Inspiration /1 :Colour concept

After just having my interim critique for my Convergence/Divergence project (and also my last critique of level 5), I am doing some research to help me further develop and inspire my work over this next week. My next aim is to start creating animated sequences that can go towards my final outcome, introducing colour and texture.

This is the work of John Agnew, who creates wonderful coloured paintings that focus on the theme of his book: Painting the Secret World of Nature. I really like his use of bright colours and compositions, which will appeal to my intended audience of children.


Their are numerous colours that can be depicted from the rhino painting, such as yellow and purple, which are not necessarily associated with the colour of a rhino, and I want to play upon this aspect in my own work. To capture my audience's attention I will be using bright colours and building upon the theme of fantasty, unicorns and the secret world of nature.

Transformation trial 2

I have added a few extra frames to make the transition of the rhino into unicorn look more smooth. Although I still like it looking sketchy to make it seem more analogue.

My next aim is to start creating textures using various hand rendered methods and materials for the skin and background. I also need to plan some background ideas with some concept art, inspired by some of the art created for the Lion King. Examples will follow when I have scanned the images from the book to my computer.

Transformation Trial 1

Using Adobe Flash I have done a test trial on the merging of a rhino into unicorn. Its quite jittery and I think that some more frames need to be added in between to make the transition more smooth.

Practises using digital methods.

I had a go at rotoscoping a scene from the BBC's "Africa" over the weekend. It's just a rough animation but it serves quite well as a way of animating the rhino's movement in a realistic way.

I actually quite like the sketchy feel to it, as it makes it more authentic and analogue. This was created by drawing digitally, but I would also like to try it out with analogue drawings. However by drawing each individual scene, it will take a lot of time, and this worries me with only 4 weeks remaining to create my animation. Therefore I am tempted to create my line based animation using digital methods, and playing around with hand rendered textures that I can then import and combine for my final outcome. This will also allow me to screen print and continue my practise in this area, as I hope to get a degree in Illustration, specialising in print making.

Intended audience outlet.

To expand upon my idea of showcasing my animation on children's tv channels, I found this competition by Nickelodeon:

Animated Shorts Program

If I can get my animating skills up to scratch and produce something I feel quite proud of, maybe I can enter this next year, as this submission has passed by already.

On this page, they also mention other outlets where the winning animation will be shown, which I feel is very appropriate for my own work. For example on air, on the website and on an app. This makes it accessible to a much wider audience who have interests across the technological spectrum.

We live in a world of unseeable beauty.

I've been having trouble trying to find a context for my animation. Have no fear though, I think I have finally found it! It takes the form of a TED video by Louie Schwartzberg, titled: Hidden miracles of the natural world.  

"We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. (TED, 2014)

By looking at unseen worlds, we recognise that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards.

Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives." (Schwartzberg, 2014)

Here is an exert from my Learning Agreement about my audience:

My intended audience will be children who are interested in wildlife, but I hope this animation can also be a tool to introduce and inspire all children to explore the natural world. The ideal placement for my animation would be on kid’s area of wildlife related websites, for example National Geographic, as an interactive and fun video to watch. It could also appear as a short animation before programs on kid’s channels such as Nickelodeon and CBBC. 

The idea is therefore to create a fun animation that explores the hidden world of nature. The narrative will be simple and mainly focus on the transformation of rhinos into unicorns after the sun sets, and the people have left. 

It also highlights rhinos, which may encourage children to find out more about them, leading on to the themes of conservation and the problems that rhinos currently face.

Animating

Over the last week, I have had the privilege to participate in various animating workshops.

Last tuesday for example, I took part in a rotoscoping workshop, where I videoed myself swishing my hair from side to side. The animating aspect, is created by opening the video in Adobe Photoshop and converting it into frames. I chose to create 24 seconds per frame, which is actually quite a lot and I still haven't gotten round to finishing the animation, so maybe next time I can get away with 12 frames per second, or something in between. You can put all these layers into one folder. In another folder, create a new layer to match the layers of the video, and draw over each frame on these new layers. When you then hide the video layers, you are left with an animated sequence of your drawings.

These are some of the layers I have done all shown together:

Down the right hand side you can see all the layers. On the bottom is all the frames. Each new layer will be correspond to each frame, so when played, the drawn images will look animated.

And below is how far I have gotten. I have drawn 39 frames so far.

I feel this particular style might be useful in depicting the movements of the rhinos, by using the footage provided in the BBC Africa program of rhinos at the watering hole during night. This scene was particularly influential to my animation ideas as a basis for the setting and scene.

I have also participated in an After Effect workshop where I drew a very rubbish drawing of a rhino, drawing each moving limb separately and very simply. When transferred into After Effect, these limbs can then be moved accordingly, to create the appearance of animation. Here is my incredibly rubbish animation: (I suppose you have to start somewhere.)

And the last one is an animation I created using Adobe Flash. This was a workshop with alumni student of Illustration at the Arts University Bournemouth, Jonny Clapham. I like the techniques involved in using Flash, although it is more suited to graphic illustration. This has got me thinking that maybe working digitally may benefit this project more than creating the images by hand, as it seems it will be more time consuming. This is something I will have to test out through a series of day workshops I give myself, to create a moving character by means of analog vs digital, and how much I can achieve with each using the same process of animation. Anyway for now, here is my animation using Flash: