Lets play graphic designer....

Tonight I am designing a cover for my paper pattern, all the ones that I have are pretty battered so I wanted to make my own, the design is taken from some snippets of pattern photos I took in the Betty Smithers and mashed together.
I start doing my animation tests tomorrow, very exciting!

BAF Day One

Finally getting round to writing up my BAF (Bradford Animation Festival) experience!
I only got to go for 2 days, thanks to stupid cancelled trains, but I still saw loads of great things.

My first day was Thursday where I went straight into a Student Film's screening, highlights being Buy Buy Baby, a 1920s style animation set in the New York stock exchange, felt very much like a Pixar short, it was really well done. My next favourite was Bite of the Tail (trailer below) it was a bit odd plot wise but the animation style was great, I especially liked the detail with the posters on the wall of the Doctors surgery. 

     

                                             
The most stand out film for me though was DRWAL, a story of a lumberjack and his son who live in a cabin in the woods, when the father cuts down a creepy looking tree he becomes possessed. It was a really haunting, tragic tale that was beautifully executed. I liked the strong use of contrast and lighting throughout, especially with the whites of the eyes.

Next up was the Short shorts screening, which I didn't like as much but there were a few stand out films with Pythagasaurus, an Aardman short which was hilarious,  Fat Cat which was done in a really nice technique of wax on glass and Nightingales in December which was a surreal story that had incredibly detailed artwork.

                                             

Then I was straight into a talk by Vanessa Boyce from Double Negative, where she talked about the VFX used in the remake of Total Recall, i'm not really a 3D kinda person but I still found this talk really interesting  Through a series of time lapse videos we were shown the whole process of how they made the entire city in the film from scratch (the director didn't want to use a pre existing cityscape) and also how the car scenes that were shot on a real location were merged together with the CG environment  and the difficulties with making it look realistic. I think when I watch Total Recall I will be looking at it in a different light now! 

       

Next up was Music videos and Commercials, which was nice as it was not very complicated and by this point in the day my head was starting to feel like exploding from an animation overload! I enjoyed Easy Way Out by Goyte, with the live action combined with some stop motion animation. It reminded me of Coldplay's Strawberry Swing video.

       

I have great respect for the next video by The Spinto Band called Living Things, all done on paper with just a marker pen, this was so simple and it was cool to just see really stripped down animation with no need for colour or any digital rendering.

                                            

The adverts they showed I didn't really like, apart from this one done for Bing, I hadn't seen it before and thought the plot was amazing, really funny.

                                            

Next was my favourite talk of the whole festival with Rob Morgan, I had never seen any of his work before but was intrigued when looking through the BAF catalogue to see his film called The Cat with Hands, (see it pays to be a crazy cat lady sometimes!) The films were mega creepy but I loved them, they had set the talk up so Rob Morgan would talk about his process behind each film straight after we had watched it, which was a great way to see the thinking and techniques behind each film whilst it was fresh in your brain.

My favourite film was by far The Cat with Hands, and I liked seeing the animation pilot as well as the finished film, as it was good to see how the plot developed from the original idea. I also thought the addition of live action really helped with the creepiness of the tale. I have given my friends nightmares from making them watch this film!

                                             

                                             

I also liked the thinking behind Bobby Yeah! originally intending for it to be a short 2 minute YouTube film for fun, it developed into a 23 minute epic, there was no storyboarding or planning, just total freedom and randomness. Rob Morgan just had total freedom with his subconscious, which for that reason alone I thought it was brilliant.

You should never push the red button!

Project progress

Main project is coming along nicely I think! Although I need to get animating as I only have 3 weeks left. Eeeek! Where has this term gone!
Here are some sketches I've done and my storyboard:
                         
                                                                            
                                   

Museum of Science and Industry

I had a sudden urge to draw on friday so I went and sat in the steam engine room at the Mosi in Manchester for a bit. It smelt amazing in there (is that a bit weird?)

Project Brief

                                                  

Yesterday as part of our Animation fundamentals module, we were introduced to the Betty Smithers design collection at the uni. Our brief being to select an object/objects to make a film around it, We didn't have long to look, but for me it was heaven, I absolutely love hunting around charity shops for weird and wonderful vintage bric a brac so I could of stayed all day. There were objects ranging from electrical items, costumes, photographs, advertising packaging to magazines.
The first thing that caught my eye was the old radios, and the boxes containing the old advertising packaging, I love the old 1950's style of packaging and I'm always buying old vintage tins and snuff boxes when I see them.          

                                      

My most favourite discovery was the box of fur stoles, I love vintage fur and taxidermy, especially stoles as they are so creepy but beautiful at the same time, I think it would be great to animate. 

After the Betty Smither's collection, a few of us decided to also check out the Potteries museum in Hanley to look at more objects, whilst I preferred the Betty Smithers and will be basing my film on objects found there, it was good to look round this museum, as they put the items into context with setting up scenes of each era of the 20th century. They also had a pretty good taxidermy section too!

We were asked to come up with 3 rough ideas of a story, I quite liked the idea of making an advert for the collection, I've really gotten into paper cutting recently so have been thinking of having objects 'ripping' themselves out of paper, this also lead onto thinking of sewing patterns. They had a section of them at the Betty Smithers but I didn't get chance to look, I've booked in to go again later so I can have a proper look at them, but I liked the idea of laying out a paper pattern, having the pieces rip themselves out and come together to form the item of clothing themselves.

I also liked the idea of something to do with taxidermy, maybe the animals coming back to life,however as this is only a 4 week project maybe that's something to put in the pipeline for later on.

Klein and Moriyama

Saturday I went to the Tate modern to see the William Klein and Daido Moriyama exhibition, which was a film, photography and design retrospective of two artists which ran side by side together. 
Klein based a lot of his work in New York, and was well known for his influential photography, in particular fashion photography that he produced for Vogue.
He also documented a lot of street  photography in New York and then Tokyo, as well as video and graphic design.
I most enjoyed seeing the video, in particular 'Broadway by Light' which picked up only the neon lights in New York accompanied by a Jazz soundtrack. Commenting on the consumerism and slightly seedy nature of New York streetlife.

Klein's series of contact sheets also stuck out, which were huge and showed 3 images, which he then painted enamel paint over the top to create a mixed media piece. These really caught my eye with the colours used and seeing the selection process in picking the best image.

Similar to Klein, Moriyama was an influential photographer of the Provoke movement in Tokyo in the 1960s. worked primarily in Japan, documenting street life in Tokyo, in particular the darker side of it.
Platform 1977, a series of photographs taken from the other side of a train platform observing the people on the other side, unaware they were being photographed. I found this interesting because since the drawing sessions outdoors I have started to be more aware of people in public places (especially train stations as I seem to be at them so often) I liked how the people kept changing but the setting stayed the same.

Polaroid/Polaroid 1997 was a huge 360 degree photo montage built up only of polaroid photographs of a room, I really liked the scale of this piece and the addition of out of place objects that appeared at random throughout the image.

The Lake District

A few weekends ago I went to the Lake District, I think its fast becoming my favourite place to visit. We were lucky enough on Saturday to have really sunny crisp autumn weather so it was ideal to do some sketches (and a bit of stop motion animation too)

Tarn Howes 

The gate to the Wordsworth garden, Grasmere.

                                           

                                                  A little animation at Tarn Howes.

Sunday the weather was yuck, so we took the dogs for a walk and visited Hawkshead to the Beatrix Potter gallery.They had an exhibition celebrating 100 years of Peter Rabbit which displayed all the original ink drawings that Beatrix Potter did for the book.

As a little girl I was obsessed with Beatrix Potter stories to the extent where I would dress my cats up in dolls clothes and try to teach them to walk on their hind legs (lets be honest I still do that now!) and I have always loved  the ink drawing illustrations so it was great to see them for real.

 

Using ink and watercolor is something I've really been practicing recently so after the visit to the museum I had a go at drawing my boyfriend's bull terriers, Chester and Molly (I didn't forget to draw Chester's eye, he lost it from a bad case of glaucoma.)

Animation Principles

My blog posts have taken a back seat recently, you can tell I've had deadlines!
But my first film is done showing all the Animation Principle exercises we have been doing since week one.
Pretty pleased that I got everything on the list finished and handed it all in before the deadline was up (I never used to be so organised!)

Sneak walk cycle

Further development of walk cycles, made a much more handsome fox this time: