Showreel

Bits and pieces of work a lot of stop motion from my time at Aardman and new stuff from the film.
I think the music works pretty well it's quite short but I think that short and snappy showreels are often better than much longer ones. I may put a longer one together in a little while.

The Film is Finished

Had trouble trying to embed the video so I have put a link in below.
Check it out.

Here is a Link to the film

I am massively happy with the outcome of this film. It was tough work but it has definitely paid off.
I don't know what I will spend my time doing now but I am eager to get stuck into more work.

Now of course I need to figure out what film to do next year and make sure that I keep up to this standard and hopefully surpass it.

Life Drawing

So my life drawing is due soon so that is currently the priority. I thought I might share some of the pictures that I am happier with.

Animation has begun in earnest.

So I have gotten into the animation of the film in a big way and now most of my time is spent with one shot or another. The rest of the team have started on their shots also and we are making good progress. I am still a little concerned about the rendering but we haven't gotten to that bridge yet so there is no sense in worrying.

The tutors are telling us that we are being overly optimistic and that we may not be able to finish the film but I am confident that the film will be of a high quality and we have cut the story down about as much as we can and still have it make sense.

The models are holding up well to what is expected of them and the few difficulties that I have encountered are easily worked around. The dress of the girl which I had thought would be a hassle has turned out to be a lot of fun to animate and the secondary action really helps the character to come to life.

 

These are pre-render tests obviously and the plan is to use a lot of atmospheric lighting and to really concentrate on adding nice textures to things in order to give the film as high a quality as possible.
The second shot will ultimately have a strong light behind the girl in order to show the silhouette off and add to the sinister nature of the scene.

Here is one more pre-rendered shot this time the spider General trying to rally support from the rest of the spiders for an attack on the mean little girl. the difficult part of this shot was to get across what is happening in quite a short period of time.

 

So that is all for the moment and now i have to get back to work.

More News

The film is coming along and while some things are harder than expected I am confident that the final result will be worth all the effort.

To quickly interject here is one of my life drawings from the year which I think is one of the better ones. I am also currently compiling my drawings for the end of the year.

Back to the film,
The models are all ready to go now and we have started animation. Here are a couple of shots of spiders that I have animated in order for them to be used as templates for larger groups of shots in different parts of the film. While I doubt that these spiders will be easily noticeable it is nice to be
 finally getting some of the shots done.

The secondary action on the shako was achieved using an FFD modifier, which gave more control and looks a lot better than the flex modifier which we had experimented with previously.

A Little Later

So this is my first real post on the blog. I am currently working on a film in college and that is coming along nicely, had a good day today and got a nice shot completed. It was really fun to be properly animating again. mostly I have been doing one second shots which are mostly just poses without enough time to really do anything. Today's shopt was vicky kickin in a door and looking kick ass doing it. When the scene is rendered I might put it up here but I am constrained by not being able to show too much of the film online before it is finished.

Just to post something though here is a picture of the Robo Spider, modelling is just about done but it still needs to be textured.

Now I am at home and writing my essay for monday, which is about anti nazi propaganda animations during the second worldwar.

Here is a link to one of the most interesting

Der Fhuerer's Face

It is called Der Fuerers Face and involves Donald daydreaming about life in Nazi Germany.
Amazingly this won the 1942 academy award for best short.

There are a tonne of other shorts including Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and even one with Popeye. Some of the most intersting came from Disney and seem to focus on the Nazi's use of propaganda and how terrible it is that they try to brainwash children by telling them lies and presentiong the world in a warped way, which I found very interesting indeed.

The Nazis and Japanese made a few propaganda cartoons of their own of course but they just couldn't compete with the american studios in terms of quantity or quality.

First Post

So This is my blog.

Mostly I will be using this to show off all of my wonderful animations and also to comment on pretty much whatever takes my fancy.
At the moment I am working on a film for college with a couple of my classmates. I am doing all of the flash bits as I have used flash before and it is really just a couple of shots at the start and then at the end to bookmark the film.

I am looking forward to getting stuck into the CG animation but the models will not be ready to animate for a couple of months. Right now it is snowing outside and I am behind on some of my work so I will get back to the blog a little later.



Cheers
Boomer