James Annandale MSc Animation

 With the imminent arrival of my baby boy (anytime from next Thursday) and the looming deadline for this semester fast approaching, I've had to limit any further activity/participation with the group project. The team have been brilliantly supportive and understanding and have stepped in to take over any last scenes that might have required my input. The final job I was tasked with was working on the transition from Eve's dance scene into the moon and spoon scene that I had originally come up with for the storyboards, which is now going to be animated by Yutong. Here is the original artwork for the first frame of the moon and spoon scene... Emma was in charge of creating the colour script for the project and took the above frame and created the following variations... As a team we chose to go with the colour version 4 (bottom right). Eve kindly started working on the transition from her scene into this one, I took the version 4 and using Procreate, split it into two layers. Fir...

As mentioned at the end of the last post, I'm getting to a point where I'm constantly thinking of new ideas and adjustments and although I intended to move on and design the arms etc something about the upper body still wasn't quite right. The abdomen was looking quite plain so I thought it might be cool to try adding some more blades seeing as this is a running theme throughout this design... This added more interest to the area but I still wasn't sure about the bulky shape. I'd considered  widening the top part of the pelvis to match the bottom of the stomach area but it was still too square and blocky, from the start I'd wanted to use more triangular shapes and diagonal lines where possible and this led to the decision to try reshaping the front of the upper body. Here is the first attempt... This worked from a front view but from the side and three quarter it still looked square so I decided to go one step further and cut away the bottom section at an angle ...

 Now that I had developed the design of the head I wanted to turn my attention to the rest of the body. As much as I liked these different body parts when viewed separately, when placed together a number of problems screamed at me. The upper body wasn't working but also the whole thing was too static and upright and not even close to conveying the kind of attitude or stance I was aiming to achieve. I had to rejig the posture, so I decided to start by tilting the lower half (pelvis and wheel) forward (anti-clockwise) slightly which I hoped would accentuate the diagonals and make it feel more dynamic. I also pondered over making the front part wider to match the upper body however before doing this I wanted to take a look at the chest and shoulders. Nothing about this part of the design was working, even where I'd suggested an arm socket might be placed (next to the shoulder pad) wasn't correct. I was just about to start sketching thumbnails for a new upper body shape when I ...

  After drawing up some initial sketches for the lower half of the Robo Samurai body and placing these in shot with the upper body and head it became very obvious that there was still a lot of work to do. Starting at the top, even though I'd not long finished designing the head I felt that it needed some more refinement. The peak in particular just wasn't working for me so I thought I'd start by getting rid of the shapes on the rain guard and having the blades stretch right across the head starting right at the front.  Although I liked this development when viewed from the front, it wasn't as appealing from the side and 3/4 view so I decided to try taking out the rain guard all together and seeing how that would look... This led to me having to draw in the tops of the brow and face mask but was in my opinion instantly much better. Now I was faced with a dilemma, the reason for the re-design was to not fall into the trap of creating a look that was too similar to many ot...

 Having finished a design for the full head I decided to bypass the arms for time being as I've been really looking forward to working on the lower half of the Robo Samurai body which I'm going to use sports motorbikes as inspiration and reference material. I collected the images below as a starting point... I really like the dynamic, sharp and angular design of these bikes and want to incorporate that into my character design, I'm particularly drawn to the lime green motorbike in the top-right corner above and the red one in the top-left. I want to include head lights in the design as I think this could make for an interesting illustration as well as combat tool as far as warfare is concerned. The one thing that isn't present in these bikes is a more heavy duty, off-road bike tyre which I'd like to use as the Robo Samurai in my mind would be charging through rugged terrain as well as city streets. I also want to use the tail and back end in my design. I made a star...

  Above are six variations on the original design I came up with for the Robo Samurai helmet, however as mentioned at the end of my last post - although I felt these were strong and somewhat dynamic drawings they were all a bit too similar to many other Samurai designs out there. So, I decided to start again referencing motorcycle helmets as a starting point before combining these with aspects of the design above. First thing I did was gather a collection of mainly modern, sports bike motorcycle helmets and studied the lines and shapes used in their design, these are shown below...  This collection shows a selection of different surface textures, styles of visor and overall shape, some having a flat horizontal base and others a more dynamic and aggressive angular 'jaw' line. I had again intended to concentrate my designs on just the top, sides and back of the Robo Samurai design but was instantly taken with the classic motorcycle helmet top-middle-right and could see how this ...

 After designing the main upper body for the Robo Samurai I then decided to move on to the head which is mainly made up of the helmet and face mask. At this stage the plan was to design each part separately so I chose to start with the helmet as this would give me the overall shape of the head which I could then use to give me an indication of of how big to make the face. I looked at my Samurai mood boards for reference and inspiration and drew the follow page of initial sketches shown below... Here I tried to vary as many aspects as I could, starting top left I altered the width and angle of the sides of the helmet as well as the shape and placement of the horns, the shape of the ridge/edge of the helmet above the eyes and the texture of the surface of the helmet. From this selection of designs I decided to develop the design bottom right and experiment with trying different shaped horns. The results are below... I'm really happy with the variation in these designs and was intendi...