Assorted animation.

A few of my recent animation homeworks for 2D Animation class:

Ball Throw.

An assignment I completed as the 6th homework for 2D animation class. The actual assignment was to do an arm throwing a ball to demonstrate the concept of the breaking of joints. I took inspiration from a recent James Baxter lecture in which he talked briefly about how he had animated the lion king scene in which Scar walks around Simba. So I thought I'd try and do something similar...

My parents cant work out how to get their computer to view gifs so I thought I'd include a video format as well.

As a little bonus, here is the second animation I completed after receiving feedback from Brian Ferguson that I could try and go a little more stylised with my ball throw:

Life Drawing.

A small selection of drawing from my Friday life drawing session. CalArts gets all the best models!

Waving Flag.

The week 4 assignment for 2D animation class was to animate a wave:

Pendulum Swing.

Pendulum swing in perspective completed for the week 3 homework for the 2D Animation class lead by Brian Ferguson. 

Design for Storytellers.

 The first four homeworks from my design for storytellers class lead by the legendary Mike Moon.

Assignment 1: Design a castle that is also a self portrait.

Assignment 2: A Line which describes an emotion. I went for doubt.

Assignment 3: A design which describes the feelings you have when you eat Ketchup all by itself.

Assignment 4: Design a tree that is also a fairytale. Hopefully you can guess this one yourself but if you couldn't, its Red Riding Hood.

Bouncing Ball.

A bouncing ball animation I made during my 2/3rd week at CalArts as part of my CG animation class.

Happy Eskimo.

YAY CALARTS!

Schedule.

My weekly schedule for the first Semester of my freshman year of character animation (at CalArts).

CALARTS.

So I've been at CalArts for about 3 weeks now and the work is coming on pretty heavy. The animation we've been doing has consisted almost exclusively of bouncing balls so far which, although interesting to animate,  aren't the most thrilling to look at so I just included my most recent one.

 Aside from that Ive started a couple of quick personal animation clips which are currently in a very basic state. hopefully we'll see these cleaned up and polished in the future assuming I'm not entirely overcome with the work load.

I intend to start posting a lot more of my current CalArts work in the coming few days and weeks, so stay tuned!

TUMBLR.

So I haven't really mentioned this on my blog yet although I have heavily suggested it by writing 'ACCEPTED' next to my CalArts application portfolio post but I was recently (several months ago) accepted into the Character Animation course at CalArts starting this September.

Its pretty excitng stuff and some eager folks have already set up a tumblr account called CalArts18 in which me and my contemporaries in the character animation course will be submitting sketches based around a list of drawing objectives. There's already been some pretty awesome work posted there already so I would highly recommend checking it out.

Whilst I'm advertising I guess I should say that I now also have a personal tumblr account where I will also be posting. This blog will remain active for more wordy posts whereas the tumblr account will be a place where I can dump a load of drawings. Check em' out!

        CalArts18
        Ben's Art Dump

Here are a couple of my CalArts posts so far:

11 Second Club Entry - May 2014.

A woman pleads for silence over her gambling debts, but maybe the conversation isn't quite as private as she thinks...

Shout Test Animation.

I was getting a little bit tired of working on my current animation project (May 2014, 11 second club entry) so I did a little practice animation on the side as a break.

The Future of Scooting.

Scooters, the least fashionable method of personal transport, but does it always need to be this way? I propose to you the future of scooting fashion! Never again will you feel ridiculed as you scoot home on your new Harley Davidson Low-Rider Scooter!

BFI Animation Camp.

So I recently attended a 6 day long British Film Institute animation course for students aged 16-19. We were tasked with coming up with an idea for a maximum 90 second short animated film. The actual short film had to be completed within 3 days, day one being story, day 2 being animation and finally day 3 was edit and then on to the showing in the evening!

The team I was in decided to pick my idea for the short which lead to me being the director of the short film. I had never been an official director before so this was slightly out of my comfort zone however, to add even more pressure I was also made the lead animator which meant that I would have to draw almost all of the key frames in the short with two others on my team inbetweening.

Me furiously animating as Neitah our producer scours the storyboards to make the shot list in the background.

I'd say the everything turned out pretty well although admittedly the scope of the film may have been a little ambitious to fit into 90 seconds and to be created with only one full day of animation time. As a result the animation isn't as smooth and the story isn't as well paced as it could have been but I think for the time given it was a an extraordinary achievement! The final short ended up being about 65 seconds which composed of nearly 350 frames!

All the compiled shots. Because we didn't have much time to edit all the backgrounds had to be drawn directly on to the cells

My team as well as the rest of the folks on the course and the UWE student tutors were all a really awesome and talented bunch and you can see more of their work on some of their blogs/Deviant Art pages:

Nathan Mohammed - http://nathananimation.wordpress.com
Kelly Mann - http://bucketofart.deviantart.com/
Beth Oliver - http://bethholiver.wordpress.com/
Adele Candice Mayr - http://doodles-by-adzie.tumblr.com/
Theo Sparks - https://www.facebook.com/Theosanimations?ref=ts&fref=ts
Lewis Furber - https://www.facebook.com/FurberAnimations?fref=ts
Sophie Marsh - http://cargocollective.com/sophiemarsh/Showreel
Laura Tofarides - http://lauratofarides.co.uk
Frank Harper - http://frankharperanimation.weebly.com
Faeez Hilmy Ismail - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/faeez-hilmy-ismail/43/7a4/241

Frames from the film as well as animation will be posted as soon as I get my hands on them!

Modelling.

I recently recieved a delivery of some firm gray Super Sculpy so I thought I would share a couple of the models I created with it. First of all is a model based on a drawing of a head from a previous post. This particular model probably took 8 hours+ to finish and I still need to whack it in the oven to harden it up so that I can try and abrade it to a smooth finish.

 This model of a woman's head took approximately an hour an was loosely based off another drawing shown in the last post. This was kinda just a sketch model where I could try out a slightly different technique for modelling hair, although I didn't really get to go too in depth into modelling it.

 

New Pencils.

I just got my new Prismacolour Ebony Graphite pencils and boy are they good! I've been looking to invest in some Prismacolour pencils for a while now, namely because I heard that Glen Keane uses them but didn't get around to it until I saw that Nicola Sammarco had rated them a 9/10 for drawing on his blog. I've gotta say, he wasn't wrong, these are the nicest sketching pencils I've ever used! Even better than my previous favorite pencil the Mars Lumograph 7B. The Pencil moves extremely smoothly across paper, especially so on animation paper and can range from a very delicate light tone to near black. Not only is it great for line work but I find that it is also extremely effective at filling in large areas of tone. Highly recommended!

Here are just a selection of some of the drawings I got out of these fine new pencils!

 

 

Storyboarding Practice.

I have recently been drawing a small thumbnail of every frame in how to train your dragon in order to gain a little bit more knowledge on the ins and outs of storyboarding. I'm currently 30 mins, 477 shots and over 650 thumbnails in mainly focusing on looking at composition as well as the position of the camera, different lens types, lengths of shots etc.

I stole the idea from Emma Coats who is by her own definition a, 'freelance director of films, boarder of story, and sometime public speaker' as well as a previous Dreamworks & PIXAR storyboard artist. I would highly recommend the exercise to anyone interested in storyboarding as you learn a ton (I know I have), just make sure you pick a film you really love because you're gunna be spending a lot of time freeze framing!

I'll post another update when I get to the 60 minute mark.

Accepted CalArts Character Animation Portfolio 2014