Viewing.

I have been watching some films about experimental animation and have been quite taken by Norman Maclarens styles of animation through the years. From him living with chickens for a day; to the way he involved simpleification of the medium. The way he stripped down the nature of animation about as far as you could go with both 'Vertical Lines' and 'Horizontal Lines' put a few ideas in my head. (The only way he could have gone further was to take the colours out-this would have been done if it was ever televised at the time!)
This kind of animation could be done by layering gels (lighting gels) and moving them in time with the music to create a rythmical narritive. The next thing i have to do is build a rig and borrow a camera. Lucky enough i have a light which could be addapted (old 200w disco light).
I have also watched some old 'dope sheet' programs, and the Beyond dope sheet programs.
This also gave me a few ideas, the oil on glass thing looked good; then i thought maybe mixing those two styles together i could come up with something a bit more experimental. We will see.

Emotional Guy

Our task this week for our charecter animation was to animate a person whos mood changes from one moment to another. My character is going from sad to overjoyed. I feel the best aspect of my animation is the way the guys chest is heaving and his shoulders are rising and falling. He even makes me feel sad.
The way i would improve it ( i know, i still have time but at the moment i have caught a lurgy and it would not be fair to come into the studio), is to make the first pose more expressive and hyper-typical of the emotion i want to portray. I am happy with the format i am using, and the next peice or work will incorperate my newly acquired knowledge of the bone tool.

As for drawing...

I have been keeping my sketchbook up to date, and as soon as i get a camera that works (i know, slackness) we will have a load of them posted on the Blog,