James Annandale MSc Animation

 Yesterday I shared a mistake I'd made at a critical stage of designing a sword, I accidently placed the blade around the wrong way. Today I went back to the original drawing and flipped and adjusted this section of the drawing and then proceeded to colour it.  Here's the new sketch... I extended the curved part of the handle and decided to use a different colour and also to finish the blade in a different way. From looking at the style variations I played with when finishing the old design I decided I liked the use of the charcoal on top of the block colour and a thin black outline. You can see an example of this below in the middle column...   The final piece is shown below, I completed it using Procreate.

 As part of my primary project, I wanted to design a sword from rough sketch to polished final illustration. I initially started working up a sketch in Adobe Illustrator but after my progress was slow I decided to choose another design and work in Procreate on my iPad instead. I drew the sketch below referencing a photo I found on Google, here are both pics. Can you spot the huge mistake?... That's right, the blade is facing in the wrong direction!!! Unfortunately I was so focused on drawing a crisp line that I didn't notice, until I'd completed several full coloured designs and laid them next to each other. 'Something doesn't look quite right about that handle' I thought to myself... Lesson learned. It was too late to change the work but I won't make the same mistake again. Here are the finished designs anyway, I wanted to experiment with both block colour and a charcoal texture as well as using no outline, a thin outline and a heavier black outline. I thin

 My lecturer Kieran suggested I collaborate with another one of my fellow students Muhammad to create a DJ booth for a scene in our group project. Muhammad needed drawings to reference so he could model the DJ booth in Maya. It had to fit in with a 1990's theme so I researched DJ decks from the 90's on Pinterest and Google images. Here's are my favourites... I used different parts of these to design the following sketches... The main aim was to be as clear as possible and simplistic, I will post pictures of the 3D versions when they are finished.

  Following on from yesterdays post about the storyboards about the Moon and Spoon symbol and the Hacienda invitation here are the animatics, this is basically where you put your still imagery in sequence and time out how long each move will take. It can be quite tricky and a process of trial and error but will give you a better indication of how long something will take to produce and also a very basic idea of how it will look. Here's the Hacienda... click play on both twice to view... Here's the Moon and Spoon...

 The second part of the story board I've designed and put together for the group project is a sequence inspired by an invitation for the legendary Manchester based club The Hacienda. Above is the inspiration for the following piece, here's the rough story board... In this series of frames the black stripes enter the shot from the bottom left however on our updated story board there was an inconsistency with the flow of the animation from both the previous and the following scene so we decided to reverse it and have them starting at the top right corner the progressing out of the bottom left.  Again I used Procreate on my iPad to put these together, I'll talk about the process I used in a future post. Once I'd finished in Procreate I saved JPG's and imported them into After Effects and made my first animatic using that software. I'll post the results tomorrow. Here's the finished sequence...

  For the last couple of days I've been working in collaboration with a small team of my fellow students Rahul, Heather and Emma to produce a storyboard in preparation for creating an animatic to show at a group presentation with our other class mates. Here's part of my original sketches... I starts with a shot of the entrance to the Barbarella Club, which then transforms into the iconic moon and the spoon symbol associated with Studio 54. The moon leans back and takes a bite from the spoon and morphs into a rotating smiley face, a symbol associated with the rave scene. The end of the sequence was adapted with the removal of the record player and the overall tone of the animatic had been set by some very atmospheric work by Rahul for the start of the storyboard... Everybody on the team has used the above artwork as a style and colour guide to try and create a unified finish so baring this in mind, I worked up my original idea using Procreate on my iPad. Here's the finished