amanda

Once first term ended, I thought I was going to bid Maya farewell for the rest of my 3 years in university, but alas... Maya is back (tell a friend).

For second term, we were introduced to making a Wild Wild West setting. In this module we learnt how to block out buildings/elements, applying textures, rendering (Renderman is amazing), UV unwrapping, etc.

Blocking out elements was fun, until we arrived at the stage of UV unwrapping. To be really honest, after being taught UV unwrapping, I was so confused with the steps. Until... we found the really effective way to go about UV unwrapping without having to deal with all the confusion. At the end of the day, I found UV unwrapping fairly fun to do.

Here are the shots:




Knowing that I'm not very good in Maya, seeing the outcome of this made me a little happy as I didn't think that I was able to do it especially with all the steps looking so complicated. I kinda wished that I did the projection mapping method as that would seem more realistic in a sense than sticking in referenced images that all look so different.

So, before I officially bid Maya goodbye for this term, let's see what surprises Maya will have in the bag for me when we meet again.

Have a nice day!

Onto the continuation of the first scene of title sequence, instead of jumping onto the part of our animatic where the Marcel Duchamp's Fountain will be sitting on his Bicycle Wheel piece and a title will appear from it, I discussed it with my teammates and we decided to make the Fountain have legs and run after the Bicycle Wheel and then only lead into the scene where they both merge into one character.

I had a hard time trying to nail how the Fountain was going to run as in every frame, the legs just look really different and weird, aaaaand maybe it's also because I was drawing the same thing for the past 5-7 hours without a break and everything just looked like a similar weird blob on the screen.

After cleaning up and setting the timing of the run/jog scene, this is how it looked like:




After a team discussion, we decided to slow things down and made it walk after the Bicycle Wheel instead of running after it and this is how it looked like after the necessary tweaks:



In all honesty, I didn't like how jerky it looked and even after cleaning up and in-betweening it, the cycle still didn't feel right. It also didn't go well with the tempo of the track. After another quick discussion, we decided to stick with the running urinal as it seemed to fit with the sequence much better.

I also took charge of one of the scenes where the physical cup which was covered in fur (done by Tom) and animated in stop motion, will then turn into a drawn type of cup where it will lead to another scene. This was our inspiration:


It was a scene from one of Tame Impala's music video, Mind Mischief. Before I took over, Eloise did a trial which was this:


I took over this shot hoping that I could maintain the fur texture of the cup as it was inspired by Meret Oppenheim's piece of work. Having it smoothened out would have defeated the purpose of featuring her work in our title sequence. At first it deemed daunting as:
1) How was it possible to draw fur and not make it seem like a spiky cup?
2) How was it going to be a smooth transition?
3) How long would it take to complete it?

After about 5 hours of both trying not to collapse from having the cold and staring at the screen for so long, I managed to finish up the shot and it looks like this:




If you were wondering why the beginning second of white doesn't make any sense, it's because we were going to mask this over the actual cup and watch it transform! Honestly, this transition was fun to do as it was randomising all the colours and messing about with the patches formed by the different shades of colours of the cup.

Have a nice day!

I remember how I used to cringe at the thought of life drawing. I mean... why would anyone want to draw naked bodies early in the morning?






Session #2: Quick poses, long poses and foreshortening.





Session #3: Foreshortening.




Session #4: Enlarged drawing (to be pieced together) and full body poses.







Session #5: One 3-hour long pose– I've done it as a full body pose in enlarged drawings.





Well, I didn't expect that I only had 5 life drawing sessions with Jason this term but honestly, they felt really beneficial and I always was keen for his sessions as we learn more to draw what we see and not what we think we see.

Have a nice day!

After being briefed on an experimental project with the subject of 'The Self-Portrait of Your Life', I was daily stuck for a good week or two trying to churn out ideas. Most of which I struggled with wrapping my brain around having my 'face' appear throughout the entire 60-90 seconds worth of animation. Then it hit me that I could eventually create something abstract and not have my face feature in it.

Originally, I wanted to create the entire sequence of shadow puppets, mixed with 2D elements. However, that didn't turn out well as the set-up for shadow puppetry proved to be a challenge especially when students were constantly crowding about trying to get a stop-motion space to work on their respective experimental project and I didn't want to risk my set-up being moved about.

I was inspired by Tame Impala's music video 'Feels Like We Only Go Backwards' and discovered that the artists behind this amazing music video did it in a  style called plasticine collage. It sounded so interesting and it also looked really, really, really fascinating.

It looks something like this:




Before I go any further into talking about how I implement this method into my experimental project, here's how my final outcome looked like.


Here goes:



Well, to be fair, this isn't what plasticine collage should be like. I tried out the real plasticine collage on a size of A5 paper, just like how it's shown in the example that I've added at the top. I had 2 problems,
1) I didn't have enough plasticine (buying a few of it were already causing a hole in my pocket)
2) It took way more time than expected

How I overcame it was that I sort-of gave up on 'plasticine collage' and went with more of a plasticine stop-motion style with some hand drawn bits and also a mix of 2D bits and bops.

Behind the scenes:




Having the very psychedelic-style of tune at the background, it takes away the seriousness of the message of my self-portrait (of which I've disclosed in my production report).

If I had more plasticine and a little more time, perhaps plasticine collage would have been the way to go. Unfortunately, plasticine itself doesn't come cheap, and my time management at that moment wasn't as great. As an overall outcome, I'm honestly happy with how it came out even though I had some momentary struggles/hiccups in the beginning with trying to find a technique and also what I wanted to convey.

Have a nice day!

For the title sequence project, I was in charge of the entirety of the animation in the first scene. We've collectively decided to do a globe spin to start off the title sequence. After a few spins, a hand will fly in and splits the globe into half whereby a title will appear.

The first thing that was picked out was of the timing. In order for the titles to be seen properly and read thoroughly, my teammates said that it would be better if I could hold out the parts where the titles were supposed to be shown for about 2 seconds each.

Honestly, I'm happy with the outcome of it as I didn't expect that I could animate it this far. However, there is always room for improvements!

Have a nice day!