Researching the 50's

As of late I've been spending a lot of my time researching the 50's and bits of the early 60's for my animated piece next year. It's a really interesting way time period and i've found that I like it more and more the further into the research I get. The main feeling that I wanted to get across was the innocent times of the fifties before people became much more loose and out there in the sixties.
I've found some great sources of information on the time and I'm using it to get a solid foundation in my knowledge of the decade.

Firstly I decided that I'd watch almost exclusively movies/tv shows set in the 50's to get a myself accustomed to how they speak, dress, have their hair, interact with each other, their mannerisms etc. I started by watching some of the more colourful films set in this time such as West Side Story and Grease. West side story was great as it showed a different side to the perfect suburbia often shown in American media and Grease showed high school/teenage life well which fits into the characters I'm thinking of including in my animated short. The music is very distinct at this time with doo-wop and rock and roll being prevalent and the films of this time also have a very distinct style with some great acting talent.



I then decided to look at some more modern interpretations on the time as generally they have a lot of research done already, so I chose the TV series Mad Men. I've been meaning to watch this for a while, and only three episodes in I've already got a nice idea of how people spoke and not high fashion but general fashion is presented really well in this series.



As well as getting my hands on some more movies (Pleasantville, American Graffiti) I have been looking for some classic fifties/sixties television. Some that I was already aware of and have even watched are Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents to name a few. These all had distinct styles so I am going to watch some of these noting down expressions and movement.

I also got a few (well 8) books out of the library, one on facial animation, one on after effects and the rest on writing and acting for animation and some books on 1950's fashion and architecture. They're all helping me figure out what to do with my characters and story and so I had to do some concept art of one of the locations. The one I chose was the gypsy's shop and this is basically what I have so far. I'm pretty damn proud of it too :)

Golden Oldies

Just about to go to bed but I thought I'd do a quick blog post before I sign off. I've been working on my project for next year a bit more today, although I did take a couple of hours off to go to town to buy Tangled on bluray, such a good purchase. Anyway, I don't want to say much about my project but I've decided it'd be a more fun and make the animation a lot more unique if I set it in a different time period. I'm torn between the 50's and 60's so I'e decided to go with the middle of the two. I'm currently researching pop culture, fashion, hairstyles and television/music/films of the time to get a good grasp on what it was like. I think my idea is good enough that, if I put a lot of effort into the story and take my time practicing character modelling and rigging then it can definitely be my best piece yet.

I've started watching almost exclusively 1950's/60's films, with greats like Monroe, Hepburn, Brando, James Stewart, Tony Curtis etc. to get a real feel for the time and it's so interesting I think I'll really enjoy designing the place and people. Today I started by doing some concept art for the sorts of clothes the people might wear, not one character in specific, but anyone. The first I've done is a summer sort of dress quite typical of a young woman in the fifties. I think with digital art techniques I'm learning from ImagineFX I shouldn't have a problem with the concept art side of it.



I have started thinking and doing preproduction work so early because I don't want to rush it. I think this early stuff is really important and I didn't really atke enough time to think things over in the last project, so I won't be making the same mistake this time. Well, I think I'll just leave you with this drawing I did earlier and promise that more will come soon.

Summer Story Development and Disney Story Book

I've decided that this summer (well what I have left of it before I start full time work to save up for next year) I'm going really start making a lot of progress down the road to being the animator I want to be. I want to start my Masters year with all the knowledge I need to make a great animated short for my main project next year so I’ve started to work through the huge amount of 3D world/artist/essentials and ImagineFX magazines I've been collecting as I could afford them over the last year. I've not had much time to look over them properly throughout the year so I figured now would be my best chance to improve in all the different areas of both CGI and traditional drawing/animation as I can. This prompted me to go to the university library while I was back in Sheffield yesterday to have a look through their collection of books on animation etc. and take out some so I can start thinking about my project.



I realised this morning as I thought about my project and other peoples work and what gave it that label of "student film" that everyone seems to dislike so much. I believe that it all has to do with the initial idea. Many of the people whose work I see had such a great idea to start off with but they missed key elements of story writing, thus letting themselves down hugely. I will not hesitate to say that I did this in the project I recently handed in too. I think the thing that comes over you is, "Oh! That's a great idea! I have to start working on it right away" That's all well and good and I can see why many people including myself do this. But really it's a terrible idea. There are key story elements that I think any writer knows; Theme, Arcs and a goal for the character to aim for throughout to name a few. These things don't come to mind instantly and so I think a lot of student films really lack the strength that a professional scriptwriter generally provides. This all comes down to the fact that in a student film, the student has to do everything. This is very rarely the case at any other point of a person's life but in university it's hard and taxing for a film/animation student.

After realising this I began to look through one of the books I had taken out of the university library, "Ideas for the Animated Short". After reading only around ten pages of it, all of the points made were such simple things I had never heard of and here I was, about to jump into a new project, doing concept art already when my story idea, although good had so many problems. This is why I've decided that I'm not going ahead with any of the pre-production work until I have a solid idea with no problems. This book has already shown me how important a strong idea/story is for an animated short to be successful and hopefully, after reading it and reinforcing my idea, i'll be able to start drawing characters and building a world for my animation to be set in.



So after a bit of an excited rant about how I'm going to improve my skills over the next couple of months I have to move on to the much more exciting news!

It all begins with my difficult trip back from Sheffield after handing in my final piece of work to Uni. I arrived back in the town around 7 miles from the village I live in and my dad couldn't pick me up so there would be a long wait for the crappy bus system in place around here. I had some time to kill, so I decided to visit the marketplace, that, ever since I could remember had a second hand market full of collectibles and antiques etc. every Friday. It was normally incredibly boring, with medals and coins, vases and old furniture and other stuff fairly uninteresting to me. I decided I'd walk around anyway, thinking to myself, "Hey, there could be some old cool movie poster or even something animation-related" (That was extremely unlikely). I began to walk around only to see the boring usual stuff but as I was leaving the last stall, the very last thing I saw caught my eye and this is where any animators/Disney fans (Not all Disney fans are animators but all animators are generally Disney fans :)) will share my happy surprise. There sat a collection of early 1960's Disney Storybooks, all hardback in the original sleeve. I told the guy I was an animation student and he offered to sell me them for £8. I couldn't say no so I got them and here they are :D







I know I'm incredibly geeky but they had all the original illustrations from the films with drawings I'd never seen of stories they hadn't made into films yet.
Anyway, I think that's it for today, I'll probably upload something tomorrow about my project, it seems to be coming along at a good speed. Bye for now.

Summer 2011 Showreel

Thought I'd just post my showreel here to show anyone who hasn't seen it on my YouTube/Twitter. Any comments would be great.

Three down, one to go

It's been a ridiculously long time since my last post so I thought I'd make this a good one.

Firstly, third year is pretty much finished!

I've been busy completing my animated final piece for this year which I am happy to say is done and handed in now. I'll cut straight to it, here's my final animated piece. I'm not completely happy with it but I never am. The final render had a couple of glitches but overall I think I've learnt so much from this project and I'm really pleased with the overall visual style of it. Anyway, here it is:

Well I can't really say much that what do you guys think? I'm fairly pleased with the outcome although I think my main problem throughout was how limiting my rigs were. This problem can pretty much only be fixed by going back to the original models and although we were allowed to carry on with this project next year, I've decided to start something totally different. I think I've got the most out of this animation as I can at the moment and really can't wait to start on another project.

Speaking of that, I've been brainstorming ideas for animations I could do over the next couple of months while I have time to develop my skills. One idea that I've had, which I'm really pleased involves a gypsy, an old man and a love potion gone wrong. It was inspired by a song that I'll hopefully be using as the soundtrack and I'm excited to start working on it straight away.

I started working on some concepts for the gypsy character and as soon as I have a few different designs I'll upload them here. Other than that I've been working on my showreel for this year. The only problem with this is that I've not actually got a lot of finished pieces of animation to put into it. So I decided to make a short animation with an alien rig I downloaded to finish my showreel off.

So I'll leave you with that. I'm off now to read and think about my next project, hope you enjoy it. Tomorrow I'll try to upload my showreel.

Also just realised that I uploaded the wrong resolution render of the animation so I'll uplo