DUIK Exercise

For the study task I designed a character on paper and then scanned it into the computer, I separated the part of the character into 5 pieces, which are two arms, two legs, and the body with the head on it. I used the auto-rig tool to link the part together and tried to create a simple walk cycle. I did firstly had some trouble with rigging the character, therefore I watched a few video guide in order to help me to get familiar with the tool.

Although at last when I was trying to render the video I discovered that the movement of the character is too slow because I did not considered the time pace when rigging the character, which I will definitely be doing the next time if using the DUIK tool again. The background I used with this short practice is from the main animation Adrift that I am making.

Puppet Master

For the study task we need to take a picture and animate it with the puppet master tools. Which are the puppet pins, puppet overlap and puppet starch. I did not used the real time records as I thought the timeline is more convenient to use. I have stick a head of a pigeon on the photo of myself in order to make it look more interesting. It is easy to use and a huge freedom of rigging the body part which gives the animation a huge possibility.

Telling Tales: Week 7

Continued animating, processed to the last few scenes that needs to be animated in Photoshop frame by frame, which I spent the most of time animating. The top scene is straight after the title, so I decided to make the scene sharing the same background as the title, where she point out her head straight after the title vanishes. The second scene is she lying on the back of the whale and pointing her hands to the sky, that afterwards she turns around and kiss the back of the whale.

Simple but Inspiring Characters

The character doodle sheet of tinker bell

It is a relatively simple character, but with enough and obvious character that makes it unique. The elements that make her unique are the hair style, her shoes and her wings. So for the main character I designed for my animation Adrift, I tend to create a simple character at the first place as it could be much easier to animate, in order to keep her unique, I remain her fore hair and her dress the same to indicate that they are the same character but just grown up.

Water Colour in Animation

On a aesthetic aspect in my own opinion water colour can be a great way of presenting a certain atmosphere of the background. What I used in my current animation is a mixture with the background painted by water colour and the whale being cut out digitally but created by water colour as well. It has fulfilled my expectation with the effect that I wanted to create at the first place. Therefore I think water colour has a wildly applied use in animation but not being restricted by the style. 

Below is a set of the screenshot of a masterpiece Chinese animation called MUDI, it is all done by water colour each frames on special water colour papers. The other one is also an example of use of water colour in animation. What is different to my animation is that the characters are animated in water colour as well, while I animated mine digitally in Photoshop.

Reference: https://one1more2time3.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/shanghai/

Telling Tales: Week 6

When considering the colour panel and the choice of the brush in the Photoshop, I tried out several different brushes, and discovered that the pencil tool among the brushes can do the best to remain the hand-made feel of the digital animated part of the animation, which works well with the water coloured background as well. Therefore, I used it for animating the characters and several other scenes on top of the background and the moving whales, which is the effect I wanted to create for the final outcome though the animatic was done in just black and white with simple lines.

Taking the references from children’s story books, I found that water colour would create a smooth and comfortable effect which matches the narrative of the animation, which is a girl’s imagination of herself turning back to childhood. The animation will not contain any dialogues, but just background music and sound effects, which in the animatic I’ve made, is just a single piece of music playing along, so it would be considered as the graphic of the animation has been finished. So at this stage, I started from creating the digital animated character in Photoshop, these is one of the examples rendered into a gif.

Digital VS. Traditional

Speaking of the animation I am currently working on, I combined the traditional painting and the digital animating together to create the feeling of a mixture and collided style, which helps the character to stand out of the whole animation as the style and the colour panel is completely different to the traditional background. Besides, it is much quicker to animate on computer than to do frame by frame on animation paper, it cost much lower than using a bunch of animation papers as well, a complete recycled method.

However no one can answer that whether the digital or the traditional is better, they both got their advantages and opposites, therefore I found it extremely interesting when combining both together.