Animate!

So this week I have continued to work on my character design. I'm still not 100% sure what the final look is going to be but I think I'm getting there.

This is just a very quick doodle of my main character.
 Here are some of my quick sketches of the development of my main character and my antagonist.

These are just some very early sketches for my 2D character i'm designing. I'm still not 100% sure what style i'm going for so the design may change drastically before I'm finished.

In our Maya class we began talking about the 12 Principles of Animation and we made a very quick animation of some bones swinging to show some of those Principles(follow through, anticipation etc).


Krish and I also wanted to learn more about simulations in Maya so we followed a Digital Tutors tutorial to make a flame-thrower.
I don't have a render of the scene as it would have taken FOREVER but the tutorial was a good start for learning more about what Maya can do. I might go back and try some more beginner orientated tutorials as I feel like I don't really understand what a lot of the settings we used in the tutorial actually do.

Our first project for Phil's class is to design a human or humanoid 2D character that we can later convert into 3D. We have to create character concept art, a model sheet and turnaround, a storyboard and an animatic. We can create the character for our final film or do an unrelated story, as I don't really know what my final film will be about yet I'm doing something unrelated.

I'm going with a sort of urban fantasy vibe for this story. I started with making moodboards for my character and for a few more characters that I can use in the storyboards. This is the moodboard for my main character who is the one I will probably be modelling.

 And this is my villain/antagonist.
 And finally some allies for my main character.
This is just initial brainstorming so once I have a clearer idea of the story I can refine my ideas and start designing properly.

Over the last 2 weeks we have had intro classes for Maya and Mudbox. I have used both of these programmes before but its always good to go back to the basics and remind myself of some of the things I have inevitably forgotten about the programmes.

Our first task was to model a bedroom in Maya. I also decided to uv map the room as I'm not very confident with uv mapping so I thought it would be good to have a little refresher.



Next we moved onto some basic sculpting in Mudbox. I haven't used Mudbox in a few years and I wasn't very confident in it when I did use it (that may have partially been due to the fact that my laptop really could not handle it and would crash every hour when i tried to use it, it never quite recovered from that).

This is the model I made in the class (slightly inspired by Mr Punch from Rivers of London which I read the other week when I was procrastinating instead of writing my contextual review)

And this is the model I made after class, the task was to change the base model into our own original character. I'm not really sure what she is but she was fun to make.

Our first assignment is a 48 hr film project. The class was split into two teams and we needed to produce a short film incorporating one prop and one quote from a list given to us by Phil. My team was me, Andrea, Nely and Krish.


We decided to do a story about two girls who enter a competition to win a phone (one of the props) where they have to take selfies with landmarks around Dundee. When the girls see each other they decide to sabotage the others pictures by photobombing.

Andrea drew us some storyboards, I booked the camera equipment and then we went off to start filming. We began up at the Dundee law, unfortunately we didn't check the camera charge beforehand and only managed to film up there for an hour before we had to go back to the uni to charge our camera.



We shot all of the scenes in the university, at the DCA, by the tay bridge and at the McManus gallery on day one and on day two went to the discovery and the desperate dan statue and then went back up the law to re shoot those scenes. After that we went off to the edit suite for a few days to cut together our footage. None of us had really had much experience with editing so I cut everything together in Premiere, Nely and Krish did all of the AfterEffects shots and Andrea created the graphics and the poster.

After that was done all that was left was to show the film to the rest of the class. I think I was hiding behind something for most of the viewing so I didn't have to watch people watch my (terrible) acting but they seemed to like it. It was a really fun project to do, we worked really well as a team and we all got to learn or try out some new skills.