From Script to Screen - Art Of

From Script to Screen - Character Production Designs

From Script to Screen - Character Biographies

From Script to Screen - Character Concept Art

From Script to Screen - Online Greenlight Review 2

Character Design - Fourth Lesson

In our last character design class we looked at designing animals. After researching the different anatomies of various animals, we worked on combining all of these traits to make a completely new animal.

Character Design - Third Lesson

In our third character design lesson we looked at creating designs for inanimate objects. I decided to make a weapon for the character Ralph from Wreck-it-Ralph.

After this exercise we looked at anthropomorphism. We had to make characters from different objects from a certain room, and I was given utility room:

Character Design - Second Lesson

In our second character design lesson we looked at how form follows function and the difference between creating female and male characters, as well as the basic proportions that a design should follow. Here are the notes and drawings I made for that lesson:

Toolkit - X-Sheets & Lip Syncing

In Nat's class last friday we did lip syncing for the first time. I thought it was really fun, especially because I've never done it before! We also learned about x-sheets. Nat set us the task to pick an audio clip from a website called the 11 Second Animation Club, and then animate the lip sync to go along with it. I picked a clip they published a couple of months ago from Star Wars, and started to plan it out on the x-sheet template Nat had given us. Here's my sheet:

To help me with the mouth sketches that I drew out, I went online and looked for a diagram with all of the mouth positions for different sounds, and I found this one which was really helpful.

The link to the website below also helped and gave me some good tips for my first time lip syncing!

http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/lipSync.htm

After I finished my x-sheet I used Adobe Animate to make a start on the animation. I imported my sound file in and used the frames I'd written down on my sheet as a guide... However I noticed that I hadn't got my planning completely accurate, so once I'd drawn the frames I had to reshuffle them a bit to make it actually look right. Here's a sketched out version of my animation that I managed to complete in the lesson. It still needs a bit of tweaking, there's a couple of mouth movements that are a little bit out of time. But for now, it's a good start!

Now I've finished the sketch stage, I want to add some more detail to the character's acting, because at the moment he's just stood like a statue. Hopefully that won't take too long to do, and I can move on to drawing up a cleaner version.

Character Design - First Lesson

Today was our first character design lesson. I learnt a lot from the presentation and activities today, and I made a lot of notes so instead of typing everything out I thought I'd put images in of all of the notes I have!

As you can see we covered lots of different subjects like archetypes, and style. The first exercise was to take a character and use shapes to make them look different. As I explained in my notes,  there are three main shapes that we use to make characters: circles, squares and triangles. I was given The Hulk as my character, and since he's already square, I tried to make him more circular, and then more triangular.

For the second exercise, we had to change the style of my character. As you can see below, I chose Steven from Steven Universe and tried to make him a little more detailed/realistic!

I really enjoyed this lesson and I'm looking forward to the next one - character design is something I'm really interested in learning more about.

2017

Every new year I like to look back on the work I made during those 365 days! Here are some of my favourites from 2017...

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Toolkit - Monster Orthographic Views

Today in Simon's class we carried on with our monster designs, taking the one we did in Illustrator into Photoshop. We were shown how to do the orthographic views for a character, and I had fun making mine in different views. Unfortunately, because my Beatnik monster wasn't too detailed, the orthographic views don't vary too much. Here is the finished product:

And also a Beatnik bunny because I finished a little early!

Toolkit - Illustrator Lessons 1&2

Following on from the alien designs I made a few weeks ago, we began work on making the drawings digital in Illustrator. I found it a very interesting task and I'm not a big fan of Illustrator, and I also missed lesson one, which is where the class drew out the outline of the monster character using the pen tool. I've used the pen tool previously in college, so it was a little easier to catch up with everyone else in the second lesson.

In the second lesson from this Friday, we worked on colouring our characters. We used the live paint tool to easily fill in block colours for the monster designs, just like using the bucket tool in Photoshop. I quite enjoyed doing something new, although I struggled a bit with putting shadows and highlights onto my character. I'm not quite finished with the details, but here's what I have so far:

I also worked on some different colour variations of my character, shown below.

I'd like to finish my monster's shadows and highlights before next lesson so I'll be ready for the next stage. I'm excited to get to the finished product!

Toolkit - Maya Lessons 1&2

Our first Maya lesson was just a small introduction, where we were shown a presentation then went into Maya in the last half hour of the lesson. We were taught some basic tools, like how to move around, change perspective view and turn soft select on and off. Although we didn't have much time to use Maya in the first class, I was still happy to get back into it after not doing much this summer.

In our latest Maya lesson, we had to design some characters based on different stereotypes we were given. Mine was beatnik, and we also had the added challenge of making them aliens/monsters instead of humans. We also had to draw a table and put three random numbers up to four in. We later found out that this would be the number of arms, legs and eyes our characters would have. We started with eight very simple shapes, drawing what we think the silhouette of our character could look like, and not adding much detail at all. Here are my original eight:

After that, we walked around the room and talked to the rest of the class about our designs. We had to pick three designs out of the eight to develop, and I chose the ones that have numbers on above. My most favourite design, (no. 2), was a bit of a mistake because I didn't do any arms when I was supposed to do three! However I really liked it, so decided to develop it further. Here are my three developments:

After this, we got to pick one to make as a final design. I chose number two, because it was my favourite even though it didn't have the right amount of arms! Here is my final design.

We scanned the final design onto a memory stick so we can work on it in a week or so. We'll be taking it into Illustrator to make a digital design then modelling it in Maya.