Visual Language: 5th - 11th December 2016

I continued to work on designing my character but I was starting with the face and creating various shapes and features. I knew that I wanted the facial features to be rather small on his head in order to reinforce his size and weight. This way felt much more natural and comfortable to create my character. I started to really enjoy the big bean shaped head with the big fat chin. This made an interesting silhouette to the character. He is starting to resemble the likes of Family Guy's Peter Griffin and The Simpsons Homer Simpson with his shape and silhouette.

The Tuesday was our interim crit on our environmental drawings. I was told that my lines and shapes were very strong and well communicated the shapes. I was then told that I didn't actually have enough images so I will have to draw some more on my commute. Colour was something that I was planning to do digitally and this is what was suggested most as well so that was ok. That was the only things that I really received from this crit. I don't feel that this way of presentation for a crit works as well. When we put our storyboards around the room and people put sticky notes on, we gained more useful feedback in a fraction of the time. People are less inclined to shout out to give feedback in a presentation.

After this crit I will have to do some more environmental drawings. I will try to use a wider range of media and think about the colour I use. I will also be scanning in my drawings and digitally colouring them in different ways.

Animation Skills: 28th November - 4th December 2016: Surprise Crit

After just finishing my animation at the weekend, Monday opened with the crit. It was really great to finally see everyone else's animations as up until then I had only seen the odd few and others that were just single frames when passing. I really loved how diverse they were. So many different styles and interpretations of their chosen words. When I later spoke to people about them, I was very pleasantly surprised to hear so many positive things. A lot of people said they really liked it. Quite a number of people said that they loved how smooth the animation was. People were very fond of the expressions and said that they told how the character was feeling very well.

I was happy to hear how it communicated the story very well. The mood was well conveyed. Many people also commented on the use of sound. They all said that it worked really well to help the story and atmosphere. I also had positive comments on the depth of field used on the backgrounds, the subtle 3D effect of the door as the hand approaches and that my proportions were all very well kept and consistent.

Some of the things I was told could be improved were; the fact that the backgrounds were quite simplistic. This is something that I did already know but it didn’t really bother me all that much. This was because firstly, I am not as confident in creating backgrounds so I wanted to keep them quite simple and focus on making the character look as best as I could. Also, the backgrounds aren’t ever really seen all that much and when they are they are out of focus. I wanted to focus on the main character more than anything since he was the driving force of the story for my chosen word. Another comment was that because of my use of tweens, the character looked rather static. This is something I had thought about. I thought that because my character wasn’t animated totally frame by frame, it does lose some of the more flowing animation feel to it and maybe does lose some character.

Despite this however, I do feel that my animation does show the emotion of the character quite well. Each part of the face was still all drawn, but some were re used when needed which wasn’t an option that people who were using traditional methods had. It was also suggested to add some secondary motion to the hair and body rather than just the face. This is something that was simple enough for me to be able to add quickly and aided by the way that I had actually structured my animate files. All I had to do was go into the face symbol and lasso out the hair and put it on it’s own layer and make it bounce when the character reacts to the surprise. This is a very small edit but one that I think does add a good extra bit of visual interest to the shot. I also added a very subtle bounce to the jacket and tie, though this is hard to notice because of severe camera movement.

All in all, I am very happy with the comments I received and most people saying that they really liked it. Most things were positive and the only negative things were things that I had already kind of noticed and had accepted or justified. I think that with more time, I would have done more as frame by frame elements to make it more free flowing, but as it is am incredibly happy with what I managed to create in the time that I had to create it. I’ve really enjoyed this project and I am really looking forward to these kinds of production projects in the future.

Visual Language: 28th November - 4th December 2016

After completing my animation skills animation and responding to the feedback in our crit, I could then put my focus onto this character designing much more. I started fresh.

I started by going online and simply searching for some inspiration. I looked at commuters and trains and the like, and this is some of what I found. 

This kind of exercise is always pretty helpful to me. After looking at many of the stock images I gathered, I thought about the conductor doing the same thing every journey. The people could be different every time but there is always that consistency. I thought that I could do a story of the conductor. He could be going around collecting tickets as normal, but when there is someone who is taking forever to find theirs, he just snaps and throws them out of the window onto a platform. This way, I could make use of the backgrounds on platforms that I've also drawn. 

I tried to collect some more stereotypical thoughts of train conductors. What I first think of is a rather large man, maybe a bit sweaty, shirt and tie, pens in the pocket and typical conductor hat. Actually, a simple idea of what I think about goes back to the fat controller on Thomas the Tank Engine. 

As I was much happier with this idea for the character, I then went on to experiment with geometrical body shapes and silhouettes. These shapes weren't too dissimilar to what I created for my original idea. I want to go forward with the rounded shapes but I want to break away from being too close to the fat controller. I struggled with this as all my ideas seemed to be very similar. I just wasn't liking what I was making. I think that the method we had been told to use in order to develop our character just doesn't work with me. This isn't how I like to make characters so I will try to go about it how I usually do.