Life drawing

After a long summer I was finally back in the life drawing studio, felt very rusty to begin with! I stuck with ink to begin with using a feather to draw which was difficult to control but gave some nice results. 

Explosyarn

One week project to create an animation from a portmanteau (two words combined to make a new word)

Summer Project

The summer project given was to design 10 contrasting characters, to coincide with our first semesters work. 

I wanted my characters to all of come from the same theme, and rather then have specific pairs just design 10 that automatically contrast.

I began with a theme of funfairs before settling on Freak Shows, I looked at old carnivals acts to help come up with characters which I feel are much stronger and will work better as contrasting pairs.

Summer Break

My long summer break was packed out with renovating my family home, volunteering at my favourite charity shop Marys Living and Giving and being lucky enough to go on lots of lovely holidays to Greece, the Lake District, the New Forest and York. Topped off by the wedding of my close friends.

I also took an opportunity with the Staffs Film Society to take part in yet another 48 hour film challenge. This was a great chance to meet new people and also gain experience in live action film-making. We were given a prop, character, line of dialogue and genre to use and we shot it using my mums house in Camden. Whilst we managed to enter our film in with 2 minutes to spare, there is yet to be an online version. So in the meantime here are some photos from the weekend:

The Return of the Magnetic Eyeballs from HELL!

The final challenge of the semester was a 48 hour film challenge, for the Bites creative society. Using the logo designed by my talented other half Arran Murphy , we had 48 hours to come up with an animation that incorporated the logo, with a given genre of B-Movie. 

Teaming up with my friend Robin Smith, we used a movie name generator to come up with the title 'The Return of the Magnetic Eyeballs from Hell'
We then began a sleepless night building sets and puppets before going straight into animating the next day.  Enlisting the help of Laura Emmerman with animation and Jamie Bowen for VFX.  

The finished film can be found on Vimeo. Really enjoyed this challenge, having only 48 hours pushes you into making quick decisions with no time to be indecisive which in a way can create better work, if a little unrefined.

The Great Sewing Bee

Alongside my modules I also was enlisted by two third year students to help on their final major projects. First I was asked by Daniel James to help on his film 'The Piper'. 
Putting my sewing skills to good use, I made 7 outfits for the child puppets. Including a teeny tiny little knitted jumper! Check out Daniel's work on his blog here

I then was asked by Joel Townsend to work on his music video project by making the band's outfit. Given a photograph as reference I created lots of leather outifts. The finished video can be found here and more of Joel's work on his blog

Stop Motion Pipeline

My second project in semester two was a Stop Motion specific project to design and make a foam rubber puppet as well as completing a series of exercises using a ball and socket armature which can be found on Vimeo. We had a Steampunk theme given and I created a 1950s style lady complete with a mechanical arm.

     

Find more images on Flickr

My production diary below outlines my progress from start to finish. I really enjoyed this module, and was chuffed with the outcome./

Sculpture for Animation

My first module for semester two was Sculpture for Animation, a project to gain skills using Maya and Mudbox to create and rig a character.The theme given was first person shooter games, not something I had any knowledge of, my era of gaming stopped after the N64 (Banjo kazooie anyone?)

I cant say that I was that keen on this project, whilst I understand the importance of Maya, the truth is I just dont like it, i'm a traditional girl.  In the end I designed a soldier character from the Vietnam war.  First made out of plasticine (the fun bit) then re-creating it in Maya. Whilst I found Mudbox easier to use I thought it was time better spent forcing myself into using and learning Maya, even though my final result wasn't as polished as it could of been.

This was a digital paint of my plasticine sculpt, more images are available on Flickr

Writers Block

I wont make excuses, poor blogging effort on my part for the past year (has it really been that long!!!?!)

I have just started my second year now and will be making a conscious effort to keep this updated, I was doing so well at it!

Anyway I will be starting with a few posts showing what I have been up too.

My first film was well recieved, I even won an award from 25fps@staffs for my use of objects in animation, the film is on Vimeo  and my production diary outlining my process is below:nbsp;