#22 Delta

I got carried away.

#21 Moving Comics: A New Era for Animation

Sorry if this post drags on. I want to post all of my planning here, so I never have to focus on it again. I hate planning.
______________________________________________________

Last year, I found a new style of animation. It's a combination of comics and animation conveyed through the use of gifs. I don't think a name's been coined for this style, since it took me a while
to find examples. All of the websites referred to their style with a different name. I'm just going to call them 'Gific's until people have found a name for them. Here are examples:

Thunderpaw by Jen

Animated Comics - Extract 1 by Stephen Vuillemin

Untitled by Tom Law 

Bottom of the Ninth by Ryan Woodward

I want to do something like this. Coincidentally, I've had this story idea I've wanted to do. It's about a group of personified emotions who have fallen into a loop where nothing special or exciting happens in their lives. They then fall apart and forget who they are. It's going to be a lot of talking, so it'll be a challenge for me to make it interesting. I think I'll just make three characters, Angry, Happy, and Sad.

Anger: He feels like there's no way he can change, like he was born into his situation. 

Happy: He feels like nobody cares about him until they need him.

Sad: He feels like he's the normal one and the whole world is crazy. If everyone changed the way they thought to be more like him, all the problems in the world would go away.

I'm going with #6 for the designs. I don't think I do this 

to choose from the list later.  I just do this to evolve my

ideas as I keep doing more and more designs.

I'm going to make a three panel strip. The story will be told like those spiderman comics in the newspapers. If you want to look at the whole story, you have to put all the strips together. That way, when I show my progress here, it'll be in the form of one complete strip. In total, I want to make 5 strips that tell the complete story.

Plus, I want the relationship between the emotions to be a rock, paper, scissors type of relationship. If Sad is feeling angry, It'll only make him feel frustrated. If he's feeling happy, he'll feel peaceful. Anger will feel frustration from feeling happy, peaceful from sadness. Happy will feel frustration from feeling sadness, peaceful from anger.

So once everyone starts getting comfortable with the emotions they're having, they learn that they were one complete being, but got separated when they became selfish and made the whole story about themselves.

 These designs are for the merged being.

I'm going with the last one.

The setting will be different for each character. 

Sad will be in a ditch that is just big enough to not be able to climb out of. He has become content with his hole. In there, he only has to deal with himself and not hear about other's problems. 

Happy will be walking alone in an open field that goes on for miles in every direction. He wants respect, so to show people that he's not a slave to them, he's going as far from civilization as possible. People will have to work to get to him. He yells in anger every once in a while to deal with his frustration. Nobody can hear him anyway.

Anger will be mining in a cave. He always cries when he's mining, because he finds it makes it easier for him to keep doing him job.

The Draft:

If you don't want to be spoiled of the story, don't read through these.

This is my very sloppy planning. I just wanted to flesh out the story. It probably doesn't make any sense, but it will once I finish the whole series. It also ended up being ten strips. Not five. I think I can make it work though. I'll just have to make two strips each week. And knowing where everything's going to go will make everything super easy and fast to do.

Well that's it then. On my next post, I'll post my first two strips. So excited!

#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.
________________________________________________________

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.
_____________________________________________________

-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.

__________________________________________________________

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.
________________________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________________________

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.

_________________________________________________________

 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.
_______________________________________________________

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. 

___________________________________________________________

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.