted to work with him on this project and since we'd worked well together before and were allowed to work in small groups for this project too, I was happy to accept.  

We threw a lot of ideas at each other, some of them good some of the terrible and started making little tests to see where those ideas could take us. It has been interesting to share ideas like that and having to be confident enough to share ideas, reject other ideas and accept ideas being rejected. I am glad that Ra'ees and I don't need to be polite with each other. I know that if I have a terrible idea, he will let me know and the project won't suffer. 
We also developed our own way of working together which consists of giving each other clear tasks and deadlines and talking a lot (I know it seems obvious but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated) and what we have called "wordbubbles".

We basically divided the text into three phases, giving it a three-act structure then wrote down key words and tried to find images for these words. Our main character is an anthropomorphic turtle and our main setting is a big city made of rubbish. The turtle, as well as background characters will be animated in 2D using either CelAction or Harlequin Toonz (probably CelAction as we are less familiar with Toonz) and the background will be built and photographed. The city is made out of cardboard, used tin cans and coffee cups. We are still testing and thinking about ways to paint it.

Early tests:

What we have now:

We also finished the first draft of our storyboard and character design for which we got feedback from our tutor on Thursday. This week will be dedicated to responding to the feedback and making an animatic.

Self-portrait with facial expressions

These are some self portraits of different emotions made during my first year. They are all drawn in a different style and using different materials.

Anger - Acrylics

Contempt - Finger paint

Disgust - Water colour 

Fear - Ink and Watercolour

 

Happiness - Dry pastel and Watercolour

Sadness - Dry pastel

             

Surprise - Acrylics

Danger of Life

                       

For my "specialism" module I had to create a 10-30 seconds animation based on a warning sign. This was the sign I chose:

Things to consider where the three-act structure of storytelling and character performance. I made this using CelAction, which I have been getting more and more comfortable with. There is still a lot to learn and experiment with though.

2015

This is mostly sketchbook work. I've mostly been using a brushpen and working in black and white. My tutor still has one of my sketchbook so there isn't that much work to be posted yet.