This is my second version of my Pull exercise. I feel that I am a lot more effective in stop motion than any other medium, I understand timing and physics a lot better with physical assets for me to interact with. I really enjoyed the process of making the puppet and filming the pull, and the feedback I received for this exercise was useful and something I shall apply to future projects.
This is my lip sync of my partner, Yujie, for the exercise where we animate someone who’s native language is different to our own. I was hesitant to complete this exercise as I was nervous to animate words I couldn’t understand, especially given I would hear sounds I am relatively unfamiliar with. I was nervous to animate the character with the potential of placing emphasis in the wrong areas, but my partner reassured me that she liked my outcome. This exercise, while challenging, has been both incredibly fun and extremely beneficial as it forced me to break the lip-sync down to the basic phonetic sounds I heard, rather than how I think the mouth should be shaped based on the words.
I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of this exercise, from planning what we’ll say to recording sound and acting, to ultimately animating each other and sharing our films, this has been super fun and I’m very excited to see the whole class’s work compiled together! This has both strengthened my connection to my course mates as well as prepared me for the collaborative nature of animation within the industry.
I also took the feedback I received for my last lipsync exercise – which was to both pre-make the mouths so I could swap them out as I needed them, and to make them solid and whole, rather than an outline. I feel that being receptive to this feedback has improved my work as the solid mouth feels like it more effectively sells the illusion of my puppet talking, and it made the process of changing the mouth a lot simpler and less fiddly.
I really enjoyed the character design workshops we had back in the first term. The lecturer was informative and friendly and I received valuable feedback on techniques to improve my character designs. It was good to do these exercises over a series of weeks and revisit the sessions with new work to show each time as it allowed for me to look at my own work more objectively, with a fresh pair of eyes. I also thoroughly enjoyed being able to see others work and it was both motivating and creatively inspiring. I think if I were to do this exercise again, I would add guide lines to my turnaround in order to keep my drawings and proportions more consistent with one another.
In spite of my last blog entry, I have managed to find the time to complete the aforementioned second clip that Shilpi asked me to deliver. I think it definitely has room for improvement especially in terms of more exaggeration, however I believe that my awareness of what I could do to improve is something that is still contributing to the over all development of me as an animator. I felt bad about potentially not being able to deliver on what Shilpi requested, and so gave it a go despite being swamped both with deadline stress and working a job outside of university hours.
While I feel that this is not my strongest work, I believe that my ability to complete what was asked of me is a testament to the dedication I had both to my second year, and to the brief I have been set as a whole.
This brief detailed working alongside a second year student, assisting them in the production of their own projects.
The partner that I was given was Shilpi, who reached out to me through email. We had a meeting where she explained her work and ideas and what she would like me to try and help with. Her idea is to subvert the expectations and pressures that women often face and have to try and live up to.
I enjoyed working with Shilpi in that she was quite relaxed in what roles she wanted me to fulfil, which meant I had more free reign in choosing how to complete the brief. Shilpi sent me two different clips from her animatic along with her character design and she said that I was free to choose between them both, and to keep it rough.
The work I ended up doing was creating in-betweens for one of her animated clips, of a woman riding a skateboard and then falling off. I converted the .mp4 file she sent me into an image sequence and added the in-betweens in Photoshop as I did not have access to TV Paint at home. I then sent this over to Shilpi, who approved but also asked me to try the other shot she had sent over as well. Unfortunately I have not had the time to complete this due to the upcoming submission, which I have communicated with her.
I believe my performance within this project was prompt and professional, I liaised politely and effectively and had a relatively quick turn around in terms of receiving her work and returning it. Shilpi sent over her work for me to complete late at night on Sunday 26th Feb, which I then returned to her with her proposed in-betweens on Tues 28th Feb. I think something that we could have improved on was communication, as due to first and second year timetables mis-aligning, it was difficult to arrange time to meet up outside of studio time. If I were to do this exercise again I would strive to define the roles I would be undertaking from the start, in order to better avoid confusion in expectations.
The role I fulfilled is relevant to the industry as in-betweening, animating and clean-up are all important roles that need to be filled in order to aid the production of animation. It has been a great opportunity to experience that environment within a simulated capacity, as it has helped both to improve my technical skills and understanding, and also widen my network as an upcoming animator. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience as I was able to talk to Shilpi about her perspective as a second year student, and glean advice from her in terms of what is to come for me. She has been friendly, helpful and understanding throughout.
I believe it was successful as I was able to adapt to her style, which I really enjoyed both as an exercise of my artistic ability as well as being an exposure to the diverse range of styles that animation can take. A challenge I feel we hit was Shilpi initially mentioned that I may be able to colour some backgrounds for her, which I was excited to do, however it ended up that her project is not yet developed enough, so I had to take on another role instead. As she has been using an IPAD to develop her film, I was a little unsure of how that would translate if she sent over her project files, as I do not own one, however I think I found an appropriate solution, as aforementioned re: conversion of .mp4, which was something I had not done before, and so have come away from this brief gaining a new skill. I utilised the animation principle of anticipation, which we covered in the first term, by adding it to the frames I in-betweened, adding more tension to the dynamic action the character carries out.