#20 Last Study: Swelter and This Actually Happens A Lot

I decided to add one more animation to study. This week would be pretty boring if I only had one animation to cover, so I remembered that there was another one which I reaally liked. I don't know why I had forgotten about it, but seriously, it's one of my favorite short animations. Like with last year's Gobelin's animation, I noticed that I developed another pattern with these studies: I'm mostly just studying the student animations from CalArts. I guess I have a thing for student-made stuff.
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Here's some stuff:

-Swelter by Jacob Streilein

Summary: In an apocalyptic setting, a man hand his child have to survive through a simple mission of getting water.

I think this is one of the first films I'm studying that has a buttload of grain. In my opinion, it helps the film, because it makes it look even hotter than if it just had the colors and no grain.

So in terms of artwork, this film doesn't have a lot going for it. The shapes for the characters are really simple and geometric. Where this film excels, though, is in the colors and atmosphere. The only colors used here were basically orange and yellow (until the last scene where they're hiding from the sun, giving reason to add some blue shadows). The sun was completely white, indicating it was burning hot. What I need to focus on when I create my own rendition of this is gradients, blooms, and grain. Those three things I think added a lot to the feel of the film.

I just realized that there was also some green tint in some places. Weird, no? I wonder what the thought process was behind that. Maybe to make everything look a bit more dirty.

This film was also made by the guy that made 'There's a man in the Woods', but this was made before that. The improvement in Streilein's art show all throughout Man in the Woods.
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-This Actually Happens A Lot by Tom Law 

Summary: A woman talks to a guy that's having trouble dealing with the awkwardness of being social with other people.

Some time ago, I said that this was one of my favorite short animations. I have not changed my mind. It's very weird, and maybe forced in some places, but it feels very honest and real to me. I feel like I was given a chance to peek into Law's life. The weirder thing is that the art is very simple. There is almost no background, yet with music and background knowledge, we can tell specifically where we are at any time.

The background color is usually one tone at any time (except for the color of the lines used with it), so the only thing that I can focus on and learn from is the character design. The thing is, I don't think I'll ever achieve a look like this. The lines are extremely expressive, it almost hurts. I don't feel like I could recreate it, but I'll still try.

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My version of:

-Swelter

Only being able to make one drawing of the style is not enough to completely understand how to copy it, but it is enough to better appreciate the direction the artist took.

I don't think I included enough orange tones in this. It lost some of the warmth I wanted to show, but the white added the feeling of a powerful light source coming from the right side of the drawing.

-This Actually Happens A Lot

I noticed while making this drawing that each person's clothes in the short used a complimentary color palette. Another reason as to why the film looked so appealing. And don't ask me why I chose to draw this drawing the way it is. I came up with the idea while watching the short for the tenth time. Deal with it.  Another thing is that I should've made the line thickness have more variety in some places. I told you I wouldn't be able to nail the design accurately. It just feels wrong trying to copy the style you love piece for piece. It's intimidating. 

#19 Studying: Derailed and Hoof It

To spend more time drawing, I won't focus on making such long studies on the artwork. I'll make a short analysis, and that'll be it. I know this ruins the whole learning aspect of it, but I think that drawing more will make me learn more about the other artist's thought process while he made his drawings (instead of talking about their drawing).  I'll still include a whole bunch of pictures though.
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Derailed by Yon Hui:

This one's about three dogs on a jigger. The guy in charge of making sure nothing goes wrong sees a train that's about to run over the dogs and has trouble sending them on different routes.

The colors in this animation are pretty hard to describe. I'm going to go with blended tones. Unless it's the object in focus, all of the colors in the background are just very loose blends of one general color. What defines the shapes and forms are the lines. This style is pretty groovy, in my opinion.

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Hoof It by Seth Boyden:

This film is about a guy that guys on an adventure when he tries to find his goat.

I like the colors it uses, they're warm, unsaturated, and slightly monochromatic. Boyden probably made his backgrounds in real life with pen and watercolor, because there's too many little details that look hard to make digitally. Since I'm trying to do everything on Photoshop, I think I'll have to color everything very lightly and then apply a watercolor paper texture to the whole thing when I'm done.

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My versions of...

-Derailed
     

I noticed that a running theme in the art of this film was the amount of houses. I tried to focus on that and even added an ocean behind everything. I think I got too detailed with the colors. Derailed didn't have that much detail on the colors in the background. By itself though, it looks pretty good.


-Hoof It

My main problem with both of these drawings was that I made the colors too light. There seems to be more drama in the actual animations, but I'm thinking a reason for that would be because of the black borders on the top and bottom. With Hoof it specifically, I think I did a good job with the lines. I especially like my rocks, although maybe not the colors used for them. Everything should've been a tad more saturated and leaning towards the brown-ish side of the color spectrum. This week's art was fun to do, because their styles were pretty unique and different from each other.

#18 Take'n a look at the artwork in short films

No doubt about it, this is the longest post I've made. So getting right down to it...

 There's a Man in the Woods by Jacob Streilein

This animation is about a teacher is driven to insanity after a kid starts a rumor in his classroom.

      This is one of my favorite short films because of the way the story is told and how the art is used to complement the story. There's a lot of cool colors used throughout the beginning of the film, but as it progresses and the man is driven to insanity, we get to see more hot colors. Normally, people just use blues and greens to show a sad emotion. Technically, the man is sad all throughout the film, but Streilein decided to bring reds and oranges near the end to highlight his anger. I thought that was a really smart choice, something that I don't think anyone could come up with.

     These colors are also very saturated, probably because they're flashbacks, memories of the man when he was a teacher. The saturated colors go away when the man is shown in the present, but they come back when the warm colors come into his troubled life. I think that's because those scenes don't represent the real world anymore, but more of the fantasy stuff going on in his brain.

     The picture above represents the type of colors that were used when the man was in the present. It feels more monochromatic and boring. Also, lines are used pretty normally to outline objects. I think this type of art style was perfect for the story, because I feel like it'd look too weird if it looked any more realistic. Blurring around the edges was commonly used, along with manipulations in value to focus right on the man.

   I think it's important to note that the kid above this text is the only kid in the school with black colors. The other kids all have a blue/purple-ish design. I think Streilein did this to fade the kids into the cool-colored background, which would've essentially driven the kid with the yellow shirt and black hair into the foreground, putting all the attention on him.

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 Jamón by Iria Lopez

This is about a baby pig who feels different in a human family, so he sets off on a journey to find out who he is.

      What I liked most about this film is how most shots used are close ups. Only under really suspenseful times did the shot turn into a wide, establishing shot. That's what I'm focusing on, since that's where the art really stands out.

     The art is really confusing sometimes, because it doesn't follow a set of clear rules. Outlines around objects appear every once in a while and then they don't. Colors are used in geometric shapes here and there, and they're usually very washed out. They also usually don't fill in the lines. It's like a person lazily colored everything, but that's not a bad thing. It's what makes the film look like a children's Saturday morning cartoon, which it ends up quickly derailing itself from by a particularly bloody third act.

     I like how the perspective becomes really skewed at times. It only adds to the feel of a children's show. I like this film, because it doesn't have great artwork. The drawings remain simple, but the story, sound design, and music lures you into the world of the pig. And you end up buying into the story.

 

     The picture above is when the story takes a dramatic turn for the more realistic. Before, you thought the pig was only there as a metaphor to show how someone feels different from others in life. But then, the creator decided to say no, this pig is actually living in our world, and his family is trying to protect him from getting eaten. That's a funny idea to me.
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My versions for...

-There's a man in the woods:

     I wish I would've been able to add more texture to materials, because I feel like that's what it's missing. I also put too much blurry shading. It makes everything look sloppy. My bad...

     I like the colors though. That much, I feel like I got right. At least a little bit.  I wish I had focused more on the design of the characters and setting when I was studying the art, not on color and composition.

-Jamón:

   I laughed to myself when I finished this, because it actually looks a little like it's part of the film. That childlike aspect of it is easy to copy, I guess. It's easier to just put geometric shapes and color in a canvas very loosely than having to set a very complex tone with very specific artwork, like in There's a man in the woods. 

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As I said in the beginning of the post, this is the most I've written than any other week. There's not much art that was made on my part, but I really think I'm learning about people's art style. More than the time I was focusing on people's animation style.

#17 Season 4 of learning PS: New Year Yayyy

Well guys, it's been a while. It might have been apparent, but I didn't end up working on the 11 second animation. Due to having to keep on schedule, I won't be making any posts about it until I finish it on my own time. And don't expect that to be happening anytime soon. Sorry...

Over the coming weeks, I will go back to what I was doing during the second season of this blog (I think we're currently on the fourth season. I'm making this up as I go...) That is: finding new styles. It won't have to do with animation though. This time, it'll have to do with art directly. I wish I could've studied art styles first and then gone into animation, but I wasn't smart enough to think about that. The goal of this is to find an art style for me that looks good/original and is quick to animate.

Like last time, I'll put some short animated films here. Instead of three, I'll put five, because I'm not going to have to study animation. Mostly, I'll be looking at the backgrounds of the short films. I'm looking for simplicity, since I'm only one person here and I want to be able to tell stories in a fast and effective way.

Here they are:

Jamón by Iria Lopez

There's a Man in the Woods by Jacob Streilein

Derailed by Yon Hui

Hoof It by Seth Boyden

Swelter by Jacob Streilein



I also had time to make a gif this week...

12fps

I tried to make it all watercolor-looking by putting very washed out colors.

#16 Mid-Term Animation

For my mid-term, I had to choose an animation that had already been made to copy. The one I chose was this one. It's from The Emperor's New Groove.

My rendition of the animation.

I had two hours to do it, but I couldn't finish it on time. When I came back to school this year, I ended up adding a few more inbetweens in another hour. It came out better than I expected. I think it's easier to copy someone's animation than someone's painting. Animation basically only uses moving lines while paintings use color, texture, and really fine detail, so I guess that's why.

#15 Too many characters

Everything's moving sort of fast now. I realized that I only have a week to complete this, and I haven't even finished designing the characters. I might have to do it outside of school. Nevertheless, I'm changing the type of hair the girl has to number three (refer to the last post if you don't understand). That way, not a lot of focus can be put on animating the follow through in the hair.

The proportion/reference lines I will come back to while animating.

Added clothes and color (even though I'm not going to use color for the final animation). She's very tomboy-ish looking. Just for fun and testing some color theory, I put color. I made her clothes very unsaturated so her skin colors could pop out. It looks alright.

It's the end of the week. I think I'm going to finish this outside of school, but I won't make a post about it. That'll have to wait until next year. Now that I think about it, I probably won't post next week. If that's the case, have some fun holidays people.

#14 Character Design & Story

The sound clip came out on the 11 second club website! You can go to it here, or you can read the transcript here:

Voice One: "I don't need to settle down. Tell him! Saul, tell him."
Voice Two: "Carrie... you're not yourself."
Voice One: "Of course I am!"

So by the sound of this, Carrie is Voice One. There's a Saul and a "him" in the scene, and one of those two is behind Voice Two. So three characters will be in the setting, but I'll only have to really animate two of them.  Also, I didn't post anything last week, because I forgot there there was a break for Thanksgiving. I say that to excuse myself for not having the character designs made yet. I'll need to that now...
  

Side note:I was being stupid and saving on jpg. 

I'm now using png.

Without focusing on the story going on in the sound clip, I made the designs for the faces of the characters (this is going to be Carrie). I started out with number one, and I kept refining the construction/proportion lines to find a good model for some 30-year old looking people. Number 6 is when I stopped, deciding it was good enough.

Because I'm stupid, I spent an insane amount of time planning how her hair would look. Going from left to right and top to bottom, I chose number six. Carrie sounds like one of those last century girls that feels she needs to look pretty to get a good husband. Thus, attractive, flowing hair would fit her perfectly.
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OK, I feel like I need to get a rough story people can follow before I go any further. The story is the driving force behind everything, including character designs, so I need to get that on lock-down. I got so caught up making Carrie's Design, I forgot why I was even doing it.

Really quickly, I've come up with the idea that Saul is Carrie's significant other. He has been diagnosed with some sort of disease that turned him into a really depressed dude (how I'm picturing him is sitting on a wheelchair, not talking, not moving, looking down at the floor. Expressionless throughout the whole scene). And this third guy, "him", is Saul's friend. They are all at the hospital where Saul has just been released from. Carrie and Saul's friend have just been told by the doctor that Saul won't get better. This is how they're handling it.

That's it. I ran outta time. I've got to get faster with this planning stuff. 

Until next week!