James Annandale MSc Animation

  As part of my primary project I want to start designing and building assets. Usually the research will be more specific to a particular culture or theme however the main aim for this first attempt was both to go through the process of first gathering images and then drawing and iterating on one particular design before creating it in Adobe Illustrator. I chose to create a sword design, here's a mood board of images I gathered... From this I went on to sketch up a sheet of broad designs with contrasting shapes for the handles and blades. I then chose one to develop looking first at the handles and then ideas for the blade. I chose a simplistic handle and combined it with the fourth blade. Looking at it now, it looks more like a dagger but never mind. The final design is below, I will post the completed colour design when finished in another post.

As part of our second semester we have to take part in a group project with a brief provided by a company or studio. We're not actually allowed to say who we're working with I can say they are based  in Dundee and we've tasked with the job of creating a promo video to promote their business. The video is to be around 1-2 minutes in length and inspired by the history and design of night clubs from the 1960's till present. Some of the clubs we're looking at are New York's world famous 'Studio 54', Manchester's 'The Hacienda' and 'The Ministry of Sound'. The mood board below shows influences based on 'The Bamba Issa' and 'Space Electronic' clubs. We were provided with visuals (a list of objects) and info to help inspire our work, here are some of my favourites... I used this list as inspiration for the following story boards, it started of as one transition and developed into a sequence of eleven. Here is a list (in order...

  Mythologist Joseph Campbell once wrote 'Follow your bliss'... With this in mind and as mentioned in the last post I've fallen out of love with my original idea which was to animate a two-minute piece of motion graphics inspired by one of my poems. I started story boarding rough ideas but found a lack of flow and interest in developing it and when I started researching styles and look for the design I found I was more drawn to the illustration and design process, rather than how I was going to animate. I came across this style of work on a psychology website called '16 Personalities' and was instantly captivated by it. Then I discovered an online tutorial teaching particular workflow using Illustrator and that has influenced the direction I now want to go. Also, considering the original idea of fusing the art movement of Futurism into my animation I've decided it was a little too experimental and my time would be better spent playing to my strengths such as dra...

For my main project I intended to create a two-minute piece of motion graphics inspired by my poem 'Wandering Through Timeless Spaces', which is about re-centering yourself by connecting with nature. It's starts with the sounds of a stroll through a woodland area or forest, you can listen to it by clicking the link below: https://soundcloud.com/the_artist_explorer/wandering-through-timeless-spaces I wanted to create a visual for this so started to research images of trees which would work with the line 'staring through the densely packed trees'. Here's a mood board I created for inspiration: I decided to develop a sketch of the middle photo (with the vivid green) and would vary the position of the trees to give the impression of wandering through the woodland. I wanted to use reference of Silver Birch as I thought this would work well aesthetically. Here's the first sequence of frames: This was created in Adobe Photoshop, I'm still learning the basics bu...

As part of my second semester I'm looking into Futurist paintings for inspiration and ideas for creating short experimental clips of animation. I'd like to try and implement ideas and concepts from Futurism into the design and execution of these pieces of animation but to start with I thought I'd have a go at animating one of my favourite Futurist paintings, 'Forces of the Bend' by Tullio Crali. As dynamic in design as it is bold in it's use of colour, I have created a basic storyboard of the painting by splitting it up into layers using Adobe Photoshop. Here I have imagined a car speeding around the corner and interacting with the giant lines of force.  I'm yet to try and animate this but when I do I'll be importing the layers from Photoshop into Adobe After Effects. I will keep you updated with a follow up once I've had chance to develop this idea.

Hello there, my name is James Annandale. Welcome to my University course blog, I'm an artist based in Fife, Scotland and I'm currently studying an MSc in Animation & Visual FX at The University of Dundee. I'll be using this blog as both a journal and a platform to document my progress through the remaining seven months of my MSc. The main aim is to get creative using Adobe software After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere as well as produce some 2D animation/paintings to incorporate into my main project, a two-minute animated piece of motion graphics inspired by one of my poems, 'Wandering Through Timeless Spaces' which you can listen to by clicking the link below. https://soundcloud.com/the_artist_explorer/wandering-through-timeless-spaces Being new to After Effects and not having animated in over a decade I'm planning to make some short experimental animations before tackling the main project, the first of these I'll share in my next post.