Character design - Model sheets

Here is how my final model sheets turned out for the character Borghoul, on the third model sheet i also  decided to draw his pet brain Squidge.

I created the background on photoshop and for the splat effects on the background i had downloaded a new brush.

Overall i was really pleased with how these model sheets turned out.

Character Design

Firstly, I need to apologize as I haven't been posting regularly at all this year, I should have been keeping on top of my blog but sadly I haven't.
I am going to take this time to upload as much work as I can to show my recent work and progress within my modules, however my portable hard drive has recently broke, causing me to lose certain pieces of work that I hadn't yet backed up, which is a shame as i was rather happy with some of the work I had on there, including my most recent module in which i modeled the existing character 'Stimpy' from The Ren and Stimpy Show, I had composited him onto a background I had created and the animation showed him walking through the scene, however i do still have a few screenshots of the character itself and will post them up soon.

The first thing I am going to post is my character design sheets and development.
The character I had created was a zombie named Borghoul, I had always wanted to create a zombie character as i have always been interested in the idea of them.

Here is my first attempt at drawing my character, I was overall quite pleased with this design even though it was the only one I could come up with, so I decided to stick with it and try to make it look better using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

After tracing over my character design in illustrator I decided to change little details about my Character such as, instead of the tuft of hair at the right side of his hair I decided to replace it with more of the zombies brains hanging out.

Here is how my character design looked after I had finished tracing over it with the pen tool, without the pencil drawing behind it

Once I was happy with the line work of my character, I then decided to colour it up, to do this I used the program Adobe Photoshop, I also added shading to the colour to give it a more textured look, I did this by using the Eyedropper tool and selecting the colour, I then selected a darker version of the colour and used a different brush around the edges of my character

I then decided to try and design my character without using any line work, and just using basic shapes in Adobe Photoshop instead to see if my character would look any better, and it turns out that I prefer this version to all of the others as it looks very simple yet effective.

Below is an image showing the front, side and rear views each created using the same technique in Adobe Photoshop.

Channel 4 ident

I created this channel 4 ident using cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects using the similar techniques that channel 4 would have used for their actual idents.

Contextual studies - Pixilation

As part of the contextual studies module we watched a few examples of pixilation animation yesterday in the studio, pixilation is a technique in which film makers and animators take a sequence of frame by frame images of live action footage to create a kind of stop motion effect, this technique is quite effective as it helps real life characters within films interact with stop motion characters, this technique also adds an eerie effect to the animation, a good example of this is the film 'The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb'.
After the presentation about pixilation we were then given the task of making our own little pixilation short, i think our short example of pixilation animation worked quite well in the end.

E4 final animation.

Here is my Final animation for Work based module in which we were asked to produce a 10 second sting for the Channel E4.
As i tried Rotoscoping for the first time on my previous E4 sting animation last year, i thought i'd try something else for the first time this year and went for a more experimental, abstract approach to the animation, i decided to do the animation in Cinema 4D and as i hadn't used the tools such as the explosion tool and spherify tool i thought i'd give it a go.
Overall i was really pleased with how this animation turned out and i think i would like to go back to it at some point within this year or next and work into it some more as i really enjoyed this module.

Practice Enrichment - Morph

Here is my morph which i created for the Practice Enrichment module, the task was to pick one animal and one type of machinery, then morph the animal into the machine within 25 frames, i decided to choose a giraffe into a digger for my morph.
Overall i didn't really enjoy creating this morph but i was still quite happy with the way this turned out, however if i did enjoy doing the morph more then i would have made the changes more exciting and used more imagination within the change.
I also think i have made some improvement from my morph attempt last year.

2.5D final animation.

Since i forgot to upload this video to my blog once i had completed the 2.5D project, i have decided to upload it now, the animation is basically about some sort of 'land pirate' who has arrived onto a land made up of sunday dinner food on the search for gold.
I was overall quite happy with this animation, however there was a few little problems i found within this animation, one problem was the weight painting of the character, as when he is walking you see that his leg buckles slightly as i should have taken more time to sort this out, another problem i encountered was the timing, when it came to the rendering stage of the animation i had forgotten to change the frame rate to 25 fps, so when i finally changed this it made a lot of the animation move slightly quicker than they should have. I have learnt a lot with this animation and will make sure i don't repeat the same little mistakes again in my next animations.