Sea Rescue Project.

For our final group project last year we were given sound snipets and then told to animate to them, they were stories of rescue at sea. We chose eventually to go really dark with ours and kill off a couple of children, to put it bluntly.  We never finished the film because of post production issues.

We chose to do ours in cut out style as there is something really charming about it, I drew out the anamatic after Paris and I deliberated over the shots, we got this thrown together quite quickly and after talking with ann made some massive character changes and plot changes. With the German Expressionism influencing our film with other animations such as the Cabinet of Dr Calagari I went ahead with character design and drawing up the waves while Paris did the backgrounds. We did all the character animation in the stop motion room green screened under a line tester, it was a fun but time consuming endeavour. Paris and I then edited it all together on After effects and Andrea tried to put in some 3d smoke on Maya, some issues were had with this but in the future i would like to get it finished. I also tested out some faces with toon boom.

Here are a few of the shots, as i said it was never finished so sadly there is no whole film to watch.

Atmospheric..

Spoiler, they die. 

Probably my personal favourite. 

You know what, i was pretty chuffed with that font! 

So there you go, something to waste your eye energy on. 

A new direction - German Expressionism

We have been in a bit of a rut without Sea Rescue project in that we had the ideas and the styles and the concepts but just no way in which to knit them together that would create an animation and invoked the dark, uncomfortable mood we were going for.
 
This was until we had our talk with Ann last week on our presentations we have to give at the end of the project about how they History and Theory unit of animation influenced our finished film. Obviously, without a finished film this is very hard to consider. Back to the point, Ann mentioned to us that we had to full dedicate ourselves to being really dark or really humorous, and considering our story has very few opportunities to be amusing we went with the first suggestion. She mentioned the influence that German Expressionism had on horror films throughout time, and even today with the likes of Tim Burton, so we decided to take a look and us this style to completely change the visual appearance of our animation and hopefully the mood.
 
I looked at a silent film online, one of the first iconic classics of German expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Everything was generally so creepy from the angular pointy scenery to the pale, tired, creepy looking characters. Exaggerating some features with angular make up or dark shadows really takes and ordinary character and makes them look a little bit off, which is exactly the type of thing we are trying to achieve with the narrator. (Source 1 and 2.)
 

Source 1.

Source 2.

 
I intend on doing a lot of research into these general styles over the next few days in hope of coming up with some characters that have layers to them influenced by German expressionism and the creepy, mysteriousness we want them to have about them.

Character Designing.

Here are the as close to final designs that i have come up with as of so far, obviously we still need to discuss them as a group so i imagine tweaks will be made. I wanted to go for quite a lanky stype because i thought this would look great for the end scene of our animation where they are underwater and it would allow us to move them in a very smooth, flowy, style. Also they are children, and children are still growing so always look a little awkward.

Narrator, scale, colour. 

Children, older girl, younger lad. 

Sea Project Anamatic 1.0 - The roughest of the rough. Except sandpaper, that's pretty rough.

Our first ever anamatic for the Sea Rescue Project, i understand that this is late but so is my Chinese food so i guess we all lose a little bit.

We admittedly did not leave enough time to put this anamatic together, having so many separate ideas we had not really got in complete order and put them together yet, therefore we drew this up in hope that it would show the story line we were trying to reach for, something serious and perhaps a bit dark.

These images were only drawn up in blue pencil and then the black i put on at the end on photoshop, with a mouse may i add.

Anyways, enjoy and i hope you are able to understand from this the sort of mood we are going to try and obtain. Cheers.

Well done for getting this far, here is your reward. Anamatic 1.0 - Rough

Sea Rescue Project Transcript.

"It was a beautiful day. I remember it specifically. Got down onto the beach after having a nice walk, and uh, sat on the sand dune and just happened to look up and down the beach. Just scanning and looking for the best wave where I think I could go in. What caught my eye the most was two children actually in the water. They were trying to swim but were actually going backwards, very very fast. And when I mean backwards they were going out to sea. Erm it was probably one of the strongest rips I've seen and unfortunately those kids were in it."

So that's is, 30 seconds long with a bit of an awkward ending. We are thinking about ways to work around this by adding extra sounds and a change of mood at the end, this will give us some extra time and the ability to incorporate an ending to this story.

Character Designing - Progress.

Over the Easter break i've been working one some Character designs for our Sea Project animation, here are some of my ideas and progression towards ideas that are nearly ready to submit as a possible final idea. It's been fun doing this it's sort of been my first taste of designing a character to fit into a story and we have agreed that we all like the style of the final image here so that shall be what i work with.

Semester 2 - Sea Test

Hello world, we have just returned to proper lectures after our deadlines from before Christmas and here is the result of one of our latest tasks. We are yet to be completely briefed but our next project is mainly based around the sea. (Don't quote me, but i think this might have something to do with the fact we live in Cornwall...) We were asked to create a small test animation of the sea in a way we wanted. I chose to have a whack at flash because it's the program i have undoubtedly spent the least time on. So here is my first real animation on flash. I present to you, a crashing wave.