Splargh progress

character development

Flargh the alien

keywords:
clumsy, stupid, friendly, kind, heroic, honest, adventurous, deserter.

personality:
He always puts himself forwards in dangerous situations and cares about others more than himself, he's kind hearted and playful.

visuals:

Animation Idea Feedback

i have chosen to do the 'alpha space' cartoon idea, because i feel it is the most developed in my mind, i have a clear idea of what i want it to be and i feel it can work well, the feedback also thought it would be good.

here we see a doodle sheet that i used to jot ideas down and make some characters, using the shapes that they're based on and how that represents them.

Character design

Character design is a combo of physical and narrative traits. like their role in a story. you think about personality before designing what they look like, the looks should reflect what they're like and their role in a story, like a hero will dress in friendly clothes, no reds or blacks as predominant colours in an outfit, the 'baddy' will often look very much like a bad guy, in the same way in a western you wouldn't see a man dressed in causal 2014 street wear.

'A face is the primary channel to express emotion of a person' - Colman

this is a reason behind the many large headed cartoon characters we see, they need a large surface if you will to show emotions predominantly enough for anyone to see. 

'A lot can be said in posture and body language' - also Colman

Solarski - 

'Hands are effective ways of expressing personality'

'how a character  carries their weight also informs us about personality - particularly which body part part they lead with'

leading with:

Chest: confident, proud, heroic eg- Johnny Bravo

Pelvis: lady, dumb, dopey, shaggy eg- shaggy from Scooby Doo

head: intelligence 

knees: coward

Power - take up more space

weak - take up less space

like nature, peacocks etc

cartoon character research -AMENDED-

this is catbug. catbug has a round body shape that makes him easily identifiable  his light black outline makes him look friendly with some sketchy mistakes in the outline, his eyes are very simple and and so is his head, with the same small sketchy mistake at the neck, he is primary colours making him child friendly and engaging to view and his mouth is always smiling.

  

here we have garfield, everyone's favorite orange cat, his design is very curvy in shape, giving him a friendly look and feel, garfield also has a very lazy looking stance, due to the fact he leads with his pelvis, similar to shaggy in scooby doo. the colors used in the design are all very basic, with orange being a simple color to appeal to children, garfield's large head and eyes indicate also that the character is designed for kids as he has a large face to show emotions easier so a child can pick them up easier.

 

here is robotboy, from the show, robotboy, robotboy has a mixture of design elements put into him, first of all he is made using one of the primary colors, blue, this makes him very child friendly, he also has rounded element to him, showing him as friendly, but his head also includes the two rectangular shapes that shows his strength as a character, his black outline is not as thick as some of the others indicating that he is for a slightly older audience than the other characters i had shown earlier.

Animation Comparison

walk cycle bear WITH WRITEUP!

here, have a gif of it :)

So, Here's how i did it.
we found the image of the bear online, we then took his image and split him into the separate body parts, by doing this we allow us to articulate every joint separately. i imported the image of the bear into adobe after effects and placed him in the centre, i then made sure the points of articulation were as i wanted them to be, for example making sure the bears arms turned at the shoulder and such, after this i made the bears body lean slightly to give him a slightly more realistic posture, i then created key-frames to give him his upper body jiggle, this gives him the rise and fall as he walks, next i animated the legs into a realistic walk cycle, by adding more points of articulation to the knees so i can assure that he has a natural walk. i also linked the arms, head and body using a pick whip to imitate the movement of the body.
the briefcase, cane and monocle were all done int the same way, putting the image through photoshop and importing them into after effects with the bear, then placing them on the body part of choice and using the pick whip to imitate the movement of the bear so the prop looks natural.

Researching Pixar writeup.

Pixar has been a company that in modern times has been very well known, they have made very popular films both interdependently and working alongside Disney. they created the first ever feature length film that was fully animated, toy story, this film was a massive success because of how original it was, and didn't focus on the fact it was animated, it has a story and very good characters behind the strength of the film. the team that created the toy story film saw the movie TRON in 1982 and they wanted to recreate the style in a way in their film. they had many other shorter films that were well received. one of them 'Tin Toy' helped inspire toy story, for obvious reasons.

pixar needed to keep themselves afloat as a company so they started creating fully animated TV adverts, here's an example of one below.

the adverts were made on a yearly basis and were pretty important to how the company and teams developed as workforce and made their style what it is today.

Buzz lightyear, the star of the toy story films was originally called Lunar Larry, but they decided to change the name to something more interesting, buzz was supposed to be the toy that any and every kid would want, so they combined the best features of toys that the teams had laying around into a model and idea for buzz.
they also researched all kinds of toys and used how it was made etc to make its personality.
to do the animation for the green army men, the team would nail some boots to a plank of wood and walk (or waddle) around the office to get a good idea of how they moved.
to make the more organic models in the animations like faces the team would use clay models and make them by hand and they scan them into the computer to give them a more handmade and natural feel.
during the making of toy story the team spent 3 years storyboarding the film, scrapping it, and re-doing it over and over again.the team also tried everything in the film, in real life, the burning of the doll was tried in real life to see how a doll would actually react, they they used this as reference for the actual film.

the pixar building in California has a large atrium that causes people to have one central location to talk and makes it a very good creative place to work, steve jobs actually designed the building with one bathroom so that people had to walk past eachother in the hallways, this was scrapped as being slightly insane but the idea of one unified work force still strikes home.
people got to design their own offices completely, for example one of the technicians wanted an airplane fuselage that was full of jungle brush, and that's what he got, others wanted western saloons and tiki tents and anything else to make them comfortable and happy and make them work as well as possible.
in the credits for their films they literally have everyone in the studio, even people that work as accountants because they're all in it together and that's what makes pixar a very different company.

pixar use RenderMan, a software that they made themselves to promote creativity and having full control what they want a thing on screen to do and how realistic they could make it, The software consists of a series of sliders that can move parts of a character like having hundreds of strings attached to them at once, giving the teams working on the animation much better of an idea how something was due to turn out.

Animation research

web series:
the awesome series, by Arin 'egoraptor' hanson, the awesome series has been going since 2008, the latest edition being 'pokeawesome2, getting a gym badge' released in 2013, directed by egoraptor, written by egoraptor, the animation style is very cartoony, and its purpose is too make people laugh, and i like it because the animation is very well done and the humour i find very funny


music:
the music video for starbombs 'luigis' balad' is animated by Arin 'egoraptor' hanson, directed by egoraptor and was released 2013, the animation style is very cartoony and it is directed at people who want to listen to starbomb, mainly teens. the animation is made to promote the song that it is backed by 'luigis' balad' by Starbomb, i like the fact that it's very well animated and the song is very good.



short:
this short made by 'gregzilla' is a fanmade mock up movie trailer made using audio from a popular group of youtubers the 'game grumps' directed by greg, animation style is cartoony and cute, making it directed towards people who watch game grumps, their audience are people aged 14-24, i personally like it because i'm also a fan of the game grumps, and the animation is solid



Movie:
this film is surely known by all, created by pixar studios in 1995 it was the first fully animated feature film ever, directed by John Lasseter the film became an instant hit as it was the only animation of its type. toy story is very heavily oriented towards children and is a great family movie designed so everyone can enjoy it.
here's the movie trailer:



TV series:

adventure time is a classic cartoon that everyone has grown to love over the time it's been shown, released in december, 2008 adventure time quickly grew in popularity, directed by pendleton ward and larry leichliter and created by Cartoon Hangover and aimed at people aged 7-17 adventure time is a series that looks like it wont be coming to any end any time soon, here's an example episode.



Advert:
the advert for crusha is made in a style that makes it look unprofessional when it's made like that just to give a feeling of trust, the accompanying song and cute animating style and content makes this advert a really memorable one, just what they wanted, here's an example now:

egg animation write up

so. i made this egg...creature...in photoshop, imported him into after effects and then proceded to pick my audio file, in this case someone saying 'pikachu' i then broke down the word 'pikachu' into the shapes the mouth makes while saying it, proceeding to draw the shapes in photoshop, adding them into after effects later.

after both the photoshop docs and sound file were imported into after effects i took the egg man and moved all his anchor points, making them closer to where joints are in the human body to give him...better movement! then, using the pick whip to parent all the limbs to the body to make sure any movement was given to him as a whole so bits of him dont get left behind i made him waddle across the screen and wave at everyone.

now i had an animation of an egg walking and waving, great, time to add the sound and lip synch! so, i took the mouthes into a new comp. and allowed 'time remapping' so i could select what frames i wanted to show when, this allowed me to select what mouth position i wanted egg man to have while he was saying 'pikachu' and after that, i was done! :D

rotoscoping gif

so, this is the gif i made of myself dancing, yes my arm turns into a sword, i made this using a technique called rotoscoping, going frame by frame and drawing over myself, this created this effect.

Look at this amazing trike

so i imported a picture, -the trike- and then put text over the top, like with the rocket, then did the tween animation to make it move at the end :D

Look, a second beautiful gif!

how i made this masterpiece:
i imported a video into photoshop using the 'video frames to layers' inport function, then i cropped it to my liking and exported it as a gif :p

sweet christ, look at this rocket ship!

how i made this,
made all the frames in photoshop and hid different layers to do the countdown, then i moved the ship to the top of the screen and made the 'tween' animation with 20 frames between them.

Welcome!

Hi there! i'm gonna be posting animation work for my media diploma work! enjoy :D and all that :3