Update Dump

I finally finished my balloon animation earlier this week. I am pretty happy with it, and Michel (our animation teacher) has been infinitely patient and helpful when it came to letting me know what to fix, whenever I could find her.

All that's left to do is to re-shoot the Bouncing Ball and the Bowling Ball on the final BG, to add a few frames to the end of the bowling ball to make it roll off screen, and to add a single frame in before the balloon contacts the box to cushion the impact a bit. All in all, I am happy with it, I and I am looking forward to animating the marine animal project!






Other than the animations, I've really enjoyed working on some of the assignments for Layout and Character Design as well. I'm not very capable with cartoony styles, so I studied the Character Animation Crash Course to get a better grip on it. The result was 'cool cat', my kind of generic lion character for rotations in character design. He came after developing a few other stereotypes and archetypes in lion prides.

After that, we had an some homework from layout class to draw some characters in any situation, with a partial environment.

I had no idea I went in all the wrong directions, but here were my favourites:


Happy Bear


Snooty Poodle


Eager Bird


Girl in Prayer

In the end, we were to choose one to develop into a proper environment. I ended up choosing the girl in prayer, and developed a temple that I had imagined she would travel to/from.


Concept/Sketchy Image


Grid




Final Temple


Something about the temple bothers me, but I can't quite figure out what.
I'm sure I'll understand as I learn more about developing environments.

I find that a lot of information about the place can form itself while you're cleaning up work. I imagined that this is the temple of a earth goddess, a goddess of creation. Bottom half of a snake, like the chinese creation goddess. Behind her, a pantheon of gods were immortalized in gargantuan white sculpture. The aquaducts behind her fill her prayer pool with every rain fall, and in times of heavy rain will overflow the pool into the pit surrounding it.

I imagined that monks and priestesses like the girl I drew would maintain the temple, removing debris but not allowed to perform repairs, as decay is a natural part of the cycle, because eventually even gods must fall. Then I thought, since she's so tiny compared to her environment (my praying girl is the red dot infront of the statue), that I might have to add a monolithic creature to suit it-- A creature that has come to take on the goddess. Just like a boss fight :)

It was a lot of fun to work on, and I'm looking forward to developing it more in the coming assignments, as we are to do different camera angles and framing in the place we've made.

During the weekends, when I'm with my family, I like to doodle creatures. I imagined a giant fluffy mount that I could ride down the street. Complete with little signals on his saddle like that man and his horse I saw on a show once. After I finished figuring out what I wanted him to look like, I had to draw his skeleton in, just to get a better idea of how he'd move and how he could be articulated.



Thanks so much for reading through this!

I really hope to improve on all of this very soon.