Skills Development

Early Contextual Analysis: 24/02/20

To aid us with our contextual analysis, we started by looking at a game with a setting that was based off of London and identifying the use of semiotics within the game that help identify the setting and its inspirations. 

Semiotics: The study of signs, indicators, likeness, metaphors, symbolism, communication and iconography

For Example, if you look at this image through a semiotic lens, you can see that the games makes use of the environment and objects as a way to identify the setting as being early America in the Wild West. This is shown through the quite barren land with a lot of early vegetation such as shrubs and cacti , as well as the clothing of the character, which is reminiscent of a cowboy's attire.

It'll be important for me to make use of semiotics in my animation due to how I plan for it to be paced since there's likely to be a lot of things going on simultaneously so I'll have to make sure to make certain key semiotics nice and clear to show the audience what era of London the character is currently travelling through.

Art: 26/02/20

In today's art lesson, we were tasked to capture the negatives of a chair, which had been placed in the centre of our class. The method we were instructed to do this by, was to fill in our entire page with a shade, then use an eraser to rub out any negative space around the chair at the angle we were looking at it. Initially I found this process pretty awkward and didn't really understand the point of this exercise but once I had done the bottom half of the chair, I felt like envisioning where the chair would be on the paper became much easier. And I feel that being able to visualise what I was going to draw on the paper was the what the exercise was supposed to encourage because instead of drawing the object in and figuring it out on the way, I had to do the reverse while knowing where not to erase, which wouldn't be possible without visualising the chairs position on the paper.

Once that was completed, we moved on to do something very similar to the first task but instead of erasing the negative space, we were instructed to outline the negative space in a pen. When proceeding with this task, I didn't find it particularly difficult, since I felt that I had developed a basic understanding of how to visualise what I want to be on the paper before I go in and actualise it, so I was able t complete this task relatively quickly. However, I feel that we were made to use a pen instead of a pencil to force ourselves to only draw in the lines that are necessary, which further enforces the goal of having to visualise what to draw before drawing it.

After that exercise, we repeated the task but were given a stool to draw instead of a the same chair. Once again I didn't find this particularly difficult but I did notice that my lines were a much more messy compared to the chair negative outlines and this is probably due to me being less familiar with drawing the stool compared to the chair. So because of this, I feel that the reason we had to draw the stool instead of the chair was to consolidate our ability to visualise what we were going to draw before doing so, as well as making sure that we weren't just replicating a drawing that we were already familiar with to confirm that we were actually visualising what to draw.

Art: 03/03/20

In today's art, we were tasked to pick an object from the box and draw it in it's original form, then create a character from the object.

Personally, I was very unsure of what to make out of the the object I had chosen, which was a cheese grater. However, after I spent some time looking at the different part of the grater I thought to make a character with features that are more typical to sea creatures and I wanted to make it have a monster vibe since it wasn't going to be an ordinary sea creatures. The first thing that popped in to my head when looking at the grater was that the main grater holes could be  the character's eyes

Art Style Experimentation (Part 1): 03/03/20

For this lesson, we were tasked to set ourselves a SMART target regarding an aspect I would like to experiment with.

I immediately knew that I would have to work on and experiment with my art to create a simple and efficient art style, so after completing a small discussion with my partner I went straight to the board to set my smart target. When I informed my teacher of my SMART target, he immediately agreed with what needs to be worked on since he knew that I tend to take very long to complete art pieces and such, he suggested that I also get myself to make a short, roughly 10 frame, animation as a way to measure the success of my experimentation regarding art styles.

Once it came to actually coming up with the art style, I was practically clueless as to where to start, so I started by just simplifying my own art style, reducing it to what I would generally use as a base for proportions, then from there I tried to alter the look of the body to make it extremely simple, but when doing so, I wasn't quite pleased with the results. Because I wasn't able to create a satisfying style myself, which was surprisingly harder than I initially assumed, I went and conducted some secondary research on how to create a very simplified art style and I found that the more blob type of art style seemed to be the most efficient and simple while still being able to have impact since I can change how much detail I put into the frames and particular scenes without straying from the art style.

With the general creation process partially done, I decided to get a move on and start drawing out a quick animation in my sketchbook using the blob style. Also, because I was still somewhat in two minds about whether I wanted to do the blob style or just an angular simplified style, my teacher suggested I just start with the blob style and after that, I can go for the angular style if I felt it necessary. When drawing out the animation, I also kept track of how long it took for me to draw out each image and made sure I roughly stayed within 60 seconds for each drawing since efficiency is the main thing I was looking for, plus it was also part of my smart target to get the animation done in roughly 10 minutes.

After I had practically finished the hand drawn animation using the blob style, I was quite satisfied with the outcome as well as  how quickly I got it done since I was actually able to keep each drawing within a minute. Because of this, I feel that I don't need to go for the more angular style, since I had become quite comfortable with producing drawings in the blob art style. However, I feel like practising the angular style would serve to be very beneficial to my artistic ability regardless of whether or not I'm going to use the style in my animation for the FMP.

By this point, I still hadn't completely met my SMART target, since my teacher also suggested that I replicate what I did on paper, on to Adobe Animate. so I still had to complete before I really met my SMART target by the end of the lesson. However, once I got home I decided to complete the task I set for myself and while animating at this time, I realised that my ability to draw digitally is quite terrible compared to my ability with pencil and paper, which caused me a decent amount of frustration and slightly disheartened me when thinking of how achievable my aim for the FMP is. But as I carried on animating, I noticed that I was slightly getting back into the flow of things when drawing digitally, although still not on the same level of my traditional art, I was able to build up some confidence in my animating ability, since I know that its gonna take practice to really adjust to drawing digitally and decided that's exactly what I'm going to do. After finishing this rough animation, I definitely would change my animating ability on the course review sheet to "Needs Improvement"

Completing Personal Skills Audit: 03/03/20

In this lesson, I was tasked to fill in a skills audit using a worksheet that my teacher gave the class. When filling out the information, it was quite easy for me since I always self reflect on my performance whenever doing a task, so when answering the questions it didn't take too much time. Plus, the questions that were being asked were questions that I had practically answered in my different blogs for the previous units, so it wasn't difficult to recall the events that took place and how I felt about my performance in regards to those events and situations during the units.

When filling out the table regarding what level I feel I'm at with different aspects of the course, I feel like I could easily put "Animating, Coding and drawing" in to the "Needs Improvement" column. However, when thinking about how much I've improved in regards to those skills, I feel like I've improved quite considerably in all of them, most namely in coding. I feel like I've improved decently in the other two areas of skill but I think because I have more experience in drawing, I'm probably a lot more critical of my abilities regarding drawing and animation since the quality of an animation is quite heavily affected by the artist's ability to draw.

Art Style Experimentation (Part 2): 04/03/20

Today, we were set to complete our SMART targets from the day prior, but since I had completed mine already, my teacher suggested that I take a photo of the hand drawn art style animation I did, crop each image out and use it on Adobe animate to compare how each one flows. And he set it as my personal SMART target to finish by 10. I ended up finishing much earlier then the target's deadline, since it was just cropping part of the image, putting it in place and adjust frames according to the way I drew it on paper and  personally I found that each animation flowed pretty similarly, which is probably a good thing.

Also today, I felt like I needed to get much more comfortable with the art style I'm going to be using so I can get the animating done very efficiently because I'll already be familiar with drawing things in that general art style. So to get more comfortable, I went and practised drawing in the art style in a similar way to how I would practice normally.During this process, I ended up creating a type of middle ground between the blob style and the angular art style, which looked more satisfying for certain poses once I got the hang of it a little. However, I was only able to draw in that style decently when drawing a female body, due to my greater knowledge of drawing female bodies rather than male bodies in different poses.

So to help myself figure the male body in this blob/angular style I drew the body as if it was in a 3D space and rotated it from head on to a side view. I should do the same with the female body just to solidify my understanding of the art style I'm going to be using. When practising the art style I also felt that it would be best to use a mixture of the art styles, for example, using the blob style for shots that are more zoomed out and are likely to have less detail in them; and use the angular blob style for shots that are likely to have emphasise on the body.

Overall when comparing my experience with digital animation and hand drawn animation, I would say that I'm definitely finding it easier to draw out the images when doing hand drawn animation, but at the moment I still feel a little split between the two, because I know that it'd be in my best interest to improve my digital animating abilities in general, plus there are less external processes when animating digitally, but it feels like it's going to be much easier for me to do hand drawn animation due to my experience in the two mediums.

Practising 2D digital animation: 05 - 06/03/20

Today, I felt the need to work on my 2D digital animation skills, so before going on to Adobe animate, I roughly planned out what I wanted the animation to look like, using camera angles that would work in line with and amplify the speed & feel I want to have for this particular animation. Although I didn't have a written plan of this, I could quite clearly visualise and see what I wanted the animation to look like, in my head. Plus I felt that by animating camera movement and more dynamic movements, it would drastically improve my understanding of how and when to use and incorporate different aspects of animation. A great example of this, is the principles of flow and smoothness, which I researched in one of my previous lessons.

However, before I started animating I wanted to conduct some more research regarding fight scenes, so I watched a few videos of an animator breaking down talented and experienced fight scene animator's work and explaining how certain things that these animators do, positively impact and boost the feeling and engagement of a fight scene.

Once I had attentively watched these videos, I then moved on to create the kicking animation I had planned, but I still kept the animation videos playing in the background so I could stay in the zone and possible hear some useful tips as I was animating my piece. As I started to animate my piece I mentally took note of the time so I could roughly time how long it took for me to finish producing my animation.

During the process of me animating the piece, I didn't really come across any particular problems. However, one thing I did have to spend a little time on and figure out was the placement of the floor and position of the character as I moved the camera, since I wanted the animation to look as if the camera was moving continuously and not cutting from different angles. To figure this out, I ended up placing the floor where I wanted the camera to end its movement as if I was doing pose to pose animation and then filled in the gap with the floor positioned where I thought would make sense as the camera went through the motion. Going through with this method made it a lot easier than when I was attempting to animate the camera movement solely using the straight ahead animating method. This resulted in me developing a weird mixed method where I would visualise as if I was animating straight ahead but then picking out where the end of a certain movement would be, like I would for pose to pose animation and I feel that this method seems to really work for me when animating camera movement such as this, especially since I tend to generally animate in a straight ahead method.

With the animation complete, I feel that it ended up pretty successful and looked very similar to how I initially envisioned it. One main thing that I would take from making this animation, is my method for animating the camera movement, although possibly a little unorthodox. Overall, this animation took 2 hours to create and I plan on increasing my efficiency in this regard because I'm pretty certain that I will need to be faster when producing my FMP animation. I also feel that this practice definitely improved my understand and familiarity with 2D digital animation, so as long as I keep practising I should become much more efficient.

Learning How to Draw Horses: 06/03/20

Today, I was thinking about the different things that I could include in my FMP animation. And one thing that crossed my mind that I didn't know how draw or structure, was horses, which I am most probably going to include in a portion of my FMP animation. So I felt that it would be best for me to learn how to draw horses at least to a basic level so I can include them in my FMP without them negatively standing out.

To learn how to draw and structure a horse, I avoided my usual method of using a YouTube tutorial and instead I searched up basic references of horses so I could find and figure out their structure myself, in turn making it more memorable for me so I can use it in the future without having to refer back to anything.

The first few drawings using reference were very basically posed so I could get a grasp of how a horses body is structured and how each part of the body flows from one part to the other. Then I went in to  mix up and simplify the different methods of structuring a horse's body that I saw on google images so that I could draw them in very basic poses with relative ease.

Once, I had gotten the hang of simply structuring a horse's body went to draw draw another horse without using reference, then I drew one other horse with very slight reference while keeping in mind to improve the mistakes I made in the first horse, for example the first horse's body was too long and the legs were a little too short.

Surprisingly, I didn't find horses as difficult to draw as I initially thought they were going to be, since I always thought that drawing animals would be particularly difficult. But the simple structure of a horse turned out to be much easier for me to get a grasp of than the human body, but that could also be due to my experience with a more complex structure like the human body making it easier for me to draw things of a more simple structure. Now that I feel more confident drawing horses, I feel more incline dot incorporate horses in to my animation, although I will probably have to learn how to draw horse in a 3D space, which I don't think should be extremely difficult since the movement of horses and their limbs are much simpler and easier to understand than the those of a human.

Practising 2D digital Animation: 08/03/20

Today, I wanted to animate again and I kept in mind a tip that I heard from a video discussing how to draw more often that I had in the background during the last time I animated. The tip stated that it's good to occasionally add on to an already existing piece instead of creating a whole new piece when unsure of what to draw.

So with this in mind, I started to think of what I could add on to my kicking animation to make it in to more of a scene and I ended up thinking of a scene where the character bounces in a fighting stance after the kick and then blasts off at an incredible speed leaving a huge shock wave behind. I planned for this portion to have different camera angles but not particularly camera movement, for example, I wanted a zoom in on the foot of the character charging up creating cracks and breaks in the ground as he got ready to run off. For this portion of the animation I really wanted to emphasise the feeling of speed, whereas in the initial kick animation I wanted to extenuate the feeling of flow and have more organic movement.

Once I had the idea practically fleshed out and and I could visualise it in my head, I moved on to start animating the bouncing of the character, which wasn't noticeably difficult since I had a general plan for how I was going to go about animating the bounce, but I did find myself spending a little more time and effort when it came to initially figuring out how exactly I wanted this bounce to look, but once that was done, it wasn't too difficult. Plus during the whole time of me animating this section and the prior section I had constantly being acting out the movements so I could get the feel for them and now in what order each body part moved, which helped drastically with the flow and impact of the animations.

When it came to animating the shock wave left behind by the character's speed and force, I didn't exactly know how to start it off but I attempted to roughly replicate what I remembered seeing in  different animated shows like Dragon Ball Z and other action packed series. The effect animation seemed to work out fine at first glance but I felt like it was lacking the actual feeling of speed intensity.

So to figure out what was missing I recalled what I heard from an animation video I watched that discussed what Yutaka Nakamura does when making fight scenes, and I remembered that the use of contrasting speeds with the character and environment really sells that feeling of immense speed. Once I remembered that integral point, I referred back to what I remember seeing in high pace and extreme fight scenes and one thing that I noticed was, that with sudden bursts of speed there always seems to be rubble left behind floating slowly and disintegrating, which makes use of making the environment really get a across a character's speed, especially if there aren't other character's or ways available to get across speed or impact in a short amount of time.

I feel that by making use of these new methods that I'm learning and adapting them to suit my style of animation, they'll have an extremely good affect on my efficiency in production.This is because I will be more familiar with doing certain things that may be necessary for my FMP instead of having to learn as I'm producing the animation, which was one of my main downfalls in my previous project where I spent too much time on the visuals, otherwise I would have to learn how to do something when I should've done so prior to the time that I would need to execute what I've learnt. I also kept track of how long I spent on completing this animation and it took roughly 2 hours. I feel like my my speed increase slightly since I feel that I got more done in this session than the previous session of animation but that might be because the things that were being animated were easier to figure out or I've possibly gotten more comfortable with animating and so I'm finding it easier to produce my work.

Art: 10/03/20

Today, we gathered the objects we had used to draw from in our previous lesson and were tasked to use a shape or form from the object to develop and design an original character

First we had to draw out the object as it was. The object I had chosen was a cheese grater and when it came to choosing a shape to take from it, I picked the overall trapezoid shape since it felt like the most useful and obvious shape out of all the available shapes on the cheese grater.

When it came to making a character utilising the shape, I didn't particularly put much thought in to it, but I knew I wanted to draw an appealing looking body type and decided to start drawing the shape in whatever position I thought of first, then from there I thought to invert and turn the shape to construct a body out of the chosen shape. I feel that the character turned out quite satisfying and it was also quite easy to make, since I drew the character using the the shapes as the structure and the shape I was using was very similar to the shapes I've used to construct a body in perspective when I normally draw. Also as I was drawing the character I thought it would be fun to incorporate the other smaller shapes from the grater in to the character as minor details, such as the whip being the curved metal handle, the eyes being the main grater holes and the joints were based off the curved metal handle.

After that task was complete, we were set to get two smaller objects at random and use them as part of a drawing. When I picked out my objects the first thing I thought of was to use the blue clip as wings but when it came to drawing the body around the object, I found it quite awkward and somewhat irritating with the object in the way, but I think the main point of this task was to work on our idea development and character designs, which I feel I had under control, while doing this task since the idea was there, I simply didn't do a good job of drawing out the idea.

After that, we had to do create something else using the same object and the first thing that popped in to my head was to draw a house and have the clip function as the roof for the house. When drawing the house, I started off extremely basic and flat but after I laid that down, I tidied up certain little areas of the house to add interest and make it a little less flat although it still turned out extremely flat in the end. This last lacklustre piece was the most rushed though, because we didn't have much time once we started drawing out the second idea using the object, so I didn't really expect much better when drawing this piece out.

Overall, I feel like this lesson served as nice confidence booster in my abilities, despite the last two pieces of work, as well as a useful aid to my understanding on character design since we were able to make some interesting designs out of everyday objects, such as a cheese grater.

Art: 11/03/20

In this art lesson, we were still mainly using objects as part of our characters, but we were also set to use two or more different pieces of coloured paper to create a simple environment that our character was going to be placed in.

When I picked my objects,I picked objects that would have a less obvious use for the character. However, because of this I was stumped for a good amount of time on how I could make the objects part of a character, although I knew what I wanted the environment to be almost instantly so I cut out the paper in the way necessary for my environment first and then started thinking of what to do for the character. The method I took for creating my character was to think of what the character was going to be doing in this particular scene, and I decided that my character was going to be walking down a path towards the horizon. From there I was able to think of how to incorporate the objects in to my character and I was still stuck for a while but once I stopped thinking that both objects had to be a specific part of the character, I was able to decide that one object would be something that is directly linked to the character and the other could be a prop.

Overall, this lesson forced me to learn and create a process to creating characters out of anything because I practically had to think of a very basic and rough backstory for my character and why the specific objects are on him, which gave life to the character and scene, since the character's goal had to make sense in the particular environment so that each part of the scene was cohesive and told a story itself. So although I initially found this lesson challenging it helped me understand how to bring life to the characters I make and tell a story through the things I draw.

The next task was the same as the first task but we had to use different objects and paper. This time I decided to go with easier options for objects and went with objects that I could use as armour or a weapon for my character, but this time I used the paper as an effect rather than an environment for my character. The first idea that popped in to my head for the objects and paper was my character dashing forward at a high speed with the paper being an effect to show the speed of the character and this character was going to be wearing head gear and wielding a blade.

The idea came to me much easier than the first idea but that's most probably because I was able to come up with a method in more challenging circumstances so when using things that have more obvious looks the task becomes extremely simple. However I feel that my first attempt at the task was the better one out of the two but that's possible due to it requiring more effort from me. This task turned out to be very useful for me since it allowed me to gain skills that I will be able to use in my future work whether it be art, animation or games.