Week Nine Update

It's tuesday and, as planned, I have completed the character study for Ash (Macromedia Flash MX2004) and pencils.
The penicls outline the characters for the digital inkwork. I have not coloured the piece yet as I am uncertain if Ash has finalised his colour scheme.

Week Eight

This week has been incredibly slow. All the groups are so busy with essays and animatics that I have not been able to get any decent work off of anyone. I had offers for some exterior work from a couple of groups but the people were not available mid wee for me to collect it from them.

Early in the week I took on an alternate exterior design of Ash's cafe, he already had one design but wanted an alternative. I researched tables and buildings and came up with the design featuring wide windows and flower beds as asked for. I had also been tasked to complete a character montage of all three major characters in the cafe but I did not recieve the picture reference until late saturday night. This picture will have to wait until next week to be uploaded as i have not had time to sketch anything i am happy with at this time.

Where I have not had a lot to do this week artistically, it has given me time to complete both my essays for M.Hirsh and G.Munden respectively. I have also had the opptunity to sit down and research my dissertation subject. I also drafted a more professional timetable.

Cafe de B...

As I mentioned above, this week I completed the external view of the cafe - with plans to complete a character study this coming week. The cafe was drawn and coloured in flash mx 2004 using a wacom tablet.

Week Seven Blog

This week I have had no work form any of my major groups. Due to the short timescale of our terms, now is roughly the time when people are churning out their animatics or blockouts. Seeing as I completed storyboards for War In Wunderland, Adam and Caspar are completing the blockout. As I am an extra in Ash's group he is completing this task 'in house'. I have not heard from Kyle at all and I have not recieved any work from Becca.

This gave me a completely free week to play with. I managed to write my first draft of Gareth Munden's business essay and take on some extra concept/colour/environment work from Jessica. For this project I was asked to create some buildings that could be used in the film. These buildigns did not have to be realisitically drawn, just clear and colourful enough for the group to get an idea of what they liked or disliked. The only rule was that the buildings were all warm colours (reds) and there is one building that is more blue as it is not lit by lanterns.

I designed the elements of the buildings (so Jessica can take them and create her own) and formed 7 myself. 6 of these have blue alternatives. I also coloured up 3 sets of 3 lanterns in different colours based on the research Jessica provided me. I then designed 2 dragons to be used as decoration. I drew the pictures in pencil and coloured them digitally in Flash.

Dragons

These dragon designs can be found on the buildings, windows, lanterns and fences I designed. The two black dragons (done in Flash) were the 2 I favoured and used in the final concept designs.

Lanterns

Blue lanterns are not used in festivals but I coloured one anyway as I had an idea prehaps the reason the odd house out was blue because its lanterns cast blue light. This could be because the lantern itself is blue, because the lantern has a mystical blue flame or prehaps it is not even lit (so in the dark the clour would seem blue/purple/grey rather than red/orange and gold).

Building Bits (like lego but less fun)

The designs below are the elements I used to create my building concepts. These pieces can be scaled up, down, out or in to create larger or smaller versions of the same thing. The idea was to create a basic idea of what the buildings would look like so the designs are all relatively simple.

The first set of pieces are the doors, windows and fences used to decorate the blank wall templates. The next pieces are the various roofs. Some elements are more ornate than others.

Buildings

I think these are all very different from one another and give a good range of different building designs. Structure design is not a strong point of mine, I am more involved in character design, so I hope these are what Jessica wanted or sort of imagined when she asked for building concept.

Week 6 Update

Week 6 was another week filled with colour! I spent the entire week working on artwork for War in Wunderland. I did not manage to aquire any work from the other groups. They are all either in a stage where all the work is being completed 'in-house' in their three's or they were not available for me to contact them in uni.

War In Wunderland

This week I completed 3x character preliminary expression sheets (9x expressions per sheet, 3x sheets in pencil then 3x sheets in digital colour - the colour ones are available to view online) and 54x colour concept alternative monkey colours. The alternative colours were designed to be different from 'Red' so he would stand out from the other working monkeys. I drafted 18x colour schemes for the monkeys (including 'Red' who is actually pink) then created a light and dark colour scheme for each one (each colour scheme has a light, normal and dark scheme so we know which colours to use in bright light or dark shadow). The beauty of producing so many colours together is that even if some are not picked, ones from the dark or light sheets may be - then these can be drafted up with lighter and darker colour schemes. These are all shown below: -

Here are the expression sheets. I went for basic expressions to begin with so that the favoured ones could be chosen and any more exaggerated or obsure ones could be drawn up if they were missing. At one point the monkeys talk so when the sound comes in for that segment I will draft out the lip sync mouths. Here is Red, Robot and Secret Agent Monkey.

As I mentioned before there isn't an awful lot going in the main groups i'm working for at the moment so I may have to branch out and steal some work off of the other groups in order to keep busy next week.

Week Five update

Week Five

Week five was a colourful week! This week I spent most of my time researching colour schemes and styles as well as creating mood boards for many of the storyboards I completed last week. I also had more formative for the movie projects so I know now where my weak points are and where to focus my efforts.

New Media

Although I am still using the same art programs on the computer to digitally draw/ink and paint, I recieved a wacom tablet for my birthday. This equipment essentially acts like a digital pencil/pen/brush and makes digital artwork much easier to create. I am still getting used to using it on my PC (as i have only had experience with tablets on MACs) as well as getting used to the new digital airbrush (which I am still experimenting with). Hopefully the tablet will help me turnaround my weekly work faster than before!

Formative

My formative went rather well. I was pleased with the feedback I recieved. The main criticism i recieved was that I did not have enough research, concept or colour work. There were areas that could be improved upon as well but those were the key areas I needed to work on. Up until this point I have produced a wide array of pencil work (mainly storyboards) and some digital work (with few colour concepts). With this thought in mind I spent this week focusing on reasearch, colur concept and mood. I have researched colour/mood and style for Becca, from which I have created three mood boards of the beach in her story. I then did colour concept boards (based on my own storyboards) for Adam, to get an idea of lighting and colour in his scenes.

The Stamp Collector

Up until this point I have not had a lot to do for Becca. She has seemed quite content to continue on working on her project without any need for my help. This week however I got pro-active and offered to do some mood boards for her (specifically mood boards of the the hawaiian beach featured at the end of the film). I researched into various beach houses from varying time eras and also into style and colour. Here is some of the research that has influenced my designs: -

This final picture is actually a stamp, which I thought was quite fitting considering the films subject! These pictures (all sourced from the internet) show a wide range of architecture and colour. I was particularly drawn the the fantastic blues and pinky-reds associated with the hawaiian skyline. I have tried to emulate these colours in my mood boards shown below. This is the same picture of a beach but 'lit' differently for different times of day. There is the early morning sunlight, sunset and night time boards: -

The morning board focuses on daylight colours: blue, orange, green.

The sunset board focuses on warmer colours: pinks, reds, oranges and yellows.

The night time board focuses on cool colours: blues, purples, greys and tans.

War in Wunderland

As I mentioned in my opening paragraphs, this week I coloured some of my storyboards from last week for Adam's War in Wunderland project. We sat down as a group of three (including Caspar) and picked out all the storyboards we thought would demonstrate the widest variety of colour in different circumstances. We chose a few from the opening scene which are quite drab and dark then a few from the fight sequence which are rife with colour and then some from the climax of the film which are set underwater. From roughly 77 storyboards we chose 9 pictures to colour - and here they are :-

This opening board was chosen to show how boring and grey the office is. I added bloodshot eyes to show monkey may have been working here for hours on end without breaks. THis is a pretty bleak and mundane colour scheme. Money stands out very well here so we (the audience) instantly recognise him and what he is doing.

This board was chosen to show monkey in a darker colour scheme for when he enters the alley and meets secret agent monkey. All the colours here are closer to black than white in the digital colour spectrum.

This board was chosen to show allthe robots massing together in the streets. Unfortunately there have not been many designs fo rhte robots 'OKed' at this time so I stuck to the yellow and brown colour palette of the original robot design and created a colour silhouette of the raging mob in darker versions of those colours. I made all the eyes 'glow' red to make the robots more ferocious and I also coloured the sky red to dramatise and emulate their war-walk.

Here we have the opposite. All the monkeys/space monkeys are busting onto the scene in their tanks, lorries, helicopters and jeeps. The sky here is a more natural blue in contrast to the previous board.

This board shows the tank shell exploding behind the majority of the robot army.

Here we have the Wunderland naval octopus whisking the robot off of the bridge. This board is useful because it has the octopus' colour scheme in light and dark due to perspective and distance in relation to the camera postition.

This board has two versions. We chose this to get an idea of what the sea would look like underwater as the robot was dragged down to his doom. The first board has the robot in his true colours (yellows etc) and the second has him in blues. The reasoning behind hte second one was i wanted to show that as light does not penetrate particularly deep in the ocean, the robot may look more blue or green the further he went down.

This is a follow up board to the previous two. The robot is so far gone his eyes have turned off and he is barely visible. The octopus, previously a silhouette, has now completely been obscured by the lack of light.

This final board is from the end sequence where secret agent monkey looks on at a victory for monkeys everywhere before he leaves to the next mission in his banana-copter. i wanted to do a sunset skyline so the helicopter could fly off into the sunset for the ending but Adam said he had never planned to animate the helicopter taking off and leaving, only the monkey walking towards it. This picture was based on a couple of boards I accidentally left out of the blog last week so here they are: -

That's pretty much the workload form this week! The only piece of work I offered to do for Ash was a perspective drawing. I have not had time to do this so I plan on completing that this monday.