Scene 4 - ASSETS

Due to all the different rocks I included in this it was too much to make an asset list sheet. Because the environment was much closer to the mountains than previous scenes I featured much more rocks and pebbles in this scenery. I would really like to have the minotaur standing just in front of the cave and for the POV camera to reveal a sword being unsheathed as though to initiate a battle. I used a stone texture and lowered the opacity for the mountain side due to all of my brushes being really inaccurate.

Originally when I made this I forgot to change the canvas size and had to rebuild. I was going to add an extra scene showing the landscape and camera panning through the environment but after changing I saved time dragging out a separate area for the minotaur fight.

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Scene 3 - ASSETS

I wasn't too impressed with myself by this scene, the blend between the fairy looking land to the stony, barren land had me struggling since I wasn't sure how to go about making the two come together. I decided on having a few bits of grass poking through the sand to give the impression the sand had buried the grass underneath. I put down a white layer in the distance and lowered the opacity to give it a thick ominous mist. Since we are now closer to the goal location I brought the mountains to scale to make them seem closer.

I intend to put more of the previously made assets such as rocks and a tree in to this piece when I begin animating in after effects which is why it looks pretty empty in this piece. The dead trees I added were to make it look even more eerie. I was really hoping to add trees with more the bare minimum amount of leaves but since all the trees I previously made were very rounded triangles I wasn't sure how to substitute it without re-designing the whole thing.

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Scene 2 - ASSETS

Here's a few assets that make up the second scene and at the moment my favourite one. I made a 3-frame animation of the fairy's wings moving and to follow up, a blink animation that I haven't displayed on this sheet. Throughout the animation I wanted to keep a consistent theme of keeping everything somewhat rounded. I felt like this gave the simplicity of the animations and assets a more stylized look. For the rocks and bushes I knew I would be using them a lot in more than just this scene and didn't want it to look like a copy and paste job for every single one so made one or two extra little ones. For the tree I only made one since the majority of the animation it's going to be scaled down or in a forest squeezed in with same type so I decided to leave it be for now. I think the ground really makes this scene, the lighting is what I was most proud of as well as the tiny details like the grass overlapping on to the path and grooves in the path.

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Animation Production - Evaluation

For this unit we had to create what would be a journey through environment(s).

I started with some initial planning - branching off ideas with a spider diagram, this influenced some themes and styles for what I would be worth concepting.

I sketched some rough bases in my sketchbook, addressing on sticky notes their strengths and weaknesses and whether I could make them work. Because at the time I was very interested in Greek mythology such and the main creatures and the environment/scenery I felt this would inspire me to make my own world with it. 

The first idea was based of the Underworld and for this I really wanted to draw two of my favourite greek myths; the hydra and the minotaur. The second idea was based on a more light-hearted theme, space. Inspired by research and some of my favourite fan-made animations I thought having a little spaceman going through the different environments passing comets and meteors would be a fun and simple idea. The third idea was meant to be based on a bittersweet story following a lonely rabbit in the mountains, I feel like this idea was very loose so didn't pay much attention to it. The fourth idea had quite a few inspirations for it but one of the main one was based of my old childhood favourite Pokemon. The Sky Pavillion in Pokepark was one of my favourite environments to explore in the game and I was to somewhat recreate that.  The fifth and final initial idea I drew out had a very classic 'secret garden' scene, including abnormal sized mushrooms, fairies and lots of plant life.

All of these ideas I decided I would make on Cinema 4D using the camera and different frames.

Out of the five I settled primarily on two ideas, with help picking from friends and tutors I decided to using initial idea 1; the greek Underworld and initial idea 5; the mythical looking garden.

I chose to have a camera going through the mythical garden land and on the flip-side have this dark underworld hell.

Once I had written up a proposal and treatment and finished tidying up the pre-production I moved on to creating the assets. I drew each of the assets for the different scenes out digitally on Illustrator. Once I had crossed off all of the assets made I was ready to move on to animating.

Because assets took up a lot of time during this unit I was left very little time to animate, I am very certain this was where things started to fall apart. Instead of animating on C4D I animated in After Effects which left it with a very choppy look. Very few assets were made with frames or animated within the animation itself. It was a very unprofessional finish which is something I am personally disappointed with.

I think time-management and motivation is what gave me the finished result but I would like to make this a learning curve for future projects.

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Scene 1 - ASSETS

My assets for scene one consist of the boat sailing towards the island in the distance. This is a short introduction to the environment and what I wanted to be visibly clear was the volcano. Because the volcano is the end goal location I wanted to draw attention to it. I wanted it to be a different colour from the mountains before it to stand out. The island is very low on detail because I wanted it to appear as more of a shape than any detail, since it's off in the distance I didn't see the point in putting any shading in it. Since I was going for a cell shaded look I felt it would look really unusual.

For the ocean I intend to animate the waves pushed by the boat in an upwards diagonal direction. It was very effortless on my behalf but I was struggling for time management. For the blue I would like to make a solid layer on after effects and just keyframe the waves to move away.

The boat is probably the best asset in this scene since the detail is a lot more convincing. I used a reference to draw up a basic row-boat. I did consider putting bags inside the boat to make the camera look as though it's a POV from someone actually sailing but it was very last minute.

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Initial Ideas

Initial Idea 1

This piece is was inspired by the Greek underworld. Greek mythology is something I've always found really stimulating, especially the different beasts such as the hydra and minotaur. I looked at a few pictures of the generic hellish look and liked the whole lava waterfall concept. Another thing that was pretty cool was the lava stepping stones derived from the Tomb Raider game.

I think there is a lot of potential behind this scenery I could use.

Initial Idea 2

For this piece I was looking at just a few generic space pictures. The astronaut is heavily inspired by the animated series Spacemen on youtube. A very comical pixel animation about to astronauts being stranded in space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMAs2RSPPk

What stopped me from going ahead with this was that there's a very limited amount of things you could do with space that hasn't already been covered.

Initial Idea 3

This piece is very simple. I wasn't overly keen on how little I had to go off on this but when I eventually had it down on paper. This was inspired by my tutor who had drawn a quick doodle on the white board of a snowy tundra looking environment. In the cave you can see a sad rabbit who will probably freeze or starve to death... we'll see.

Initial Idea 4

I really loved this one. This has a lot of inspirations behind both the character and the scenery. For the background I was inspired by Pokepark, There are two locations in the game that motivated the design; the Flower Zone and Sky Pavillion. Both locations are either high in the sky or literally floating. Another one that was unexpected was the Avatar film, the floating islands were very alluring to me and the way the water dropped over the edges was very 'heavenly' to match the same kind of vibes I was going for.

The bird-like character you seen in the front was heavily inspired by Zelda Wind Waker - or more specifically the Rito Tribe. The appearance of the tribe is very humanoid however all of them feature beaks where their noses would normally be, I loved the concept for how distinctive and unique it looks. Where as most bird/human hybrids are the usual 'human-with-wings' looking aspect it was weirdly attractive. Going off from that topic I was secondly inspired by the book series Maximum Ride, originally written by James Patterson and later illustrated by Narae Lee in an eastern manga style. The only difference I made with the wings was that their wings came out from where their arms would normally hang, much like a harpy.

Initial Idea 5

This idea was inspired by my best friend Caoimhe who had originally drawn a very mythical looking scene with abnormally large mushrooms. Her drawing had reminded me of one of my all time favourite games Trine. I really enjoy the scenery of Trine 2 for it's colours and pleasing aesthetic and more so it's abnormally massive mushrooms and other pretty aspects.

After consulting my tutor with the different environments I had created he recommended that I did a mash up of my initial idea 1 and initial idea 5. The idea of moving through a very pretty fairyland and on the flip side would be it's parallel. A very daunting hell-world. As much as I liked my 4th Idea I would like to save it for another time. I really like the idea of mixing both ideas up because it sets a kind of story in itself. It also gives me a chance to do two ideas in one.

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Initial Planning

When I first started brain storming ideas that would be suitable for this module I started by jotting down the different ideas that came to mind. I categorized them in to what inspired me, themes and all the environments I could remember.

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Assets for each scene

Scene 1

• Ocean
• Island/Volcano
• Boat
• Sky
• Sun
• Clouds

Scene 2

• Trees
• Dirt path
• Fairy
• Rocks
• Bushes

Scene 3

• Trees
• Dirt path
• Bushes
• Sand
• Dead trees
• Mountains
• Sky

Scene 4

• Dead trees
• Rocks
• Cave entrance
• Skulls
• Minotaur(?)

Scene 5

• Rocks
• Lava
• Volcano
• Hydra

Scene 6

• Volcano from bottom
• Rocks
• Smoke pluming 

Scene 7

• Sword
• Volcano (mouth)
• Lava
• Rocks
• Smoke

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Practice Enrichment - Evaluation

Practice enrichment was a very brief module expanding our skills index based on live drawing.

We started by taking pictures of our hands and tracing them, this was very straight forward. Instead of filling in the shading we had to place lines in where the shadows, lines and detail was much more obvious.

On the live drawing week we had to work on A2 paper and an easel. I found this very straining on my wrist and back and struggled through the most part. Techniques we learned were using different medias of art such as pencil, coloured pencil, ink, pastels and chalk. This pushed me out of my comfort zone but with practice I became more comfortable with the tools we used. At first I was hopeless at measurements off the pencil but with a couple of lessons I can use them much more fluently to help improve my work. I did get ill half way through a lesson and had to leave earlier than expected but managed to catch up before everyone was ahead of me.

Overall this module has been a massive learning curve for me and I felt like although I struggled it was progress towards improvement in an area out of my comfort zone. I would like to partake in more live drawing in my own time.

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Practice Enrichment - Research

Research

Mode 2

Battle of the Year 2013 Poster

This Illustration is by Mode 2, one of the main reasons this piece appeals to me is the fact that it has such a unique and dynamic art style, it is very detailed but the way the lines are drawn in a very rough and messy way, this adds to the action in the image as the lines reflect the movement. The layout of this image draws attention to the action that is going on and gives the image a feel of depth, there is a clear conical shape in which all of the characters are neatly within. The colours used in this piece also appeal to me, the artist used the directly contrasting colours blue and orange, and this makes the image look vivid and also helps the characters to stand out, it also helps the viewer notice the distinction between the illustration and the background photography.

Cat in the Park

I particularly like the colour in this image, the use of faded watercolour paint gives it a very calming look to it, and a soothing tone. The illustrative style is very technical, and the use of blue lines to contrast the red background. The image has good composition as well, the focal point is clearly centred, and gradually as you go to the edges of the image less and less is happening. I also love the way white is used to define the shading and creases of the clothing, this gives the image a unique look and does not divert from the already established colour palette. This creative use of colour in both this image and the one before has opened my mind on how colour can be used.

Life Expectancy

This is one of my favourite works by Mode 2, quite a different tone than the other two, this one paints more of a picture of fear, abuse and anger. This is reinforced by the excellent use of colour, reds and oranges contrasted with pitch black silhouettes helps convey the aggressive vibe we get from looking at it. The composition in this image also furthers the tone, the man with the machete is suggested as being powerful, this is done by placing him in the foreground, he is much larger than everyone else and therefore visually overpowers them, and this is opposed to the masses of people in the background who’s fragility is suggested by their small size in comparison. The man’s aggression is also suggested through the composition, by the fact that the point of focus is on his machete, we also don’t see his face, he is dehumanised through this. This image also makes good use of the rule of thirds, positioning the man with the machete at the side while the majority of the image is made up of the civilians. The way lighting is used in this image, and the use of shillouetes casts an ominous look over the whole image, this gave me inspiration on how I could use lighting in my own project.

Andrea Wan

Fakelore

I love the surreal tone to this image, the composition really adds to the simple style of the piece, as there is a lot of breathing room between objects. The use of colours is sparse and the choice of colours is refreshing, the image is mainly comprised of white, but the other colours, green, brown and yellow which add to this feel as they are all very natural colours. I liked how the image is stylised, it is quite a simple style but it is also quite original, this simplicity would surely be an asset to my own style in this project.

Little Ghosts

This image has beautiful use of watercolours, the choice of colours combined with this creates a beautiful calming tone to the piece. I am quite fond of the simplicity, and the ability to create characters from simple shapes, I think I could take something from this in regards to my own characters in my final piece. The image is well centred and there is all together a very balanced mix of foreground and background in regards to where the ghosts are positioned.

Night Travelers

I think the main reason I like this piece is the contrast between the very blank expressions of the characters and the absurdity of the events going on, it altogether makes it very humorous. This piece has a very similar palette to that of the ‘Fakelore’ piece, very natural but bright colours.

Jeremy Fish

The Last Duel Ghosts of the Barbary Coast

This image is noticeably centred, there is also a strong use of symmetry which adds to the overall appeal of the image. This is a very technical image done on a digital format, the texture used gives the image a semi realistic look, I particularly like this use of texture in conjunction of use with a cartoony style, I think it can give a piece of art a quite quirky look, I am thinking of doing something similar with my own final piece.

Bunny Skull Ride

This piece uses bright, block colours which gives it a very vibrant and bold look, it also goes well in conjunction with the simple, cartoon art style. It also has a good use of line width, exaggerating the outlines and making the image stand out. The subject is also very interesting, it is quite a unique concept of having a snail using a skull as its shell, and this kind of wacky fantasy influences my own ideas and outlook on how I can make my fantasy world more interesting.

The Bikers Zip Hoodie

The use of a monochrome pallet in this piece gives it a dark gritty look to it, like the first piece I looked at by this artist it also has a strong use of symmetry with a few deviations. The lines used for shading gives it a rather comic book look in terms of style as well as the bold lines used across the image in general.

Amy Sol

The work of Amy Sol is a great inspiration; I was considering doing a fantasy based concept for my final piece. I really admire the way this artist creates stunning fantasy and surreal works, for a start her use of lighting and shading is always very softly blended in with the other colours, she avoids using bold colours to maintain this natural and realistic feel. The composition in this image perfectly points out the centre of focus, positioning all the main subjects in the middle. There is also a great contrast between the black background and the lighter objects in the foreground, making the image stand out to the viewer.

I particularly like the composition in this image the arc overhanging the girl highlights her position and helps her stand out, this is further enhanced by the contrast of colours, from the dark blue outside the arch to the bright yellow and greens on the inside of the arch. The way she draws the objects in her art always conveys a sense of grace and delicateness, there is nothing violent or extreme, this can be seen in this image in the way she draws the grass, as it is positioned in a way which conveys the movement of a gentle breeze, also in the way she slightly fades some of the objects that are further in the background to create a kind of ‘ghostly’ impression.

 I find the design of the flowers and general world in this one to be quite inspirational, she has used some unique and beautiful designs that could help in artistically inspiring aspects of my own final piece. In the composition of this image the flowers seem to curve around the point of focus drawing attention to the women in the middle, the black background which is quite expansive and dominates a large part of the image, creates a feeling of isolation.

Kozy N Dan

Conflict Resolution

I have looked at Kozy N Dan’s work before and it never fails to impress. In this piece what is visible amongst the vibrancy of the colours are two apes having a tender moment. The use of colours in this is similar to that of Lora Zombie, the light blues of the guns especially. What I get from this piece is that there is a sense of tranquillity amongst it, the rainbow signifying that the remnants of guns have been abolished and that they are at peace now. Though this does not influence my work it motivated my style and colour palette. What I’m unsure about is whether the apes in the middle are supposed to be transparent so that the viewer can see the rainbow. I believe that these apes are the souls of the apes that perhaps died.

Drowning Party

This piece looks a little more morbid than the last, with a rather eerie title.

This piece is made with gouache on paper with a very cloudy texture to it. In this piece there is what appears to me as a kind of whirl pool of bodies in different positions of the water. Some people have legs out, others have hands or head and some even have genitals above the water. I really love the look of the water and especially the colours, the purples, blues and greys make for a very soft look overall. The depth of line on the limbs of the people gives them a much cleaner look so that the viewer can see them much easier. It looks like there is a layer of water between each person giving it a rose effect.

Tossed

I absolutely love this piece. Much like the last we have the choppy ocean, very aggressive waves with a very soft looking texture. Inside the waves if you can’t quite see them are bunnies made out of the sea foam. It’s very pleasant to look at and is easy on the eyes, it leaves me very content. Made once again with gouache on paper and like the last you can see very defined yet subtle line depth. Some of which blend in with the sea foam making it evident these rabbits are just figments of the imagination seen within the choppy sea water. 

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