I’m not dead!!! – MA – Write up/research discussion, general update

So to give some context to the title and the ‘SPOOOOOKY’ gif. I recently had surgery to remove my appendix after it got infected and I started having agonising pain in my lower abdominal area when I returned home for what was suppose to be a short weekend visit, which is reason why I’ve been a bit silent lately. I’m on a speedy recovery and I hope to return back to Nottingham before the end of term to catch myself up, but to sum it all up, I’m okay 🙂

Research Topics

After completing my learning agreement, I now have a clear understanding of what my project is and where research is going to be leading to.

One topic I’ll be discussing will be about Albert Mehrabian’s theory on communication. A professor in Psychology, he researched into the importance of verbal and nonverbal communication where he found that visual communication had more of an impact on an audience member than the other two. Within my project I aim to test his theory through research and experimentation by showing a focus group a few animated performances (which I will animate) and test what form of communication stood out to them more.

Another topic I will be looking into is research into behind the scenes videos from films/shows/video games of voice actors portraying characters. The aim for this will be to see if the portrayal of a VA impacts or influence how the character came out in the finished medium, or if not how did the directors choose the role for the character. It’s an area that can be thrown back and forth depending on where I look, but can be quite interesting if I find the data I’m looking for.

One other topic I will look into is reading some of Ed Hooks ‘Acting for Animation’ books. the aim for this is to not only improve my skills as an animator but see but how much body language is useful for an animated performance in terms of conveying a characters thoughts and emotion through their movements. With this research I can relate it back to the data I collect with Mehrabian’s theory.

These are roughly the main areas I’ll be looking into, of course each area have their own sub research sections that’ll help with the overall project, but I don’t want to ramble too much in this post, otherwise no one’s going to read it 😀

The next step I’m going to be taking is looking at my project and putting it all in a rough schedule for me to follow for the next two terms so I won’t be losing my mind and reach the end deadline. I’ll also be returning to Notts this week/weekend, so I’ll be able to discuss all this with mu tutors to help me out. Plus I need to start thinking about where is my next step after MA, so I’ll need to do some studio hunting soon.

Doodle

CAN YOU FEEL IT NOW MR. KRABS!!!!

Here’s another entry from the inktober challenge which I didn’t finished. The tagline was “Roasted” and for some reason I chose to do Mr Krabs being roasted over a grill… I think I need help…

Wave your hands like you just don’t care!!! – MA – Learning Agreement, Alterations to project

Hey hey, it’s been a while XD

I’ve been working on my learning agreement for the last couple of weeks, trying to finalise my project and making sure everything makes sense and connects to what I’m looking to achieve. So I thought I may as well update my blog to inform what has changed since the last post.

New project direction

Now I know I mentioned that my project was based around how Voice Acting influences animation, as I hope to do it after completing university. But my write up began to drift away from the original idea, and more in to stereotyping  and accents as I’d I sort of made my main research aim about how some accents are more appealing than others, and wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

So I spoke to Rob and Dave about my project what I wanted to talk, and we all agreed that I should focus on something that was my strong attribute without drifting away from Voice acting too much, which was performance animation. It was more in-tune with what I was interested in, and it gave me a lot more interesting topics to talk about relating to communication, body language and acting, which I will go over in the next blog post.

Doodles

Here’s a doodle from my inktober submission of SPELL. Unfortunately I didn’t submit for all of the days for inktober, but I’d say I made a good start, and I hope when it comes back around next year, I’ll be more present 🙂

Thanks for reading 😀

There’s no context to why I’m using this gif… I just like it :) – MA – Research discussion, interdisciplinary research

Had an informative talk about my project today with my lecturer Rob, as we spoke about my current progress in my research. I told him that I had identified my research aims and that I had a clearer understanding of how I can structure my write up…

To catch you boys and girls up, I spent yesterday thinking about what aims were in terms of research, and concluded that they were:

• To research what voices and accents are the most appealing and why?
• How does it relate to current media? e.g. in animated films and shows
• Using data from my experiment (my character animation to a variety of voices), compare to my other research to reach a conclusion

With this identified I can now bullet point and set objects of research for myself to look into to help provide evidence in my write up 😀

…After looking at this Rob suggested that I do some “Interdisciplinary Research” to help with the write up, which involves “the combining of two or more academic disciplines into one activity”… yes I did use google search to help me explain it, SHUT UP!!! …ahem…anyway… we looked at variety of different courses at NTU that I could reach out to and get their opinion about my research, a few being Linguistic students, media students and sociology, because I’m using different accents and voices into my research it’ll be good to see what people of these faculties think.

 

Doodles

To spice things up in my blog-posts and give them more of appeal than just adding gifs, I thought I’d add some doodles that I did randomly

 

Different character from the anime ‘Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood’

I’ve been re-watching FMAB lately with my flatmate Jegor and I did some doodles of some of the characters in the show. I also decided to sketch Ed in an Adventure Time style just for the hell of it.

Edward Elric x Adventure Time

During one of Tegan’s lessons I used simple shapes to create some characters. I lost the adobe animate file that I used, but I remember doing some doodles in my sketchbook.

 

2015 vs 2018

So myself, Jegor and Max did another challenge between ourselves. The challenge was to draw something that we did ages ago, and I chose to do the Elizabeth drawing that I did in my first year. I’m quite pleased with the turn out, I can definitely see the progression I’ve made over the past 3 years.

FFFFFFF********************K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – Thesis Film – Storyboard

After a lot discussions with tutors, peers and my inner demons, I’ve finally finished the rough, first version of my storyboard.

Let me tell you this was a very strenuous process. Mostly because I’m terrible at storyboards, but also I felt I was doing too much than I needed to do, and was panicking that my story was going to be longer than I wanted it to be, and so I was constantly going back and altering things so it wouldn’t be as long. But never the less it’s done. and with it I can proceed with the animatic, so I can see if my story is not as long as I fear it to be, as well as to see if it all fits together and reads well, not only to me, but also to the audience.

Also I came across this useful website/blog – Ian Freer, illustrations by Olly Gibbs. 2017. The Camera Angles You Need To Know – Empire . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/film-studies-101-camera-shots-styles/. [Accessed 22 November 2017]. Which talks and discuss the different types of shots that are used in film and other medias. This was helpful because whilst writing up each shot that I was using, I couldn’t remember which one was which plus also gave me some inspiration for some shots that I may change.

The boys are back – Thesis Film – Character Design/Mood-board/Colour Scheme

Finally got the new designs of Shay and Kodi inked and coloured up. I’m a lot happier with the designs now, definitely closer to what I originally wanted from the start. You can also notice that I have changed the colour of the boys clothes. This was because I thought that the original colours didn’t necessarily fit with the lighting that I wanted to achieve within the film. So they needed new colours, and not just random ones, ones that would match with the colour palette of my film.

Adventure Time Wiki. 2017. Image Fall-Off Path.jpg \ Adventure Time Wiki \ FANDOM powered by Wikia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/File:Hair_Fall-Off_Path.jpg [Accessed 28 November 2017]

To create the colour palette I opened up Adobe Color CC, and used one of the references that I used in one of my blogs to describe the type of lighting I wanted, and used the colour wheel to replicate the tree.

With the palette done, I whacked it into Photoshop and used the pen tool to adjust colour whilst keeping with the palette and applied it to the characters.

Everybody FREEEEEEZ!!!! – Thesis Film – 3D Modelling/T-Poses

Shay T-pose

Between my sessions of doing my Storyboard I’ve been drawing up the t-poses for my characters. This, in my opinion, is the best T-Poses that I’ve done so far as I’ve managed to level everything up to one another e.g. the front face shape and features being level to the side face.

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With the T-poses done I’ve made a start to modelling Shay’s body. I’m by the time I’ve managed the basic shape of Shay’s full body I can use it to cheat a little bit and re-scale it to Kodi’s height, so it would save me time of having to create another model from scratch.

Kodi T-Pose

Back to the drawing board… Kind of – Thesis Film – Concept/World Building/Shay Modelling

I had a discussion the other day with my tutor Andy, regarding my post from Monday (Let me Inspire you – Thesis Film – Inspiration Research) and it’s connection to the style of the characters I’ve created (Gimme a Hand – Thesis Film – Modelling Shay/Kodi. Finished Concept.).

Within in my last post I talked about what my influences were in the terms of what of characters style and the lighting I wanted to achieve. And Andy brought up how the characters I made, had no connection to my influences, which was “a shame” because he thought that the influences that I used were really good. He then moved onto understanding the world I was trying to build asking me When is it? Where is it? How does it relate to your characters objective? etc… Which I really couldn’t answer because I didn’t really build up the world fully. I knew that the area that my characters grew up in was to be in the countryside, but besides that I haven’t done much.

After some awkward realisation silences, Andy told me to do some world building as well as to re-style my characters, not to change them, but so that they look like they’re taking influence from my inspirations.

List of ideas for the World

So I started with the world building and I began to look into some of the popular era’s of the world from western to eastern culture, and I got pretty fixed on the middle ages as I felt it was best suited for Fantasy element I wanted for the world, but it was something that was done a million times before, and so I kind of wanted to push it into the future a little bit, a time just before the industrial era, and perfect era was the renascence, I won’t dive too much into it but I’ll say I like the idea of having magic and the science of the time influence the early stages of the industrial era, plus I do like some of fashion of the time period, also some country landscape and villages are good references for building the boys Home. Andy also gave me a suggestion of maybe looking into Greek mythology to relate it to the “Hero” aspect of my film, which is a good area I could explore, like for example I could have Greek myths carved into some of the walls of the temple.

 

My attempt of drawing some of Noelle Stevenson’s Art

Looking towards redesigning my characters, I first needed to have a go replicating the style. I started by drawing some of the art that Noelle had already done.

Trying to replicate the style with different characters

After this I then began to draw characters from some of my favourite characters from Anime’s and Shows in her style. I even did a drawing of me.

Re-Designing Shay and Kodi

Once I was comfortable with drawing her style I then began to apply the style to my two characters.

Re-Designing Shay and Kodi

So far so good I’m not 100% happy with the look of Kodi, as I’m trying to replicate his clothes to the two era’s that influenced my world, as well as change his hairstyle, though I might just got back to a buzz-cut. As for Shay I’m more pleased, I’ve given him a new haircut as well as bulked him down, he still has the same clothes, but that’s not much of an issue. I’m continue the re-designs until I’m satisfied. Which will hopefully be done before the Pitch on Friday.

Naruto Challenge – Drawing Challenges

 

Entries from Left to Right: Max – Kakashi/Jegor – Sakura/Me – Naruto

Myself, Jegor and Max did our first drawing challenge of the Third Year. Our challenge was draw our Original Characters, Cosplaying/Dressing up as characters from Naruto.

 

Gimme a Hand – Thesis Film – Modelling Shay/Kodi. Finished Concept.

Update for Modelling Shay: I’ve finished modelling the hand of Shay. It fits well and it looks good smoothed. Though Debra raised up an interesting question about the positioning of Shay’s arm, and whether it was better positioning to an actual T-pose. I argued to say that I have seen 3D characters in the similar pose, so I assumed it would be okay either way, if there are any problems when it comes to rigging I can always go back and change it.

Shay and Kodi Concept Art

Shay and Kodi Concept Finished: I’ve also finished up the concept art for Shay and Kodi. I’m quite pleased with it the combination of the Line Art, Colours and Shading have complimented each other well. There’s a bit of missing shading on Shay’s right foot, but I’m overall pleased with the end result. I’ve also emailed the file to my lectures to see if they can put it up in our 3rd Year wall, seen as they’re in desperate need for art.