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!

Personal Work - Bunny Animation

A small bunny GIF I made in Photoshop at home!

Contextual Studies - Back to Basics Part 1&2

I wasn't well for the contextual studies lesson last week, so this week was a bit of a catch up for me. I learnt that last week was 'Back to Basics Part 1', and we looked at avant garde, which is part of early modernism. It describes new and interesting change, things that haven't been done before. In film, this could mean experimenting with the camera or editing, or even changing the narrative around to have the end first, then the beginning, and then the middle! At first there is a shock factor to avant garde work, and then it gets accepted into mainstream society.

In yesterday's lesson, which was 'Back to Basics Part 2', we looked at surrealism as a feature of avant garde. Surrealism has some example like 'Beauty and The Beast', or 'Spongebob': it describes objects coming alive when they usually inanimate. Psychoanalysis also links in with surrealism, so we moved on to learning about this. Psychoanalysis is research into dreams and mental state, looking at our conscious and unconscious thoughts. We learnt about Sigmund Freud, who analysed what was going on in people's heads. All of this relates to film in many ways: it covers violence and sexual topics, repressed taboos, and other subjects that are not generally talked about/heard of. It talks about fantasy vs reality, and there are examples of this in the film 'Inside Out', where it's very surreal: you're inside someone else's head, trying to figure out what is real and what isn't.

Freud interprets dreams and fantasy, and the impact on culture and intellectual life. We then looked at the short film 'Destino' which was a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali, a surrealist artist. I found it extremely interesting, and I'm seriously considering writing my contextual essay on 'Destino'. The features include the characters morphing, the environment becoming dreamlike and changing, and things being generally 'weird'. One of the reasons I really enjoyed 'Destino' is because you can distinctly see the two styles of Disney and Dali combined.

After this, we watched 'Un Chien Andalou', which is a banned short film made by surrealist artists. There were a lot of violent and sexual connotations to it, and the most disconcerting thing about it was that there wasn't an actual story to it! That really annoyed me, because every single film usually has a story it in. However, it really made me understand surrealism and psychoanalysis a bit more: how it's meant to make you feel uneasy and like something's wrong.

I found this lesson very interesting and I was glad I was able to catch up on the lesson I missed easily. I'm going to do some more research into 'Destino' as it was an incredibly captivating film, so I'm sure there will be an update soon!

Toolkit - Bouncing Ball Animations

Today in Nat's lesson we animated some bouncing balls. We started by creating some arcs and making the ball follow the line.

Then, we moved on to making a tennis ball, ping pong ball and bowling ball bounce. Because they are all different weights, they all bounce differently:

After showing this attempt to Nat, she gave me a few things to improve on. The ping pong ball needed to speed up as it got closer to the ground, and do lots of smaller and faster bounces near the end. I needed to make the tennis ball less cartoonish, so I decided to start the tennis ball animation again, and edit the ping pong one a bit.

This is the second attempt at animating the different balls, and I think it looks a lot more natural this way. I really enjoyed this lesson and getting to know the basics of animation!

Toolkit - Maya Ray Gun

Ray gun Maya tutorial

Toolkit - Maya Egg Cups

In this tutorial we explored polygons, NURBS, and subdivions to make different egg cups.

Toolkit - Maya Trolley

In our third Maya lesson, we made a trolley following a tutorial Simon gave us. We have also been set the goal of completing some of the tutorials on the Maya tutorial website. Here is the finished product: