Finished Short

Here's the finished version of the Beryl the Peril short film that I submitted.
In other news: I won a DNAD award for it. Wowzers!

Walk Cycles

Walk cycles are hard.
I've re-read the section for walk cycles in the Survival Kit over and over and they still prove to be a pain. I am getting the hang of them though, and here are two examples: one in 2D and one in 3D.

Beryl: In the Flesh

Here is the puppet of Beryl I made in ceramics.
It is awful and I hate it.
She doesn't move very well and her leg is falling off.
That being said, I am glad I at last tried - experience is always cool.

A Pencil... made in Maya

Yeah this is a bit late, huh? I honestly forgot to upload this when I made it.
Here's an object I created in Maya, a pencil to be precise.
It's very basic, but for a very early practise, it's fine I suppose.
Could use some shading and colour though.

Animating in Maya - Walk Cycles

Today we learned how to animate a basic walk cycle in Maya using the Moom character model.
I still find the programme to be quite daunting and complicated to use, but I think that I am slowly getting the hang of it.

The walk cycle bellow is nothing special, of course with it being a test. It needs some more "personality" (i.e. more bouncing, flipping of the foot, dynamic head movement etc). That, and one of the hands is a bit fidgety (possibly due to some slight confusion I faced when trying to rotate certain joins). Aside from that, you can easily tell that Moom is walking, so as a first try, it's fine.

Today we focused on walk cycles in traditional and 2D animation.
This was the practise Haraldur and I made in Adobe Photoshop.

Animating in Maya - Getting Started

Today I was taught the basic tools for key framing, easing and object manipulation (squash and stretch) in Maya.

I would have liked to include the short bouncing ball I made but I couldn't get it to render properly. Baby steps, I guess.

LAUAN404 - Week 7

During the final week before submission, I animated two sequences from my animatic in TVPaint.
This was my fist time using TVPaint properly, as I had only casually dabbled with it in the past. This week was a good educational experience for me, as I learned more about the programme as I animated; in future, this will be my tradigital method of choice. The intro of the short film was done in stop motion via Dragon Frame. It was a small and quick addition to the finished product but I feel that it adds a lot of character.

I added the animated segments into the animatic, and after adding a few finishing touches here and there, it was finished by the following Monday.

LAUAN404 - Week 6

I spent this week working on my storyboard and animatic.
The storyboard was fun to make and it was satisfying to put it all together in Adobe Premier with all the proper timing to see how it will play out. However, I think I have gone overtime and it needs to be edited and trimmed down, which may be a problem.

I also produced a brief powerpoint presentation based on my development process during this module.

LAUAN404 - Week 5

This week we created a character profile in our sketch books in order to properly solidify what our character's personalities were and what they're all about.

I decided to make Beryl a troublemaker that craves the attention of getting caught as whenever she tries to make the lives of those around her a misery, she only makes things better for them instead without them even realising.

We also jotted down ideas for our short film and organised them into sections which would help us with story boarding during the following week.

LAUAN404 - Week 4

This week I worked on the backgrounds for a hypothetical Beryl reboot.
I wanted to not have any black outlines for the backgrounds so as to help the characters stand out more. I also made sure to give each location a distinct colour scheme to match the tone of the environments. With the examples I gave in the sheet, the classroom is in blue and purples and the street has different variations of green.

I also drew two supporting characters: a teacher and a friend of Beryl's.
Both of these characters will play a role in the short animated sequence I will eventually produce at the end of this module.

LAUAN404 - Week 3

After finishing the turnaround, I went straight to work on creating a dynamic poses sheet.
We all received some practise in drawing dynamic poses by studying line of action and drawing a set of poses we made from a live model (thanks Ben).

A lot of this helped me with my final poses sheet and I also included some exaggerated facial expressions that were a ton of fun to draw. Additionally, we had to include a silhouette of our character to see if the design was eye catching and unique enough.

LAUAN404 - Week 2

This week I decided on a design for Beryl that I liked and developed a turnaround sheet.
Classic Beryl seemed to be wearing a school uniform from the time period so I have given her a more modern look, complete with a shortened tie to match her trouble making personality. Her shirt is dyed pink after a failed attempt to turn it red in the washer, and she has scribbled all over it with notes and plans for various pranks she wants to pull off.

LAUAN404 - Week 1

Our new assignment is to "reboot" a female character from either the Beano or Dandy comic strips for a new audience. We were allowed to be as different from the original character as we so wished as long as we kept the name.

From the list of characters provided, I decided on doing "Beryl the Peril", mainly because the others didn't grab my attention all that well. I spent the week researching and analysing old pieces of Beryl-related media and made a few initial sketches of what my redesign could look like.

Truck