Tuesday 27 October 2009

The different colours of the rainbow! Well, not really.

As Emma also did, I decided to come up with a bunch of colours that reflect what I want to achieve with Wee Eck, as with the real London Zoo I wanted to be authentic in what Wee Eck wears (with the added kilt of course!), so the colours are mostly different shades of green, whilst the tartan mostly consists of different shades of red (as recommended by kuler!)

Below I've attached a colour wheel, which luckily for me are pretty much opposite to the colours Emma will be using for Minnie, which I must say, is fantastic.



More in the next few days!

Sunday 18 October 2009

The style of claymation

Since the style of the characters of the film must be tailored to look like they were done in "claymation", Here are 2 images showing both a real claymation piece, and also a piece made to mimic the style on the computer.



Wallace and Gromit



Flushed Away

When Aardman created Flushed Away, they tried to retain the claymation look, but in my honest opinion they should've gone further with adding more textures to the characters. The end result paled in comparison to their claymation efforts, aside from featuring their trademark character style. When we create our models we'll ensure the organic claymation look remains, made possible with the textures on the characters showing fingerprints.

And now here's the moment I add pretty much one of my favourite scenes from any animated film, I would embed it for easier use but it's sadly disabled!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUEoLn2NWcM

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Wee Eck McGlone

Ah wow, first proper post eh?! Good to finally post here with something meaningful and useful instead of my rather pathetic welcome post! I've decided the best course of action is to outline who exactly Wee Eck McGlone is, and what he actually does at the London Zoo!

Information Given To Us In The Character Brief
Name: Wee Eck McGlone
“London Zoo’s long suffer head keeper sixty, bald, curmudgeonly, Scottish, fiercely patriotic and obsessive about sweeping up dung”.

My Adaptation Of The Character (Liable to change)
Name: Wee Eck McGlone
Age: 61
Occupation: Zoo Keeper
Personality: Kind, shy, caring, intricate, and will stop at nothing to get the job done!

Bio: A sixty one year old Scottish Zoo Keeper, who will stop at nothing to keep the place clean and the animals in check! Likes to clean all around the zoo, but most notably likes to ensure the place is dung free! He is fiercly patriotic and wears a Scottish tartan whilst on duty. He is mostly bald, but what hair he does have left is slowly fading away. He still retains his moustache.

With this in mind it gives me a good idea of how the character should look, and act. Sketches soon to follow.

To further help the development of the character, I've taken images from throughout the internet displaying the certain character likenesses I'd like to portray in him.







Information about Emma's Minnie character can be found here!

Monday 12 October 2009

The Brief

Brief C: Character Design

“We would like your students to design and animate some characters for us for a potential animated advertisement for London Zoo. We are thinking about using a visual style that reflects traditional “Claymation” techniques but will be generated using CG processes. The characters should be worked up from the following list:”

Willie Billiams – “A hyperactive nine year old on his first visit to London Zoo with an obsessive interest in creepy crawlies.”
Pocahontas Billiams – “Willie’s sister, she’s seven years old but much more relaxed and more knowing than her sibling. She wants to be a gorilla.”
Wilhemina Billiams – “Willie and Pocahontas’s grandmother, she thinks everything smells bad and is worried that a chimp or one of those nasty bonobos might escape and “Poo in her hat.””
Wee Eck McGlone – “London Zoo’s long suffering head keeper sixty, bald, curmudgeonly, Scottish, fiercely patriotic and obsessive about sweeping up dung.”
Cornelius – “A middle aged silver back gorilla, the most civilised and sensible occupant of the zoo by far.”

“Your students should consider the following points when working through their character designs:”

“If they work in 3D then they should concentrate on two characters from the list per animator.”
“If they work in 3D then they should be using one of the major 3D packages, i.e. Maya, Lightwave, or Max. The characters should be fully modelled to a maximum resolution of about 100,000 polygons, decent texturing is vital, we won’t accept a model alone at this stage. The model should be rigged”
“We expect to see support work on paper, development drawings and character sheets that should include orthogonal views, i.e. front, back, top, and side, and a more expressive drawing of the character in a typical pose.”
“We would like to see some expressive animation sequences that demonstrate the functionality of the rig and also character performance.”

Just to note this is a group project, so both myself and Emma will each make a character for our character design project, and then later animating both into an animation. Hopefully with our combined effort we can make an animation piece that shows off our characters, nicely rigged, textured, and most importantly animated well!

Thursday 8 October 2009

Welcome to ze Blog!

To welcome you, here's an inspiring piece of animation.

Which actually has no connection to the project that me and Emma are working on whatsoever.