These are my animated parts for the first year 'Animation Arts' project. First, individual tests were done to establish timing and the layout of the movement, and then the cutouts were made according to the major changes in movement that occur in the test. This was then reshot under the rostrum, and edited in After Effects.

Shot of hallway, and main character appears at the top of the stairs.


Shot from below of the girls feet, showing her hesitation in going down the stairs.


Shot from the side, showing the girl in profile stepping down the stairs.


Shot of girl appearing at the foot of the staircase, and turning to walk towards the door, and cut before she opens it.


Closeup of girls face, and light turns on. Shot cuts to wide shot of living room, with mom at the door. Shot zooms out t reveal arch and kitchen.

This is the second part of my non-narrative abstract project entitled Synthesis. The original idea was for the animation to be an observation/interpretation of people and place. Thus, I decided to base my animation on a recent trip to Cornwall. But the catch with thi sproject was that it had to be visually non-figurative. This was quite a difficult one for me as it was kind of a hit or miss, and I knew that people's response would be short of utter confusion. But I did manage to sneak in a bit of figurative animation in there ;).

For the final project of the term, I had to create a 10 second trailer or 'sting', which is a short piece of animation/video hybrid which ends with a text resolution. In this case, we had to end with 'UCA Maidstone', as the trailer was part of a documentary animation festival held in Maidstone, Kent, showcasing animations about the town, and observations of its people. I chose to do my trailer using the fast capture settings on a digital SLR, and create a stop-motionesque animation with that technique. Subject matters were mostly decided instinctively, and after taking a whole bunch of shots, I chose the ones I thought was immediately Maidstone, and stitched them into a cohesive whole. The text was a sticker stuck on a railway fence.

Animation Project.

I thought I'd show the animation project stuff, and write a little about how things are going. Basically, the title of the project is 'The Individual Voice', creating a 1 minute animation that references personal memories that meant something significant to you. The slight difference is that this is a group project, which required the group members to find a common theme or experience that they can feed from, to put in their animation. My group consisted of Justine, Naomi, Matt and me, and we chose 'childhood imagination/nightmares' as our common experience. Rather than creating separate experiences, i.e 4 different stories involving for different characters, we decided to mould a story around 1 main character, which allows for more content considering the film is only 1 minute. The character travels within her house to find imaginary characters in it, and reacts in a way that maybe only a child does. The challenge in this particular story is to convey mood, the sense of aniticipation before she encounters these characters, and to achieve a dark atmosphere that is subtly lighted. We chose to do the animation in cutouts to 'hopefully' preserve the look of the characters, so the same cutouts will be reused in the story. However, it is time consuming, since a lot of time goes into cutting and positioning the cutouts. I guess we all stepped out of our comfort zone, and we can take comfort in our spirit of experimentation. Here are some stuff that I have designed so far:

The main character, a little girl.

Some more turnarounds



And a stepping animation test done quickly in flash, to test the movement and cut.

More life drawings

These are the rest of the life drawings done on Friday's class, looking at different ways of conveying form. These are done in graphite. Tried to focus more on bigger shapes and lines than detail. I think the lines become better when I draw with my arm than my wrist, and better lines I think makes for a more cohesive structure. In here are also some more abstract drawings, trying to free up the drawings, and finding a new approach.

This one is done in pen. Lewis (the tutor) asked us to construct structural lines to establish proportion, scale, and angles before adding the structural details.

Drawing in Experimental Styles

Lewis gave us an exercise in adding different characteristics in our lines in order to convey a mood or emotion through the drawing. Another exercise was to show a particular action in silhouette. The trick was to show others, and ask whether they can tell what the characters are doing, what action their pose suggests. I found that its easier to tell a particular action in silhouette if its done in profile, as the parts that are key to the pose are visible in profile view.