Day trip to see Paranorman at the cinema

A few months ago the class went to see Paranorman, and since then it has become one of my favourite films and i now have it on DVD.
Paranorman is a stop motion animation film about a boy called Norman who can see ghosts and nobody else can and doesn't believe him, he then accidentally angers a witch who summons zombies and he becomes a hero as he is the only person who can stop them.
I watched a special feature of this movie a few weeks ago and i was amazed at how the film was actually animated, each character had tons of different faces which just clicked onto the head for each facial expression. The whole production process of this film must have taken absolutely ages to complete but in my opinion it was deffinatly worth it as it is a brilliant film.
I think i would maybe like to try out doing a stop motion animation one day.

Talk with children's book illustrator Paul Hess.

A few weeks ago now. Children's book illustrator Paul Hess came into the studio to have a chat with the class about what it is like to work in the industry and having an agent etc.
The talk was very informative and interesting to be actually told what it is like to be working as a professional from a professional.
He also brought with him a few of his books for us to have a look at, one was called 'Nail Soup' and one was his peter pan pop up book that he actually said had sold out and he made quite a lot of money from it, enough in fact to have a year out from working.
Another thing he brought was a portfolio of his work and showed us the process and techniques he uses in his work, he works mainly in watercolours but says that he fancies trying new things as he has been doing that for quite a while. He told us that he had been trying out digital painting more recently.
He also showed us that when the work is sent in to a client for a book or something, sometimes the quality of it doesn't stay the same and sometimes they could end up filling something in by taking it from another one of your previous paintings, for example a background etc. without mentioning it to you first.
Here are a few examples of Paul Hess's work...

Festival Research

Pictoplasma

Pictoplasma is a massive animation and illustration festival that focuses mainly on character design and is hosted in both Berlin and New York, they hold talks from illustrators and animators from all around the globe. Every year on my animation course we get the chance to go to Berlin to see it and sometimes New york if you can afford it. Sadly though, i have not been able to afford Berlin or New York in the 3 years i have been here, which is very unfortunate as I would have loved to be able to go as i think the talks and events would be very helpful and i think i would learn a lot from the experience.

This year they held talks from some of the artists i have mentioned previously such as one of my favourite artists Jeff Soto and one of my more recent favourites BAKEA.

They also host a lot of workshops in which you get to design your own characters and models and also get to keep your creations once you are finished with it which i think is another really good thing about it as you could end up walking away with new skills or techniques learnt which can be useful for your own work in the future.

I really do hope to go to one of the Pictoplasma festivals one year.

Animex

Animex is a more local animation festival to me as it is hosted in Teeside, this is slightly similar to the Pictoplasma festival as it holds talks and workshops from a range of different animators, illustrators, designers and game designers.

It is really helpful to go to these festivals as you can get the opportunity to chat to successful animators etc. and if you are interested in working in the industry you could even hand them one and maybe they could get in touch with a few jobs for you or even hire you.

Problems with current animation!

Throughout yesterday and today i have came across a lot of problems with this animation as dynamics are very unpredictable when using them in Cinema 4D, every time i was saving the animation then going back and opening it up the big E4 logo reveal would be all messed up and distorted as the blocks would fall differently to how i originally saved them, today i had sorted the animation out once again ready to render, so i began to render it and after 4 hours of rendering it i previewed the progress of the animation only to find that the blocks were falling differently once again, this was very frustrating and i even considered giving up as i could not understand why this was happening.
I then began to google how to create keyframes for the blocks so that they would stay the same every time they fell, and came across one thread in a forum on the website C4Dcafe.
I followed the simple instructions that one user mentioned on how to do this, i then saved the project, closed it down, and opened it up again and yes, it stayed the same as i left it!
The above video is the 'Test' render of when it did not work, i will begin rendering the working animation tomorrow and hopefully upload the animation onto here tomorrow too.

Will Sweeney

Another Artist that i quite like is an artist called Will Sweeney, he is a london based illustrator and a graphic artist who specializes in comics, animations, clothing designs and music artwork.
Although i don't really take part in much illustration i still really like will's style, and the characters he has designed.
I feel that i have always been quite inspired by comic books and comic art as i am a big fan of comics and graphic novels and once even considered trying to get into the comics industry as a career.
I would really like to start drawing again and gain more illustrative skills sometime.
I really like the way his work looks like the more traditional style comic art, which is like when the images are drawn with pencil first and then traced over with pen to give the artwork the finishing touch.
i also like some of the colour palettes he uses too with a lot of things in the images being in just the one colour with shading, then the background would be coloured in a different color etc. which is a very simple way to colour up and would help with time constraints, and it still manages to look good at the same time.

Update on current animation

Today i have managed to finish off my 2nd animation for this project, the animation shows lots of little E4 blocks that fall into place and form a big E4 logo at the end, i have encountered a few problems with this however as i had saved the file to go away for lunch it was fine, then when i got back, the blocks in the animation fell differently which caused the E4 logo reveal at the end to be distorted thus resulting in me having to go back and basically start it again which was really quite frustrating.
I am currently rendering it on this computer as i don't want to run the risk of saving it again only to come back to a distorted reveal logo.
Here are a few screenshots of the animation, after having a preview of it to see how it looked, i then decided to turn the luminance on on the shapes to give it more of a shell shaded look.

Weekly Reflection

This week has been a rather productive week in terms of adding new things for my blog, getting organised and making a start on my 2nd 5 second animation.
as you can see, most of the week i have been sorting my blog out by adding a few influences and sorting out my time plan for the final weeks of the course.
On Friday i made a start on my 2nd 5 second animation, however i had forgotten to take screenshots of my progress but i will post a few screenshots tomorrow.
The tutorial i have been following to help me with the animation is called 'Stick Textures To Dynamic Objects For A Fun Reveal' on the Greyscale Gorilla website.
I thought as well as creating this animation for the greyscale gorilla competition i could also make it into a small sting for the E4 channel, in my animation i have loads of little purple E4 shapes which then drop down to the floor and reveal a big E4 logo once they have all dropped.
I am fairly pleased with how it is looking so far, i just need to tweek certain things to give it a better look and also need to try and make the little E4 blocks land closer together when they drop to the floor.
I have also been having problems with trying to render my first 5 second animation as i have tried it 3 times now, but im sure i will get that sorted in the week coming.