Character Design - Part I: "Dr Frankenstein's Experimental Pet Shop"

    The past week we were introduced to new ways of generating ideas for character design and how to streamline those ideas into a finished concept for a character. It was lots of hard work and at times I felt frustrated over how stuck I am sometimes in artistic habits. Ultimately, though, I think I learned a lot and am excited to tackle new design challenges.

    There was an assignment that asked us to design two pets for "Dr Frankenstein's Experimental Pet Shop" in a photocollage style. I created the Frilled Dogfish and the Split-Tongued Splatterpurse, complete with Latin names, though I probably broke all grammar conventions. Click to read the descriptions!

      I'll add some details of my progress on the final assignment, so they'll get a separate post :)

Learning to talk... Dialogue Animation!

These past two weeks we made our first foray into dialogue animation with Christian Kuntz teaching us.

Working with dialogue and lip sync is pretty challenging but I enjoyed it a lot. I got a lot of positive feedback on my final result and even though it was a struggle half the time I learned a lot. I think this kind of subtle acting, be it with or without dialogue, is more natural to me than action shots. (No need to slack off on the action, of course!) Another challenge was animating Sawyer, which I've been wanting to do ever since watching her in "Cats don't dance". Her construction is really tricky! Again, I learned a lot.

I hope to get back to this scene eventually and inbetween/clean it, but I have some personal projects on my list first.

Bellydancer Design

  We had the opportunity to design our own characters for the dance animation assignment and I wanted to do a bellydancer. It was quite a challenge, but because I bellydance myself and knew my music very well, I knew what kind of movements the character would have to be able to showcase and in which way. (Subtlety and good flow was my main goal.)

  Well, here's the evolution of my character's design! She got ever simpler, basically, and chubbier. Playing around with poses was difficult at first but once I started working with the music and letting myself be led by it, it all came together much better.

 

This assignment was fun! Still struggling with TV Paint (the first assignment in TV Paint, the flying bird, was SO hard for me!) but I did better this time.

The task was: there is a frog, a fly comes in, what happens next? Everyone was super creative! It was lots of fun watching all the clips together.

Assignment: Walk Cycle & Attitude Walk

We had these subjects with Alberto Campos, he's such a fun person and gave us a lot of creative freedom. Working with Pink Panther was surprisingly difficult!

Walk number one:




And for the attitude walk we were encouraged to show our progression from live-action reference (i.e. ourselves) to the final thing and set it to music. My final is still very rough.

Inbetweening: Aisling

We got a professional scene from the great "The Secret of Kells" to inbetween. This is my result, I'm fairly happy with it.

Assignment: Drawing for Animation

"Drawing for Animation" with Frederik Villumsen was great, his approach to animation and flow really helped me a lot. We had to animate Mickey doing magic and failing. In hindsight I played it too safe with this animation, but I still quite like the calmer attitude.

 

Design I

Design I with Lawrence was tough tough tough (who knew arranging three boxes and a line on a piece of paper could drive you to your limits like that?) but eye-opening.

 

"Arrange three boxes and one line as dynamically as possible, only right angles." Failed, of course. Still, Lawrence said at least I had the balls to put in a huge box at the top.

 

 The taste of dark chocolate - my "poetic association" was spruce tree sap on dry moss.

 

Imagery for the jazz album "Kind of blue" by Miles Davis.

 

 

"Hamlet", first scene: the ghost appears. I associate death with outer space and stars, so I chose not to make the ghost white, but to have cold space visible through him, trailing stars.

Construction & Perspective: Acting Exercise

After working on constructing a simple character by the example of a Mickey Mouse model sheet we were given the task to illustrate this little gem by Ollie Johnson in three poses:

A man desperately in love with a girl far away carefully mails a letter in which he has poured his heart out.
 

 



Construction & Perspective: Prehistoric Composition

One of my favourite assignments so far, we had to do eight thumbnails with the theme "Prehistoric," focusing on composition. It did not have to be a cohesive story but there should be a consistent character present in all the thumbnails. I chose my protagonist to be my favourite dinosaur, the parasauropholus.

Next we had to pick one of our thumbnails and rework it in a bigger size, paying even more attention to clear construction and composition.



Construction & Perspective: Goose Sketches

First assignment of the third week, "Construction and Perspective" with Magnus Møller. Task: stop this clip of a pencil test randomly 10 times and draw the pose, focusing on line of action, proportions and solid construction.



Introduction Week Film

This is the film I made in collaboration with three other students during our first two weeks, "Introduction to Digital Filmmaking" with Sunnit Parekh-Gaihede. We had to work with an audio clip that was given to us and chose to work with paper cut-out stop-motion animation.

 



Furthermore, here's some of the artwork done to determine the ultimate design of our main character.