lighting test

I went on to photograph my background test test what angles i'd need the lighting at and the bigness of that light.

I first had the light coming from behind, even though there's a nice bright white light coming through, you can't see the paper's edge towards the bottom as it blends together.

I then had the lighting come from the bottom, this created lots of depth that I really liked, but there wasn't enough shadow around with darker layers.

having the light come from the side, did create nice shadows , and made the colours a bit more vibrant. But I think I may need multiple light sources for this to work.

I thought I'd see how the think looked with just the flash on the camera, but it makes it look extremely flat which I don't want.

I think, a soft lighting behind, and from the front will light up the whole thing, and then have a stronger spot light come in from one side to create shadow and depth.

This was with a back light and a light front and coming in from the left, this gave great shadow and depth, but I think it's just easier and cleaner to do it digitally.

Paper cut out discov background

Before I stuck the layers together using foam tabs, I wanted to see what distance gap would look best to create shadow and depth.

Using scrap card I used one foam tab to stack the layers and didn't feel like there was enough distance.

I then stacked up two foam tabs and this created the kind of depth I wanted and better softer shadows.

I stuck together the final cut out using two foam tabs, I places them towards each corner of the card and also added one to the top and bottom and it dipped in slightly as there was no support before

I did have the worry that the navy coloured card was too similar to the black card, but I think in the correct lighting it will look fine.

I now need to decide how I'm going to animate the fish. I think I could animated them with paper seperatly, and put it together with the background digitally, as this paper cut is on an A4 scale so may be too small. I'll have to test it out.

Paper cut out

Using the design I already had on photoshop, I wanted to then print out an outlined version to transfer onto my pieces of card.

After figuring out how I could actually turn my block coloured shapes into outlines, I did this by selecting on the the styles in the sidebars, and by right clicking a selecting blending options I could adjust the outline so that the line was thicker and easier of me to see.

I then saved this file as a pdf, so that I could print it.

I printed the file on layout paper, which works as a pretty good alternative to tracing paper.

I turned the sheet over and traced around the line of the first layer in pencil.

When i had done this, I turned the paper back over so that the design would be the right way, and taped down the corners of the two pieces of paper so they wouldn't move when transferring over the design

I drew over the printed line, this time in biro so I could firmly press down so that the line was more visible on the card underneath.

I repeated this process with ever layer before cutting anything out.

sketching fishes

I started sketching some swimming fish sequences, but I was really struggling getting the shape and movement of the tale. I found this gif and though it is only short, if gives me differnent tale movements. I discovered you can drag it into photoshop and it separates out the different layers.

I then on a seperate layer and using the pen tool, traced over some fish to get the different shapes and sequence of the fish.

I know the gif isn't very long, but you can see the curved shapes when the fish are swimming, the way the tail moves from side to side. I'm pleased with how it's turned out, and when I do my paper cut test, the shapes will be easy to cut out too. 

Fish. Lots of fish.

As i have fish swimming in my Discovery Channel ident, I looked at videos of fish and found this image of the sequence of a fish swimming, which will hugely help me with this part of my animation.

Maya - Turntable

I created a turntable in maya, it was very simple to do, you simply create a polygon and click turntable in the drop down menu. I cose a suitable frame rate and added a colour to the pyramid. I then right clicked on the timeline and saved it with playblast. 

More After effects testing

I imported my Photoshop layer of my design for the Discovery Channel ident, and added a drop shaddow to each layer, to create the effect that it is layeres pieces of card.

I first of all made the drop shadow colour the same colour as the layer, but as you got to the lighter colours it became less clearer to see the shadow, I then though, if I were to me making this with paper, and casting light down onto it, the shadow would be black. So I went back and made the drop shadow for each layer black, and got much better results.

I added in the logo and than from the skills I had previously learnt, added a papaer tecture to the whole thing and I'm really happy with how it all looks digitally. 

I'm still going to experiment with card, just to see how my original idea would have looked, and maybe I will still go with that idea depending how it looks.

Looking at plants

I wanted to look more closely at how plants grew, moved and looked within animation. And found some examples in tv shows/films and from looking online. 

I picked this example to look at how a flower bud opens out.

I found this image of a plasticine beanstalk, It similar to what I want to create visually, apart from the platted bit. 

When I gave up trying to find a gif of a beanstalk growing, I watched this in a Futurama episode, I recorded it so that I could look back and try and copy the smoothness of the movement and use it as a guide of how to make my plasticine grow like it.

Flow, form and force, life drawing

For this life drawing task, I started off drawing longer held poses in different media, to see how it would effect what the drawing comunicated. I found that to get a confident looking drawing, using a thick maker pen worked the best to show weight and to create smooth flowing lines. If I were drawing a more detailed drawing, I'd use a thinner felt tip or pencil, as a thick marker wouldn't allow me to me smaller detailed marks.

I liked working with the thicker pen and used it more to draw poses that were held for 10 seconds or so. This allowed me to draw quick lines, but still you could tell what the pose is.  

I did start doing quite sketchy drawings with thinner pens or pencils, but when I switched to this thicker marker, it was hard to do that and so confident lines were the way forward and was the style we were told to aim for. With more practice, I got better at creating confident lines.

Evaluation

In this studio brief we were set tasks to help us explore and understand further different aspects of drawing and what we needed to consider whilst doing this.


The list of things to consider were:

Examining the production of sets, series and sequences of images in the production of a narrative.

Observational drawing in and out of the studio - to enable you to think about environment, background and layout.

Life Drawing - with a view to improve observational skill and capturing the essence or character of an individual.

Drawing motion- exploring a range of media, processes and techniques to develop visualisation skills

Colour - develop an understanding of colour

Responding to sound - experimental drawing



Throughout this project I feel that my observational drawing have improved, and I feel more confident to go out and draw things more, I need to look more at my compostions and follow the 3 grid rule more. I could also look more at prespective as this is something I need to improve on and have more of. I need to capture things from different heights (not just the view from different floored window) but think more about angles,  looking down or up at an object. This is something I definetly need work on.


When going out doing the environemtal drawing and I went to a place unfamiliar, I couldn't really stay somewhere long, most of the time due to cold weather, so I'd have to do a quick sketch to get the basic outline and then I just photographed from where I was sat to carry on and add a little more detail when I got home later. I did think it was a good exercise to get me out of my comfort zone.

The turn around task was helpful to get different angles on the same object. This was something I had never done before, and enjoyed doing. It made me think about how important it is to beable to draw your character from all angles to make the look believable. 

wWhen working on the last tast, I know I need to work on my lines, I've got used to drawing very sketchy lines, so I need to work on making my lines confident, which I have improved on as I went through the studio task, but they were just stick figure and I think I could improve on this a lot more.


I explored with a range of media to test out how different media would effect what the drawing communicated, this developed my visual skills of how different media can change the whole drawing, using a crayon, gave a rough texture and didn't express fulid movement like a thick marker or ink did. 



I really enjoyed being able to go out and draw, and not bening on the computer the whole time. I feel like the tast have improved my drawing skills a little, but I do need to work on my lines and drawing poses a lot faster and not being too wanting it to be neat and perfect.  

Adding textures - After effects

 Because I wanted a more textured surface, I found some textured paper images online to test out how it would look if I were to create the layers using textured paper. 

I was shown how to add the image and add a soft light to it. This covered the whole image and the crisp ness of the layers outline was gone.  

I had to select and pre-compose the paper texture layer and the layer I wanted the texture on. Open this composition, duplicate the vector layer and right click to Alpha Matte it. 

After I had done this for all layers, I ended up with this. The colours have changed drastically, this could because of the image I chose, that had a yellowy colour to it. I'd have to further look at how I can change the colours to what I want. I also don't like how it's not as sharp. I could try scanning in textures and clipping masking it in photoshop.

I went back and managed to play around with the hue, which made the composition darker, but I made the shadow to soft and it lost it's harshness. 

This results looks better, but I think if I were to continue with this technique, I'd have to made the shadow a lot harsher.  

Drop shadow in After effects

An option for me to create my animation would be to create it digitally and use after effects to create a layered effect. 

I created my layers in Photoshop and imported them into after effects and was shown how to add a shadow to, to make it look like it is made or layered paper.

I added a drop shadow, and played around with it's distance, spread (which made the feathered edge reach further) and the angle, which made me control the angle of the light.  

I quite liked how it turned out, however I think if I were to carry on with creating it digitally after my stop motion test, I'd use textures instead of solid colours, to add a paper styled effect that I originally wanted. 

The Me Bird

I was looking for videos on how I could improve my layered animation idea in after effects and found this short film. They used paper to get key frames but did the rest in After Effects, to produce this amazing outcome.

I like the different patterns and textures that have been added on the layers and would like to see if can can now create the same effect.

Design reference - Discovery channel

Based on the reference image I got, I sketched out some plants and fish to see what designs would work for a paper cut. I decided to keep everthing simple and flat, as making things look 3d with cutting card would be tricky. when designing the plants, I have to make sure there are no little flimsy bits that will fall off.

Guldies - Euphoria

To help me more with my E4 ident idea, I'm looking more at different stop motion animations using plasticine.

With this animation I looked at the squash and stretch aspect and also the transformation between one shape to another.