Elements Animation: The colouring

The Elements project ended at the end of January. But one of the key problems with my final animation was it was essentially not finished. One see in which the grass grows up around the teddy bear was coloured but that was it, the rest was just black and white.

I was advised that I should colour my entire animation because it would be a really nice piece of work to put on my show reel.

It became evident to me mid-project that I would not be able to colour my entire animation. The scene in which I had coloured took a massive chunk out of my time so I knew at that time the priority would be to get up to the desired amount of frames before time ran out. After the project was over I was really happy with it, despite being uncoloured, therefore I was happy to go back and colour every individual frame in my spare time.

The second scene I coloured was the scene in which the grass covers the teddy bear. Colouring these frames took a massive amount of time, particularly due to the fact that the grass grew bigger and more grass strands appeared on screen meaning there was more to colour and more to shade. Towards the end of these frames, each was taking around twelve hours to colour. This process was sped up quite significantly after I moved on to using a cintique and a wacom tablet.

Jax Teller caricature

I often do caricatures, usually I use peoples birthdays as excuses to do them as they are very time consuming, sometimes taking a full five days to do. 
But they always start with a rough sketch, these sketches are often incredibly scrappy and might have taken just a few seconds to do but they are the most important part of any caricature because to me that act as skeletons for whats to come. 

At the moment I am working on a caricature of Charlie Hunnam as Jax Teller. My friend who the caricature is for is a fan of the TV series Sons of Anarchy. I started off drawing Jax but after a few sketches I felt it wasn't quite working out.

The aim of a caricature is to exaggerate the features of a subject. But with Charlie Hunnam, he does possess a slightly rugged attractiveness about him. So yes it is important that his features are exaggerated e.g. eyes that are quite close together, but this needs to be achieved in a subtle way so you don't lose his handsomeness in the caricature.

So I began drawing other members of the cast. To be honest, I thought it would be a piece of cake. These guys are the most recognisable set of characters I have seen in a TV show so I felt that because they've all got features that can be heavily exaggerated that they'd be easy to caricature, but what I found was entirely the opposite.

I didn't feel the sketches were so bad but because these guys are so recognisable, the features I hadn't got quite right were instantly noticeable.

After a lengthy detour I went back to Jax. After a short period I abandoned the caricature I had been editing on Photoshop to try to get right (an example of putting the carriage before the horse) and began working from a different photo.
                                                

This photo was a better one to work from because it was more recogniseably him as his whole head was in shot (caricaturist Tom Richmond says the most important part of a caricature is the head shape). With his whole head in shot I realised what I should have been exaggerating. Not only are his eyes close together but his whole face is rather close together wheras his head is basically normal size. The idea was to exaggerate that negative space around his face.

Above is my final caricature.  I feel after I approached the same subject with a fresh perspective I was able to create a far better caricature than if I had just kept with the first attempt and tried to make it work through colouring.

Niall's Logo Development

Outside of animation, I have been developing a logo for a friend. This logo is for a website that sells tennis equipment and my friend is currently developing the website while I'm working on the logo.

I would say this project was very much out of my comfort zone. I have designed logos before but this is a paid job so there is a need to create something professional and in addition I am by no means an expert on sports, particularly tennis.

But I felt its sometimes good to force yourself to do things you're not necessarily that comfortable with or enjoy.

I wanted the logo to be as obvious as possible in what the companies about. So I wanted the logo to feature in someway a person playing tennis.

I researched by looking at footage of tennis players performing a serve, in particular Andy Murray because he's Britain's best tennis player and this is a british company. I stencilled over a few screenshots of Murray serving on Photoshop. Then I wanted to combine this images that were currently on separate layers so the logo would almost look like the motion of Murray swinging the racket, thus incorporating some form of animation.    

So the viewer could view each pose separately without it all looking clumped together, it was like I was using scissors to cut and erase parts of each layer and then once this process was finished, instead of looking like four people merged together it would look like one person, one motion, just put together in a way you can tell there are four separate layers.

The results were I feel unsuccessful. I wanted it to be clear what was going on with the motion, in that I made sure there was no overlapping of layers. But I feel the final image just looks jumbled and I felt it was very hard to see what was going on.

For my second logo I decided to go far similar. So instead of trying to portray a motion I stencilled over one image of Andy Murray swinging his racket with one colour, black.

But I still wanted the viewer to visualise motion so I incorporated a swing path of where the racket hits the ball the ball and then where the ball goes. I was inspired to do this by when you watch a tennis match, if the umpire is unsure about something such as where a ball landed on the court. We will watch CGI footage of the ball hitting the ground followed by a smooth yellow line (as I like to think of it, its motion path. I then turned this motion path into a tennis racket like shape.

I simplified the logo down as much as I could by incorporating fewer edges and making lines smoother. This was also useful because I didn't want the  viewer to see the man in the logo as obviously Andy Murray because I was using his image without his permission so I simplified his face down as much as possible so he just looks like a tennis player.

My friend liked where I was going with the logo and liked its energy, but he felt it looked a bit too complicated. The next task will be to simplify the logo down further.