Human Child Concept Page. Off on holiday!

Another day spent on the phone sorting out things for next uni year has left me with very little time for homework. After yesterday I was hoping for a chance to dig my heels in on this workload, but alas it was not to be!

Still, a research page, and this character development is better than nothing!

The beginning was a quick idea of the proportions I was going for with this character. (They're intentionally contrasted to the alien character).


Then a few sketches for an idea of hairstyle, I like quite rough looking hair; it's easy to draw from any angle, and I think it suits the characters profile anyway.


The 3 circles are to show the proportions of the character again, he's 3 heads tall, his legs are slightly less than 1 head, and his body slightly more.


Also decided to do the turnaround while I was at it! 


A few notes about it, you can feel free to comment about: I'm not sure if I should give him a nose. Not sure about the colour of the pants. Also not sure if the proportions should be closer between the 2 characters... We will see!


This could well be my final post before I go on my jollies! So, have a good few weeks and I'll catch you on the flip side! 

Matty out

Birdbox Studios!

In my countless hours perusing everything that youtube has to offer, I've stumbled across quite a few little gems.

Last night while browsing short animations I came across this awesome little video from Birdbox Studios:

I'd love to do a video in this kind of impressionist style. I think it looks fantastic, and it wouldn't be infeasible to do it in a 3D style... Maybe i'll come back to that idea later!

Of course, after that I had to check what other videos they had. Sadly they only have 6 videos, but they are all very funny, and very well animated too! It turns out, that they also are the makers of the ice cream video that rob linked a few days ago: here.

Here are another few great great videos from them, I'm sure they'll make you laugh!

 

Great videos all of them! I like the simple looking animation (I know it's not actually simple). The 'Sketchy Blues' video reminds me very much of Bill Plympton's videos with the rough sketchy lines.

I'd better get to finishing my drawings today; I'm currently working on more character development for the alien idea... I realized today that I actually didn't draw out the human child yet! Silly me. Expect that up in a few hours.

Matty out!

Futures! Front of House Character Concept

Greetings one and all!

Today has been a fairly hectic day for me, lot of things going on that I needed to get sorted out... Suffice to say, I haven't had much chance to get work done!

I did want to make sure I got something uploaded though, to keep up my streak! So I did some quick concept sketches of characters for the first of my series (Futures) projects.

Tomorrow hopefully, I'll have a chance to get quite a bit done. Also, I'm off on holiday (finally) this weekend for 2 weeks. So the blog will be a little quiet for those 2 weeks, since I will have no internet access. 

Rest assured, I'll be working while I'm there, and I'll have a lot of stuff to show once I'm back! 

In the words of Rumplestiltskin: "Have a nice day".

Alien Set Design

Hello all!

Got a little carried away today with this start to my set design. Decided to draw the houses of the 2 characters in the film. 

The basic goal, was to show how similar the 2 worlds are, while still being very similar. 

What I tried to do was mimic the layout, as a mirrored image, and changing the shape and colours of most if not all of the components. 

Being 2 images side by side in the same file, created an ENORMOUS amount of layers. Next time I try to do something similar, I will just compose them together afterwards to save myself a headache!

Here are the images separately, so you can have a better look!

Hope that this gives you a little more insight into the idea! I'm very excited to get started story boarding when semester starts!

See you next time!

Glowy Looky Goody!

No idea what I was thinking with this title... My brain froze on this one, and I am eternally sorry!

Anyway, I thought I'd better post a step-by-step development of this idea; my guard idea. Here's a slight progression, this one includes the characters, so you can get an idea of what I intend everything to look like.

Yes, the characters are very very rough. This is just to get an idea of the feel of the film. The finished characters will almost definitely be vectored and much cleaner looking, like a puppet... but 2D!

My first thoughts about this are I actually really like how the characters stand out, the blue may need to be brighter... 

Also, I almost immediately realized when I drew in the characters, the castle has to be much bigger, so that the characters can occupy more screen room, like this they are much much too small... But that is easily fixable, and nothing is set in stone.


And more good news, is I'm getting a much stronger grasp on my final (3rd) 3 minute idea for next year! You will be seeing work from my series project and the final 3 minute film very soon!

Guards Style Development!

Today seemed like a pretty good time to try and get some style development done on my guards idea, after the silhouette reference videos in my previous post (here).


Wow this blogspot composer does some STUPID STUFF! Need to find a decent blog writing program I think... 

I digress! Yes, I did a quick sketch for what I'm thinking for the guard idea, similar to the silhouette films, but reversed, so dark at the back, getting lighter coming forward, to the characters, which will be brightest.

I like this is a starting point... I think all of the layers are going to need to be dulled down, so that the characters stand out more. I'd also like to try with some high contract shadows. 


I'm also going to have to figure out how to articulate the characters in silhouette form, it should be relatively simple to create the silhouette characters in Flash. For the background though, I'd like to have the layers move slightly less, the further back they are (if there's any camera movement at all)... We shall see.

Here it is with some high contrast shadows added, again very quickly and roughly. I do like the way this looks, it definitely gives the image a more finished look, and it stops the background appearing too bright... They still may need dimming down though, we'll see after I've done the characters.

 Matty out!

Style Research: Silhouettes

Greetings all! I hope that you are enjoying the new look of the page! 


As I mentioned in a previous post (here) I don't want to show my guards idea as a typical animation. I'd like it to be quite visually unique, and if not totally unique at least distinctly different from the 'norm'.


Inspiration for the style came quite a while ago, while watching the film 'The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello', which was completely unique in it's appearance (at least to my knowledge).

Obviously the style is intended to be very dark and intimidating, which isn't what I want to do with my Guards film, but I would certainly like to create in a visually distinct way, using a similar 2D cut-out style. 


Today I also stumbled across another video in a very similar style, which I first thought was by the same people, but it's not. 

Again it uses a 2D cut-out silhouette style, this time it's slightly less intimidating, which is a move closer to the look I'm going for. I could definitely do something similar to this. 

The style in my head, is essentially this but reversed, using light characters, and the layers into the background get darker and darker. I'll have to do some experimental sketches to see if the style is even possible to visualize in a practical way, and if it is... How practical is it to animate in this style. Expect to see some style concepts in the coming days!

Matty out!

Research: Pitching A Film

Well i have to admit, the idea of officially starting the research phase has been a daunting idea for a few days now... I didn't have the foggiest idea where I should really start. 

Then it dawned on me, I don't actually know what is expected of a movie pitch, at least not at a professional level, which is what I'd like to achieve for my final years work! so my first port of call for research is going to be how to pitch a film. Ooo I like that font in bold... I should point out now, I am writing this live; I'm going to be switching to and from writing this blog as I actually write it and do the research... Let's see how this goes!

So, first thing I'd like to know is what a professional level company such as Pixar expect from a pitch.

http://www.pixar.com/howwedoit/index.html# is very informative! It's a little vague on the specifics of what they expect from a pitch though, let's dig deeper.

Ok, I couldn't find any details on the Pixar site about the specifics of a pitch, but a little venture into google and I quickly came across this. Which looks very promising, written by Michael (Mike) Vogel - Director of Animated Programming at Sony Pictures. (I'm still reading it).

This article is officially a god-send! So many questions that I wanted answered are answered. It's very easy when trying to get your idea across, to lose your sense of perspective. Making sure that you keep the pitch relevant to your character(s) is important. 

I was surprised on the section about the artwork when I read it, but with a little thought it makes total sense... Why would you show any artwork that isn't as you'd like it in the film. A producer isn't going to be interested in seeing sketches of characters, they're going to want to see exactly how the character is going to look. Showing anything that isn't finished is only going to mislead.

Another point he makes, that makes total sense, is knowing what role you want to have in the actual making of the film. Although not entirely relevant for me as a student, but in the professional world, I'm going to have to start really thinking about what I see myself doing... Be it writing, directing,  ideas, character design or the animation itself...

The length of the pitch this is something that I had been wondering for a while... "Make it just long enough to cover the important bits" is great advice, the details will be worked out in storyboarding and script writing. You only need outlines, ideas, characters. For a series, he also recommends having a few fleshed out ideas for 2 or 3 episodes; fleshed out meaning that it will have a beginning, middle and end. Also some vague ideas of other episodes, which shouldn't be more than a sentence or 2, just to show the directions you can go with on this idea.

Very helpful stuff indeed, so overall I have to remember that the story is key, leading with the story and using images / research to support the idea, rather than having images play the largest part. The idea itself is what you are pitching, not the characters, or the world etc... An important thing to keep in mind!

I think this has been a good start to my research, at least I know what I should be aiming to show in my presentations now (at least better than before). I think actually getting to making the presentation will be a better learning experience though! Until next time, Matty out!

Touchdown Turnaround!

Yes, that's a song reference title!

I got the alien kid turnaround finished last night, I'm not sure if back shots are entirely necessary... The back of him would be relatively boring anyway! 

Quite happy with the way it turned out (see what I did there?). Hands are always a fiddly part of any drawing, and I don't often have to draw them from the outside side angle... Took a few runs at it. Also spent a little bit more time tidying up the drawing this time. 

A note on the lighting of the side view, it looks dull because I was trying to keep the lighting consistent. So this is the side that's actually mostly in darkness on the other image.

Now for some research work... 

Mat out!

Alien Kid Front Reference

Oh my goodness! 2 posts in one day! You can tell that the deadline is looming... I had intended to do a full turnaround on this page, but I wanted to get some more practice using my new colouring technique. Yet again there have been tweaks to the process: 

This time instead of colouring onto a multiply layer, I coloured onto a normal layer, underneath the line layer, and shaded AFTER that on  multiply layer. This made it much easier to reliably get the colours right, regardless of the grey background I use, which darkens the colours if you're using a multiply layer.

The reason I use a grey background is three-fold; firstly, I find that a bright white screen gives me an ENORMOUS headache after a few hours intensive staring (drawing). Secondly, the brightness fools your eyes, colours are much more difficult to pick accurately (that part is mentioned a lot if you look for photoshop tips). Lastly, particularly on the shading stage, I find that having an overall neutral looking (dull) page helps get a much better sense of direction for the lighting. 

I still can't decide if I prefer to shade first and colour after, or colour first and shade after... Colouring first is a technique often used by anime artists, it seems to simplify the process, which can only be a good thing, and the finished look is for all intents and purposes exactly the same.

The lil' dude in the bottom left is my signature by the way, I was debating whether to put him on, but I think it's quirkier than just poking an "MF" on every piece.


I should have a proper turnaround finished tonight, but I'll upload it tomorrow, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing!


Mat out! *resists urge to put smiley face emoticon*

The Alien Revisited!

Hello all! I'm pleased to be having a fairly productive day here, getting a lot of ideas much better formed ideas now (about time I know).


Got some good feedback about the previous alien character I uploaded, but thinking about it, that alien looked much much too old to be the character in my 3 minute, which is supposed to be an alien child. So I had another sketch, which turned out quite well, I decided to give it a proper work up, though a quick one this time. I also thought it would be a good idea to show my process, even though it is constantly changing as I learn more...

As you can see, I started out with a portrait to get an idea of character. I do this occasionally when I don't have a specific pose in mind.


The process is basically a case of building on layer after layer. I still had a LOT of polishing to do, but at the concept stage, anything over a certain quality is overkill... Especially if you don't go with that idea. This whole thing took me just over an hour, much quicker this time after my previous drawing, which was experimenting with a whole new technique. Very briefly I'll explain the process:


Portrait > Sketch body / pose > Decide lighting direction (multiply) > Tone shadows (multiply) > Block in colours (multiply) > Add lighting (normal) > Add Highlights (normal) > Background (preset template), gradient from bottom left, add more smoke effect to darken bottom left, add signatures > Done

Quite happy with how the character turned out, I like the innocence in the face and the proportions definitely are more child like. I'm not sure I'd like to go too exaggerated with proportion, at least not until I have a definite style in mind for the film.

Here is the final stage again, it's far from finished, I left a lot of my sketch lines in... I like how they look. For a fully finished image, I'd have to neaten the edges up, possibly ink in some lines...


My next order of business on this idea, will be to get a finished design for the human boy character, and turnarounds for each. I'll also need to spend a lot of time on set design... It's my weakest area drawing-wise at the moment.

See you the next time I see you! Matty out.

Colour Theory In Practice

As a follow up to my previous post (here) about colour theory I thought I'd give a few quick examples of colour theory actually being applied to... things.

I hope you're appreciating the backgrounds, I think they jazz the place up somewhat! So with any luck this should help explain some things I perhaps missed yesterday. 

In other news, I spent most of the day in Harrogate shopping with Hannah today, hence the slightly shorter than usual post! Tomorrow I'm aiming to get some more development done on one of my 3 minute ideas. I'm also looking into a smarter way of storing my work on my computer, hopefully using smart folders, but it may take some serious re-organizing, so until next time!

Matty out!

The Basics of Colour Theory

Good afternoon all!


Now then, I've been mentioning colour theory a little bit over the last few days, so I thought I'd do a post explaining at least the basics of it. 

Now then, as you can see, this colour theory is based on an RYB (Red Yellow Blue) colour wheel. Red, Yellow and Blue being the primary colours, are the largest circles, the second largest you get by mixing the primaries and are therefore called secondary colours (Green, Purple, Violet, Dark Orange and Yellow-Orange). The smallest circles, are tertiary colours and you get those by mixing either primaries or secondaries.

Colour theory is a method of choosing colours that look good with each other, and more importantly, a way of avoiding colours that do not look good together. There are various ways of choosing harmonious colours, which I've shown in the image.

Basic complimentary colours are those that are directly opposite each other on the wheel, these are extremely high contrast. It is important to remember that even though the colours do compliment each other you do not have to ensure that the colours are used in equal amounts, rather choose one main colour and use the other to compliment it, for example in details or lighting etc. You can also use another pair of complimentary colours, as long as they are within 2 spaces of the currently used colours (Analogous).

Split complimentary colours are very similar, except instead of picking colours directly opposite, you choose one colour and then the 2 colours either side of the colour directly opposite (see image). You can choose any of the colours as your main colour in your scheme, and again, they do not have to be equally balanced.

The analogous colour scheme uses 3 touching colours on the colour wheel, they are therefore very low in contrast. This is often used when a specific colour is wanted to dominate a theme, the analogous colours can be used to to pick out details etc without distracting too much from the main colour. Commonly used in the design stage of characters and sets etc.

The tertiary colour scheme (my personal favourite) uses 3 colours equally spaced around the colour wheel (6 colours apart). This is much less colour restrictive than the other schemes as all 3 colours are so different. Again, often used in the design stages of characters and sets, when a dominating colour is not in the brief.

An important note, colours such as pastels that are lowly saturated (all near neutral colours), do not necessarily need to adhere to colour theory and can be used freely with each other.e

Here is a .png version of the colour wheel, you can import this into your drawing application to quickly pick up colours from.

On another note, I took a better look at my use of blog labels, noticing that they are not used as search tags as on other sites, rather a way to categorize your posts. I've had a little clean up of my labels, so you can now use the labels box at the top right to view posts that you're interested in seeing! 

Until next time! Mat

Hair Do Boompage!

Another day, another ludicrous lie-in... I blame it on the cold that I still have! 


A brand new idea for another 3 minute dawned on me in bad last night, it's still very much in the budding stage, but it's about a pirate girl. I decided to throw together a hair do style-page, not sure that any of them will be the final design, but any I should upload pretty much all development work I do. Keep in mind that the face is just a generic girl face I sketched out, not the definite face of the character:

I actually really like this hair effect, I do it using the same hard-round brush I use for sketching, with opacity and flow set to pen pressure. 


If I had to choose any of the above hair styles it would probably be the top right one, or perhaps the bottom right with the top right's bangs... Another page is needed I feel...
I'm currently also still working on the colour theory blog, but it's raid night tonight so I thought I'd better get something uploaded to keep up this daily streak I've got going!


Oh, short story for you to explain the use of the word 'boompage'. A few years back I was doing some very quick sketches, jotting down ideas and couldn't remember the word 'stylesheet' so just saved it as 'boompage', I of course immediately remembered it was called a style sheet, but boompage has kind of stuck! (I did say it was a short story, and I didn't say it was going to be particularly interesting). So now you know, any stylesheets I do, will probably be titled and labelled as boompage.


Anyway, until tomorrow: good-bye, aloha, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, au revoir, adeus, and all that jazz!

Alien Sketch Cleanup

I admit I got a little carried away last night and today!


Last night I spent a few hours, creating a bunch of backgrounds to import into all my concepts, I'm trying to get away from the plan white backgrounds... Though I'll probably still use fairly plain backgrounds for simple concept sketches.

After I'd created quite a few variations of backgrounds, in various colours. I started playing around with ideas for a more professional looking ratworks signature; the kind that you see on concept studio's. I notice that a lot of studios use the whole name in the signature, not just the logo, and often find a way of incorporating the logo into the name.


I had a play around with some fonts, and some layout ideas, the rat standing on the w in ratworks for example, in the end I found one that I really like... Though I know rob wasn't expecting any changes like this, but now at least we have a choice of which signature to use, I admit I do like the 'stamp' logo we already use, but for more finished looking work I think I'll use this one.

 I'm still working on a decent looking presentation for how I actually arrived at this, and I should have that uploaded in a few days!

In other news, today I decided to try my first finished drawing, and I must say I'm pleased with how he looks finished! I spent about 3-4 hours on this today, I got a little carried away experimenting with a new painting technique I decided to try out. Usually, I spend a long time 'inking' all of the lines in, for a cartoony look, then block in the colours, and then shade. On this I went straight from the sketch (exactly as I uploaded it the other day) to painting and shading straight ontop. The resulting .psd file had a LOT of layers, but I think the finished look is worth the effort (and trauma to my computer's memory). Here's the pic:

The blogspot resizing makes it look a little fuzzy, so please do fullview! The blobs in the top left are the colours I picked using colour theory, these are tertiary complimentary colours. I should really do a blog on the basics of Colour Theory, which I'm still very much in the process of learning.

Until next time! Matty out!

Getting closer with the alien...

As the title says; I did a really quick sketch today of my alien, and have taken quite a liking to the design of this one.

I want a cartoony looking alien, but not one so generic as in my previous sketch. Started out with a tiny thumbnail for a quick idea of build and pose, and then just sketched around it; a very quick and seemingly very effective way of quickly coming up with ideas.

Also thought id add a quick splash of colour... There hasn't been very much so far has there?
I'm sure that will change when I'm slightly closer to having finished designs.


Hope this alien is a little more to your liking Robear... Have you got any suggestions? 

Still suffering from this man-flu (cold), hope it goes before my holiday...

Matty out!

Guards! Guards!

Afternoon all!

A fairly productive day today, got a full beginning middle and end for my guardsman idea, so that's 2 of 3 3 minute ideas all done and dusted, apart from concepts, sketches, research and a presentation... Ok so I have a lot of work to do!


In other news I'm suffering from a pretty nasty cold at the moment, it's one of those colds that's bad enough to be a huge drain and an all-round inconvenience, but not bad enough for me to think that it's flu. All the flu symptoms are there... But I'm getting on with my day, so it must not be flu! The start of the uni year is fast approaching however, having some semblance of a deadline is a huge motivator and my work-rate has noticeably increased at last! (2 blogs in 2 days! I know right?!)

Anyway, the reason for this blog is to show the basic concept sketches I did today for my guards idea, so here they are:

 

 

I already love this new brush! The first image I was trying to get some ideas visualized, it probably makes a lot more sense to me... But hopefully I'll be able to sketch up a finished looking example frame to get an idea of what I actually intend it to look like. The second image is a character conceptual page, I really had no idea how I wanted the guard character to look, he needs to look slightly pathetic, but not totally unlovable.


I found that a great way to get some quick ideas for characters is to very very quickly draw silhouette character thumbnails, the actual silhouette of a character has a huge effect on the appearance, certainly the immediate impression the character gives, so it's a great great great starting point for character design. Plus, the character in this film is (at least at the moment) going to be shown entirely as a silhouette anyway!

I'm really not sure if I should publish my actual idea on the blog, so until I've discussed it in detail with Rob and Jud, I'll just stick to uploading the research and design side of things, not the story side (sorry).


Extra kudos to you if you got the Terry Pratchett reference in the title!

Matty out!

Quickfire Portraits

Hello all!

Kicked into action once again by Rob uploading and making me feel lazy!
I was going to do some speed life drawing like he did, but instead decided to go for speed portraits. So I quickly gathered up a bunch of character portraits (some you may recognize) and started sketching quickly from them.

This was just an exercise for me to get a little reminder of proportion of faces, my cartoony sketching has, I admit, warped my drawing habits. For example, I noticed that I was actually creating much smaller chins / jaws than what is correct proportion (particularly on women). 


Another quick helpful tidbit mostly aimed at Rob:
A way to save yourself some time when 'signing' in photoshop.
1. Open up the logo you sign with.
2. Using the magic wand (w) select the blank space around the image, also select the spaces inside letters are selected etc.
3. Go to Select > Select Inverse. Your logo should now be entirely selected.
4. Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, and select a name for your new brush.


Now your logo will forever live inside your brushes panel, so you can quickly select it, size it as you like and re-colour it with ease. It also doesn't add as much to your file size as importing the actual image.


Enjoy! 


Next time; sketches from my newest idea. All about guards!