Monsters and the like.

So there seems to be some jittering from the Thespian fraternity; that they are all going to be replaced by noughts and ones!
But i think that they can relax and breathe a sigh of relief because i feel these advances in on-screen technology can enhance the cinemographic experience and inject some life into the industry. With narrative based productions seemingly going over the same old 'stability-occurrence-stability' format; the injection of some 'wow factor' can not only add strings to the script-writers bow; but enable them to re-invent the wheel- that is, take the simplest narrative form and present it as though it were the a new concept.
By this i mean that the target audience in western animation, is,mainly children. So in making the tale of sinbad the sailor for instance in a two dimensional traditional cell-type animation in the 1950's now makes it possible to bring real life actors into the production with a high degree of CGI; therefore the actors are benefiting from the work that the speculative value of the film generates. This was proved to be true in 'Sinbad and the eye of the tiger' Ray Harryhausen (1977) which exhibited a high degree of stop motion animation and made the film a success; even though its two predecessors had seemingly exhausted the subject in hand. (Releasing princesses from evil genies or magicians).
Now surely the gate is open for another Sinbad film to be made just on the basis of CGI?
This also brings in the question of shelf-life of these productions. Unless a film is either totally believable or not believable at all i feel has something to do with the shelf-life. As we discussed in our lecture there is a place that the consciousness does not want to be in believability; when a production is uncannily life-like but there is just something about it that un-nerves you. This is true in robotics as well as animation and is called the un-canny valley. Whether there is a correlation between the believability of a film and its shelf-life is open to much debate; but personally i think that there definitely is. To give you a contentious example of this i cite the second volley of star wars movies; especially Clone wars. This for me is like Industrial Light and Magic have just found a new toy water pistol and proceeded to get everyone soaked when they could have just had an occasional squirt here and there and the fascination would have lasted a lot longer. The scenes when the same space ship is flying past again and again in the background remind me of the background scenery on a Hanna-Barbara chase sequence!
Surly this will limit the longevity of this series of films. I know this is not strictly speaking the un-canny valley theory i was on about earlier; but parallels can be drawn.
All in all i believe that CGI will carry on to supply traditional actors with work through speculative developments in film; more outlandish plots and the continual need for a human element in all productions; be it voice or live acting.
These are times of fast change in visual technology; and i believe that as happened with electronic music production, a plateau will be reached where any development is so minute that the viewer will not register it and any speculative value will be lost and narrative based production will prevail; be it with Thespians or not.

I think the problem is..

I was not very happy with the way my 3d walk went. I failed to relay my own gait. The main problem is the lenght of the stride. And the way that i carry a bit of weight. This just did not come off. The balance of the figure was too far back on the model. I am going to post the walk playbast and then you will see what i mean.

On the other hand i was quite happy with the 2d version. For me to get any likeness was quite a result. Ha. I got the arms a bit snappier and the stride right. I also got more of a feeling of weight, and the balance right. You could almost tell it was me; which was cool! With the confidence i am gaining from my life (and general) drawing and the use of a more affirmative line, plus addressing the volume issues, i am sure i can do better next time. The video below is the final attempt at the walk.

And this one is an earlier attempt.

The day we talked about Nemo...

It has been a long time coming; but eventually the day of our visual assignment arrived. I teamed up with Adam; a guy from Wolverhampton, (gods own city, and, probably have the best football team in Europe right now). We decided to speak about Finding nemo. We thought that this would be a great choice as it is full of stereotypes and, as we found out had a lot more to offer in the narrative.
Basically we found that the film very skillfully deals with social issues such as alcholism, schizophrenia, short-term memory loss and also berieavment.

The first scene was a very hard hitting; because it deals with the loss of a whole family and the anguish that this may cause. This i feel may be the Director (Andrew Stanton) admitting that we do not live in a perfect world and that he is at the helm of a global company who's films are viewed in war torn countries and by people who are a lot less fortunate.To portray the perpetual American dream is what a lot of Pixar and Disney's work has done in the past; but in the Nemo film the only characters that seems half normal are the stereotypical pelicans (portrayed as old male Aussies) and the dentist; and any normality and western values such as a stable family life are snached away in the first scene.

This film is set half in the ocean with Nemos dad and his journey to find his son and half in an aquarium in a dentists surgery. Here we are introduced to various characters, all of whom have different afflictions. One thing which we failed to do when we delivered our talk was to appologise to the group for ruining the film. As a couple of our group said they did not see the fish and the disability aspect of the film. I think this is a good thing because it shows that Pixar did not let this issue take over the narrative.

This is my 2D walk. Its the third attempt i had at it this week as i had trouble with volume and putting too many frames in. In this walk i have probably not added enough frames but i feel the overall thing works ok. When i have to do it again i will stylize the walk more, maybe exaggerate the walk to an extent that the fundamentals are blatantly obvious. This would be a lot easier with a character who has longer legs!

What i want to try and do next is establish a line of action which suits the mood of the character and do a walk cycle around that. I have found using flash very helpful for making walk cycles and i have made several pairs of marching legs.

All in all i have found the walking cycles a lot of fun. This was a surprise as i thought i would have a lot of trouble with this. To remedy the problem i have been having with volume i have been keeping the first frame out so i can lay it across other frames and keep the continuity going.

Life drawing

As usual i have found the life drawing classes very useful. I find Cathy's method of teaching very helpful and she is always being positive about any improvement in our work. At the same time she will correct any issues we may have with scale, etc. The walks that we have been trying to capture in life drawing have been very useful; the position of the feet especially. Also the relationship between the hips and the shoulders and the way the skin acts on the sides of the model.

Well till next time; some life drawing to follow and some news on our talk about the film Finding Nemo'. Lata.

Hi everyone, just a short posting to put up a couple of walks that we have done this week. I will write more on the rest of this week a bit later.

This image in pencil for me has a certain sense of movment about it. It is not particualy detailed but has the lines of probable movement left in place on the drawing. There is a circular line going around the head which suggests a swivelling motion is possible and also a centre line which emisizes where the weight is on the model. There is minimal use of shading; which at this time; i used very sparingly.

This image; drawn from a photo of a statue in Poznan, Poland is done with oil pastels. In it i have committed a lot earlier. There are no pencil lines to gauge it first off and some of the model seems to be missing. The picture does tell you about his stance and the way he is brandishing his spear; he is looking straight at the camera; just about to bring the spear back with his right hand and throw it straight at you. Icoudl have tried to put some shadows in this drawing but in the time i allowed myself; i did not have time.

In this sketch i have tried to capture the main character in the monochrome animated movie 'Renaissance' by Christian Volckmann, 2007. The style gave me an idea about the ammount of information needed to be present on the screen to give meaning. I am going to try and use some images that have been 'threshholded' as key frames in one of my 2d animation projects and to try and work out the tweens. That is what i am going to do now, so until then, bye!

I thought i would upload some of my drawings that i have done in the last two months. Also support each one with a small evaluation of the materials i used and analyse what i learnt from the particular session. I must say; firstly, that some of these are done at home and some in the life drawing class, as the subject matter may devulge..

This drawing was done with some charcol which i found very useful for sketching the main lines of balance and power through the subject. It is a material i would go back to using again; but next time i will make sure i have some fixative!

The main thing that i learnt from this session was the importance of perspective and scale. The size of the head, hands and feet are so important in a drawing like the where no emphasis is being put on any particular part. As you can see i missed the legs out completely; this is bad planning on my part, and so the learning curve goes on.