Character... blue?

Quite a serious problem seems to have occurred when I export my turn around, in that he turns blue whenever it is exported as a .mp4 or .mov. I am really confused as to why this has happened, I have tried to look into bit rate, colour exposure and everything I can think of to fix this, therefore I will need to think of a way around it.

This is what the turn around is supposed to look like, but obviously spinning. for some reason it only wants to export as an animated gif or as a png file type. This is a major problem and I am trying to fix it as fast as possible.

Character Design - Starting the turn around

I just about knew what I wanted my character to look like fully, so I did a few a3 drawings of my character so that I could get a better grasp for how he fit together as a character. When Starting the turn around, I decided to look at turn a round's that other animators have done before. doing this I looked at Batman: The Animated Series, Young Justice and Justice League the cartoon shows. I chose all of these to look into because of them being easily accessible online such as on instagram. I decided to do a quick t pose of my character, not including the one I had already done which was required, just to see how he would form on the turn around. I started by doing an under layer turn around where it was only his very basic shape, and then build on top of it with a line turn around.

This is the turn around before it was coloured, I am quite happy with this even though the scarf is off in 1 frame, apart from that, it serves it's purpose incredibly well, and I am probably most proud of the way the facial shape changes as he turns.

Character Design 2

Giving Him a Face

I decided that the next step of creating my character was to give him a face, as well as giving him some shape and depth. I decided his outfit should look worn, as though it has been broken and self repaired at some point, as though he has been given a full outfit, but he has been out of a home for so long that he has had to make some self repair. Therefore I decided to give him some patchwork elements in his outfit, I also decided to give him some longish hair, and make it slightly messy. I wanted to make sure his homeless element, which is important to his development, was clear throughout. His body shape is slightly different from the standard body proportions of a child, but that was ok for me, because I wanted him to be exaggerated, and have exaggerated features, therefore this was not an issue. I had seen an artist on instagram, use a similar shape to my character when doing his own interpretation of "Harry Potter", which I thought was really cool and I decided to take inspiration from this.

   

CHARACTER DESIGN!!!

NEW BRIEF

So I am finally excited about a brief for Visual Language, it is character design. Character design is something which I love to do, and the brief requires us to base our character on the places in which we did our environments. Immediately my thoughts go to a homeless person for the dark arches. My first step was to design basic shapes and make them abstract. With just simple shapes it is easy to get a simple body shape for a character, my shapes of choice were a circle, and 2 rectangles, as I thought this would be easiest to morph into the shape of a young child.

These were some development sketches of my character, there is no face yet, or even bodily shapes, there is however the addition of a scarf shape which is obvious. I decided that because of where he lives, the dark arches, he should have something that signifies keeping warm. When I created this character, I made his backstory first, by giving him the name of "Theo" who lives in the dark arches. Theo is only 10 years old, and I decided to have him run away from a bad orphanage, so he could have the look of being homeless in the dark arches. Below are some of the development sketches of my character without the facial features and the such as of yet. I have not yet decided on the look I want to give him, but these I think are a good starting point.

French Horn, It Continues...

FLIPPING THE WORDS

Another week gone, another week of French Horns to draw, if I am completely honest, I have had more fun completing briefs before... none the less, I Have had more time to think, and more time to develop some ideas relating to the French Horn project for Visual Language. I made some fair old progress this week, and an idea of what to do for my storyboard is starting to formulate relating to my own feelings on this topic.

Progress

My main takeaways for this week included the thinking of "if I flip the words, it makes 'horn French'" which immediately made me think of "Horny Frenchman" naturally. From here I made 3 drawings, all of which are weird, and I did limit myself to 3 so it didn't become even weirder than it already was. These can regrettably be seen below:

Movie Soundtracks

When I thought more about movie soundtracks, my thoughts jumped to some classics as "Jurassic Park" and "Batman". So I decided to incorporate these into my 24 drawings by including some photo shopped images of some classic posters reimagined but with a French Horn added to the mix. Different Mediums were encouraged for this brief, and if I had spare money, I would have like to do some pastel and water colour drawings, however with the limited mediums I have, I will have to deal with this by substituting physical mediums for digital mediums instead, not ideal, but I have to work with the mediums at my disposal.

French Animals  

I am honestly not sure how it came to this, I just started grasping at straws desperately and thought of animals with horns and making them French, which is when I found out that the Laughing Cow is a French Product, and Frenched up the logo a tad, I'm not sure if this counts towards my 24 drawings in all honesty because I edited something and drew over the top, I am certainly hoping it does, because I am incredibly stuck for ideas.

The French Busker

For my storyboard idea, I wanted to tell the story of a sad French busker playing a horn in central Paris, I thought this was a safe idea, because this brief is sending me into a block at every single turn, and making me wish I had better ideas for this, because I do not think I have had any Ideas which I am happy with.

Rocket, Lizard, French Wha....t?!

Visual Language

We were given a new brief this week, for "Visual Language" where we are required to make 24 or so sketch like drawings all relating to 1 word. On hearing this, my initial thoughts were "easy" and "awesome", and even when people started to get their words, I continued in this thinking. People around me were given "lizard" and "Rocket" and "Flower", all great things to base a sequence of drawings from. Little did I know, when it got to me, my word was "French Horn". Honestly my thoughts on this are that I have been cheated, and I have never been so confused by a brief in my life. Instantly my motivation for this topic has been halted, and I would much prefer to work on my animation skills. However, it needs to be done, so I have been trying to think about the different ways in which I can interpret the 2 words, not in a literal sense, but treating them as separate words. My other thinking is that I can try and relate the instrument of French Horn to myself and my interests somehow.

Firstly, I made the mind map (shown above) to try and kick star my brain into thinking of something. When I think of French Horn, I think of Orchestra, which immediately makes me think of A) The Tom and Jerry episode where they fight over who conducts the orchestra, and B) Movie Music, the French Horn must have been used to make some of the deep sounds in a movie's score before. This type of thinking helped me to take a grasp on the situation a little, although not completely, and I am still unsure of where to take this project next. I started out by doing some quick sketches of what I thought about, which ended up being a Storm Trooper using a French Horn Instrument, and a French Bull with the French Flag wrapped around his horn. Unsure as of yet where I am going to take this next.

Environmental Drawings 2: Return to the Dark Arches

Return to the Dark Arches

After seeing the effect on the lighting that drawing in straight pen had on my train drawings, I returned to the dark arches with more equipment than the last time. One thing I had not considered, which worked out in my favour, was the time of day, whereas I had gone the first time in the morning, this time it had been evening/night, which greatly effected visibility down there. Needless to say, I feel as though this change in lighting enhanced my drawings.

When drawing on the train again, I this time had the advantage of a table as well which meant the drawings could be steadier, I again went for pen due to the restricting time and limited space of the train and I again loved the way it made the lighting look, if anything, I would like to try a drawing inside the train using the same black shadow style I used for the dark arches, with large black areas driving home the idea of shadow and light areas.