Result!

When it came to shooting I ended up deciding on utilising the time-lapse function on Dragon. The sheer amount of objects moving meant it would have taken far too long to manually capture given the time I had left.

Anyway, here's the video~

Overall I'm quite pleased with how this has turned out. Since this is my first piece of stop-motion it was quite a challenge to get everything moved in only 20 seconds, and the panic of trying to make everything move at once is clear in areas where the movements are jerky and the composition of the objects generally messy. It seems I hadn't quite matched up the amount of frames needed to capture my idea, and so there were many frames left over in which I had to improvise. However I feel these parts actually turned out better for it after having gotten into the swing of it all.

Another problem was the impracticality of the gloves that this whole idea sprung up from! I never took into account that it'd be awkward to place cards and move the little E4 logos around with them on, so often the placement of them is very haphazard... especially on the sunglasses and in the pages of the book.

With more time I definitely would have followed my plan exactly and made the movements more neat and fluid. That way the drawn part at the very end could have been a lot more interesting and detailed as I'd planned.

Still, if time allows it I may be able to add visual effects such as grains and lighting as I'd intended initially; also I could use camera movements to focus on the best parts of the animation and make it all more dynamic.

Further development...

After gathering all my objects, and with shooting imminent, I played around with them on a piece of board to get a better idea of how I want the general formation of the 'set' to look once it's all together (bear in mind my actual background will be black).

This first image was my initial layout as I'd sketched it in my roughs, but somehow I wasn't pleased with how it looked. The addition of the pieces of bone and the Ouija board meant I had to rethink the layout, so I messed about further and settled on the next image.

 I think the balance of objects is much nicer here; also the addition of the glasses works well. The next thing is to decide how all these objects will move as I lay them out, which will already be there when shooting begins, how long they'll remain in shot for and so on. I'll make a separate storyboard for this in order to have a clear idea in mind when it comes to shooting.

Another way to add depth to this idea, I feel, would be to hide the E4 logo in different areas so the audience have to spot them. 

Places I can hide the logo:

• Inside the matchbox,
• among the pages of the book, 
• appearing from behind the car,
• flickering beneath where the glass marker lies on the Ouija board,
• on one or more of the playing cards

If there's enough going on so that the audience might spot something new on a second viewing, rather than just building up to one big and obvious reveal, then the final outcome will be a lot more exciting as a whole.

Animation and timing.

Today I changed a walk cycle to a run, and experimented with timing and posing in order to create convincing movements in a character.

To change the speed of the initial walk cycle I opened the Timeline window.

By entering the 0.5 value I doubled the speed of the walk.

After seeing how fast the character moved I doubled the speed again, making sure to adjust the number of frames in the loop each time.

To make the walk into a run I accentuated certain movements, for example made the main body sway side to side more dramatically and raised it. I also made the arms pull back and extend more, and raised each leg to show it leaving the ground. That gave the character a unique, rushed-looking run.

Outcome of Character Design unit.

An update of how my character for the character design unit ended up looking. As late as I am in updating this, I'd like to reflect on how pleased I was with the outcome. The character ended up well fleshed-out both in style and substance; he's definitely a personality I feel I could write some interesting and funny short stories about in the future.

As far as translating the design to 3D was concerned, time constraints meant I was unable to fully build the character; however I was able to build the parts necessary to rig the entire body. Here you can see that I was able to give my character the reclining posture that I tended to draw him with by adding extra controllers in the spine. The only things I slipped up on were the head and foot controllers- fortunately this is something that could easily be fixed at a later date by changing the direction my character faces and re-organising the hierarchies. Overall I was pleased with how he translated to a 3D model, and was able to animate him with a basic walk cycle for the deadline.

General Inspiration - Tokyo Plastic

I was highly entertained while researching some of the productions by this team while also slightly disturbed. All in a good way, though. I do have a certain love for the creepy and gruesome, after all.

On watching this for the first time, I was almost put off by how sickeningly cute this was. As beautiful as the smooth, shiny style was, it seemed far too much. 

Needless to say, I was surprised (a little more pleasantly than I'd like to admit) when the grumpy creature in the sky decided to make the little critters explode with some sort of heat ray. I find it both disturbing and amusing that the sun continues to beam happily in the background while the inhabitants of this cute and colourful planet screech in pain. Even their skulls are adorable. Overall, a genius idea. I approve.

Another somewhat disturbing sequence, this little fellow appears to have a mouth that smiles at the eye-creature, but it in fact turns out to be an eye socket by the end. There's something disturbing about creatures that are nothing but masses of flesh and human parts, and for that I like the design all the more  - along with the fact that the switch from mouth to eye socket is very cleverly done.

A more genuinely cute ad campaign. I found these two characters very endearing - I loved the shoe details like the laces and fabric types. It reminds me somewhat of the sackboy design from Little Big Planet.

General Inspiration - David Oreilly

I recently watched 'Please Say Something' by David O'Reilly, and instantly fell in love with the creepily adorable characters.

This walk cycle was highly expressive considering the simplicity of the character's limbs. The bobbing of her head from side to side was cute and endearing.

I really liked the geometric, blocky shapes that gave the whole story a cold and clinical atmosphere, along with the 3/4 view of most of the scenes, which lent it a retro video game sort of look.

I liked the use of fragmented, nonsensical letters to portray sadness/illness.

On top of that, I found the story very touching and may or may not have shed a single manly tear. It was a typical enough plot, but the use of animals and switching of the cat and mouse role was very clever and thought-provoking.