February

Happy Leap Year!! For my second installment of photographs for the '52 Week Challenge', I bring you February! As you can see, breaking my lens has definitely not got in the way of me and this challenge. Well, not yet at least....

Lights.....Camera.....Line Tests!!

After finishing my moodboards, I've been trying to put my ideas in motion. Literally.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've made the animatic for my cheekily titled short, Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude is the story of Old Owl and his struggle to feed the birds in his local park, which is constantly disturbed by Little Owl and her painfully oblivious playtime. When Old Owl's patience is pushed to the limit, he resorts to devious plans to get the peace and quiet he's after.



Schadenfreude animatic


These are a couple of line tests I made to familiarise myself with certain movements of my characters.







This is a pencil coloured line test of Old Owl's previous line test, I was trying to create a bit of a messy look with some of Wilko's finest colouring pencils. [The reason there is a weird page strip on the left towards the end was because I ran out of paper and had to use sheets of a failed line test I did with Little Owl, which resulted in me concealing this error rather ungracefully].




To emphasise the playfulness of my aesthetic, I experimented with making 2D puppets, which not only has quite a charming look to it but wont test my patience as much as hand drawing each frame. Although I wont the that kinetic, scruffy the pencil line test provides, I can use more interesting and intricate patterns when making my puppets. Here are a couple of puppet tests to, again, familiarise myself with making the actions and finally, a title sequence test.

MoodBoards Galore

For my animation, I wanted to create a cutsie and sort of naive aesthetic by using simple shapes and bold colours for my background. Inspired by the likes of Michel Gondry, Petér Vácz and Magdalena Osinska, I've chosen to use familiar materials such as craft/tissue paper and a variation of fabrics to give my look a soft and playful feel to them. These are a couple of moodboards I've done over the past few weeks to help formulate an idea in my head of what kind of look I want my animation to have.

I scrumpled up the tissue paper when scanning it in, giving the trees and clouds more dimension, which constrasts quite nicely on a 2D image. To make the bark and branches more interesting, I decided to use an image of long, straight hair to mimic the intricate detail of tree bark and wood in order the make the trees look a bit more graphic.

Mixed Media and Photoshop

Meet My Owls...

Old Owl & Little Owl

I'm 3 weeks into a 12 week intensive animation course as part of my degree. In this time, I am to produce a short animation between 1-2 minutes long and due to my ever growing obsession with owls, I decided to make my main two main characters............well, owls. Although I don't have the biggest confidence in character building, I was inspired by the drastic expressions of the white faced scops owl to give my characters anthropomorphic qualities: Old Owl's being comparable to a bitter old man and Little Owl's playful, childish qualities were inspired by the hyperactivity of the burrowing owl.

This is my first ever line test exhibiting Old Owl's expressions.
Despite the annoying light change about halfway through, I was still rather pleased at the outcome of my first attempt.
.