Just finishing up my animation.  I made some adjustments in the end, to make a more smooth animation. Also removed some movement here and there.  I’m not that satisfied with my work on this one.  Felt like I got of to a bad start and needed to adjust the same frames over and over again.

From start to finish:

During this assessment  I tried to think even more about the characters personality. I wanted to portrait him the way I pictured the character from the soundfile. (Booze) A stubborn  ship captain who let’s everyone around him know he is in charge.  The way I interpreted the sound file was that something is going on to the thermostats and he is desperately trying to find out what. Then the character goes a bit crazy and loses control over the situation. Then he gets obsessed with booze (alcohol)

I chose to have a scene with him were he is steering  his ship, and communicating with someone at the same time.  And that he wouldn’t be any good at doing two things at the same time.

Personally, the biggest challenge for this assesment was acting out the sound file for this character. It is a  short audio sequence  which doesn’t give you much to work with and it happens really fast.  I have a feeling

that I did what I could  at this point, but I should’ve really asked more for help from tutors  instead of forcing my will on the 3d-program.

Reference to animation:

for this project I  actually went on and filmed myself as I did lot of different takes on the scene I had in mind.  Just to try and capture the essens of the character.  I did also get a chance of observing my lack of acting skills.

I didn’t draw keyframes that I wanted to use this time around, but instead tried a ”free approach” on posing the character as I went on.  The difference this time is that I actually used a fair amount of time  blocking the sequence. Instead of rushing into smooth animation.  That is certainly a disciplin I’m going keep doing from now on…  blocking makes everything easier in the end.

I still think some of the movement is too slow.  I’ll see what I’ll do about it.

Last tuesday I had a talk with my tutor Penny. She had a look at my animation sequence and gave me som constructive feedback.  I should’ve done it more often, not being to stubborn and try to manage everything myself.

She told me to actually have less movement in the scene and to focus more on the characters intention.  She also noticed that my characters still ”floats”  a bit, regarding animation. I agree,  it look like someone is controlling a human fork lift..

Apart from that, I’ve been trying to remove as many key-frames as possible. I guess my block animation wasn’t solid enough, because I don’t seem to find good inbetweens.  I might achieve the same result, but with less amount of work. Really, I’ve just been going over the whole sequence over and over AND over again just to clean up unnecessary faults.

Lip sync:

Still have to tweek it a bit. When I play it back, it isn’t as smooth as in the work scene. Need to make clearer movement on the characters lips. Now,  it just seems that his jaw is doing all the work.

I’m getting satisfied with the result so far.  As far as I can see, I still have to tweak some movement. (remove some flow animation, so it doesn’t look like the character is swimming) and try to make the characters hand to have a more ”constant” grip on the steering wheel.

The things I struggle with , is to really show the characters emotion through movement. Quite challenging since the soundfile is very short and not that much room for movement. But, I am trying the best I can to interpret the sound file for my character and the way he is reacting.

final note for this post , I should get more experience in cleaning up the animation. Feels like I’ve been using to much time cleaning up some unnecessary  mistakes, because of poor animation structure.

Sorry for poor English. My head is tired from listening to the sound file all day..

test animation : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyCNBnLAT7M

The problem occurred  when I wanted to go from blocking and ”smooth” animation.  A lot of weird stuff started happening. Joints flying everywhere, timing got all wrong and basically not getting the character to pose  the way I wanted to.

At first I thought about re-doing the whole thing, but I realized this was possible to clean up, if I just took my time with it.  So I started to clean up the animation. Trying to delete some keyframes and make the animation ”cleaner”  I also came to realize that I  tried to fix everything at once. Then it seemed to be too much to do.  The work method I then chose to use, was to start with one side of the characters body. (e.g. left side) I would then do as much as possible on that side before starting to clean up the other half.

Since my scene is a character holding a steering wheel, it was best to do the torso and legs movement first.. because: If I were to change his torso, leg movement AFTER animating where his hands should be, then I would have to redo the animation again, but if the body is already done, then it wouldn’t be a problem.

Still got a long way to go in animation, but it is still fun and I am still trying to achieve a good result.

In the future I should also try take tips for others.  Still being a naive beginner saying: I know how movement works! I know this! Note to self: No.. you don’t know sh*** yet.

It is absolutely a relief being done with my project, but at the same time there is much I would have done different in this project.

Some of the images I’ve created turned out pretty good. Others could have been better.

The reason I guess, is because I’m quite new to making a comic book and trying to get the right material to make a sketch funny.

Both my discipline and motivation has been tested throughout the whole process. At some point I could manage do do anything. I was just worn out and had too much to do in every module .

I guess it is the same for every student, but I really needed to take some time not spending time with my project or anything school-related.

My personal opinion is that the report for the final year project is destroying the creative process in the project. I really wanted to spend my time doing what I want to do. Drawing , coming up with new ideas… generally

make my project better in any way. I ended up creating something really fast and use most of my time writing a report ( not a good one by the way… report writing isn’t my best skill)   But, I guess I understand why the University needs their students to deliver a report. School standards, being a University. Basically having requirements  to hand out diplomas.

Don’t get me wrong. This project wasn’t all bad.  I learned alot about myself and what I am capable of doing. Knowing my limits..

I also learned how much there is to a comic book.  My first naive opinion was : I just have to draw some images and put them together in a document. easy buisness.

Turns out I got it wrong. Every image that is being used needs to tell a story of it’s own.

If you have a comic book with a lot of different categories , you have to make sure they fit  in the right context, not to confuse the reader.

My aim was to create a lot of different images with a new category to each image.  When  I started to compose the project together I realized that I had some images that had the same category.

So I would say my final result is a bit confusing. Some images relate to each other, some don’t .   I mean, I wanted to create a weird comic book that doesn’t really make sense.. but perhaps it’s… to much?

2.task Full body animation

I haven’t been posting anything on my blog for a while. mainly because I’ve been busy with other projects and forgot about the whole thing.

for this assignment, I started out choosing a soundfile to use in my animation.  I chose the ”boose” sound file.  I think  this soundfile is a great challenge to do animation because it is quite fast and also has alot

of feelings in it.  The main character seems furious, irritated  and somewhat unstable.

After I’ve chosen a sound file, I started to plan what sort of character I wanted to portray.  I got the impression that the main character is a ”bossy” type. He likes to tell others what to do and to have some control over others.

I chose the scene to be in a big cruise ship.   The main character is the captain and he is trying to steer the  cruise ship while having a conversation  with a second character.

The idea is that he is supposed to steer while having a dialog with another character.  The main character gets more and more irritated then in the end he gets too exited , loses his grip on the steering wheel and falls to the floor.

-Buddha

-Kalki

-Kurma

-Mayuresvara

-Mohini

-Narasimha

-Parashurama

-Vamana

-Varaha

-Matsya

The Character I devoted the most of my time creating, was Parashurama, though not the best character I’ve done, I used him as a project to develope my own style and using a personal tecnique.

I think the pose of this character is quite good. Dynamic, dramatic and when it comes down to the drawing quite rough.

Work method:

Every drawing is done with good old pencil and paper. Afterwards I scanned  the drawings  and started editing them in Adobe Photoshop. First I redraw the drawing digitally whith a black outline (in one layer) then I add different layers. For eksample; I use 1 layer for the black brush outline, 1 layer for colors, 1 layer for background and or if my coloring isn’t good enoufg I create a extra layer that I use to name; background_fill.  This is to cover up what I’ve missed while coloring.  I found out the result is better, if I don’t use the ”paintbucket” in photoshop, but instead color everything manually.

I’ve created every character seperately, in different documents. In the end I imported every character too 1 document, and then added a a background scene to match them all. Then It just came down to shading and composing the characters to fit the picture. So instead of uploading every avatar seperately her , I put them all in one picture.

here is my result, not quite finished but close;

As you see, I didn’t put too much details in the background because the main focus of this picture is the avatas. And there are 10 of them , so there is plenty to get you eyes on.

Many of the Avatars have dramatic and aggressive poses, but I think Buddha holds the picture together by sitting in the middle of it, smiling and beeing quite content.

I would really say that this assessment has improved me alot. Both in drawing with pencil on paper and drawing digitally. It’s been alot of fun, and I’ve been able to develope my own style.

I have also been given some feedback from my friends, and they all say that I got a cartoon comic-feel to it. I guess I agree , but I still need too work harder to get better results.

Thats’ it for now.

- Anders Lorentzen

Since I am creating a comic book, I have to think about different ideas for different situations I can draw.  The difficult part is actually composing the jokes. It is still early in the project period, but I have been taking different notes of eventual  humorous situations.

I will use one of my drawings as an example.

Assassination.

My working title for this drawing is as its written above ”Assassination”. Here, I use the word in a slightly different setting. The word is asociated with murder, and not a very funny word to begin with. So I started to break up the word and if you tend to think in a childish matter, it was quite easy: ass-assination. Not the best wordplay in the world, but with a good drawing I hope it works. I have to mention that I was thinking about using the phrase ”bottoms up”  I think the phrase is just as good as assassination, but when it comes down to it, I feel ”assassination” has more class. And that ”bottoms up” is mostly asociated with drinking or finishing a drink.

From the word assassination, I got the joke that a guy is in a swimmingpool. He has just been under water and is now on the surface to take a breath of air. In the air above him you see a big ugly bottom with a bathingsuit that is too small. The bottom is coming crashing down on him. This setting will be described in one shot. not a series of events.

Here is a quick drawing I came up with:

You can see that this is a very rough sketch of what I have in mind. But my method works for me. Basically get the idea down on paper, put in the major details and then process it forward to a editing program.

Adobe Photoshop works for me.  As you can see in the picture above, I have the scene and the characters they way i want them. What remains is to make a clean picture, make the scene nice and figuring out the composition of it.

When I edit and ”re-draw” in photoshop, I use a drawing tablet and a drawing pen. This makes it much easier to re-draw digitally and getting good curves on my brush strokes.

This is what I’ve got so far:

Concidering the amount of work (also in other modules) My style will be slightly sketchy, but Still cleaner than the drawing above. I’ve just added some colors, refined som lines for both ”characters” and trying to get more details in the environment.  I haven’t decided if I should leave the the word ”Assassination” broken up like in the drawing above: ass-assination. I think It might work better if I use the word as it is officially written, because I don’t want to ”spoon feed” the reader.  I think I’ve heard somewhere that ; If you are starting to explain your jokes, the joke isn’t working / it’s not funny.

I still haven’t got any respons on my e-mail, asking them how they work, how they compose each drawing, basically asking them how they’re work process is.  So, now I am concidering sending them a new e-mail, or maybe contact another artist/company.  I guess I’ll have to do that, because I want to ask experienced artist  , and get ideas on how to compose my own comic-book.  I guess I can start drawing  different ideas for my comicbook. Text and composing can wait, but not too long.  Guess I will have some more time, focusing on my project now, since I’m allmost done with one of my assessments in Drawing and Compositing 3.

I can’t believe how much I’ve appreciate drawing now.  It’s both fun and relaxing at the same time, and i learn alot from myself and others.

So here it is:

Student Name: Anders Lorentzen

Project type: Comic

Software: Adobe Photoshop

Creative genre: 2D, drawing

Working Title : Inglorious Custards

Aim: Making humorous situations through drawing, putting them together in a comic novel.

Problem definition: I want to find out if I can create an interesting and humorous comic novel with different styles of storytelling. One frame drawings, Multiple frame drawings/stripes with and without text.

Personal goal for the project : I want to develope my own style for drawing, beeing able to tell a story through pictures and successfully use comedy to make funny situations.

For some time I’ve been drawing various one-character situations. I found this to be very interesting and entertaining. So I finally desided that I want to make my own comic-novel. It’s challenging , a good amount of work and it is very good practice for some of the disiplines I have (drawing and composition, concept art for 3d projects.)

I am concidering the project to be around 10-20 pages of drawings, or more if I need it.

Research: See what successful comic novel artists have done, what style they use, how well they tell a story through pictures, use of colors, how the scene/environment is set up etc.

Schedule:

Research – November

Drawing – November- February

Coloring/editing/composing : March – April

Subission date: 4th April (at noon)

Now, I know my spesification isn’t perfect, but I feel I managed too put down what my intentions are. What I realize now is that , I forgot to mention my group aim, who is this project aimed for?  My answer is adults, concidering  the situations I will try to create through drawing in this project.

I’ve allready started making some ideas amd sketches for my project, but I don’t want to rush into them yet. First of all I want to do a bit of research regarding comics and  composing in general.

First of I want to try and contact Frode Øverli,  a norwegian comic strip cartoonist who is the creator of a comic called : ”Pondus”