E4 Ident ideas

So, we got the brief for the live project yesterday and it's 'surprisingly' the E4 ident competition. Which is going to be fun! I'm looking forward to working through one of the ideas I came up with to enter. I'm not expecting to win or anything but the experience and such will be beneficial.

So my favorite idea is that of a load of cute characters fall from above, the camera pans up to reveal a tube shaped as the logo for E4. It has to be 10 seconds long so the variations of this idea may be slightly too long however, I do like the idea of putting these said charaters onto a conveyer belt with paintbrushes that paint some of the characters purple so they can fall off the end and land in respective areas to make the logo. My initial thoughts of the character were to the image I have as the background on my computer, like the above. This image is by Punga who will be speaking at Pictoplasma in Berlin, and it gave me inspiration for the character I want to fall and bounce from the sky.

My other ideas are also okay in my opinion; I was going to reference 'Jaws' in one where a rostrum had been set up with a flip book below, 'something' bulges out from under the pages like a shark popping up from under water, perhaps accompanied by a Jaws theme sting in the SFX that would add to the humor before the E4 logo RIPS out of the paper as a monster.
My third idea was a sea captain looking through a telescope, and the eye piece leaving the E4 logo as a mark on his eye.
My final idea before I stopped scribbling ideas out was where a character gets up close to the 'camera' and sneezes headbutting the 'camera' which leaves the E4 logo on the character's head. (Don't steal my ideas please x3)
Anyway
As for a final note, I have a few images of character designs that I want to upload.

I need to decide which kind of creature I want to use if I were to do this animation. I like 3, 4 and 5 if I'm honest but am having a tally as to what the audience would prefer.
Cheers

Character designs... hmmm

I had been watching Lord of the Rings and had been in a LOTR type of mood all day when I drew my first attempt of a charcter design. That is probably why it resembles Gollum, I wanted to create a character that was slightly grotesque but could still have enough redeeming features to be a lovable character. I drew from aesthetics of the Gringott's goblins in Harry Potter and Gollum almost subconsciously and this was the outcome.

I suppose another strong influence in this particular idea is that of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, I really loved the Spiderwick Chronicles series they produced when I was younger and the artwork by the illustrator DiTerlizzi always fascinated me. It's most likely the reason why I love drawing things like mermaids so much. I had wanted my character to remind me of the character called 'the Knocker' that had been illustrated in the book; he was one of my favorite characters because he was so crazy. I could relate to him since he too speaks to himself like a nutter.

(The Knocker)

These are some of Tony DiTerlizzi's artworks, here you will probably see the influences on my mermaids and hopefully you will agree with me that the guy's stuff is really interesting. Come on, some of this stuff got my dyslexic brother to read for longer than an hour at a time.

I love how realistic it all looks despite it being mystical beings and such. See, this is where someone with their head as far up in the clouds as me can actually believe these things are real xD

Anyhow I will get back to uploading more of MY work I believe I have one more photo to explain...

Finally this is one of my ideas for a character, it hasn't really been developed much beyond me deciding the hair do should be like this rather that like the original I had drawn which looked like it had broccoli for a hair do...
anyway off now...
cheers

NEW LAPTOP!!!!!!!!!!!!! oh and life drawing

I now have a laptop to do work on =D It had better not duck up like the other TWO!!
Anyhow, last week we endured  4 days of solid life drawing. Our model very patiently posed for us as we practiced our naked man drawing skills that I shall upload a couple of photo's to demonstrate. We were given various tasks to fulfil, such as drawing with charcoal, alternating between charcoal and chalk, using charcoal attatched to 3ft long bamboo canes, using drawing ink and sticks, alternating between ink and white acrylic paint and so on. On the final day we were let loose to do as we pleased and the immaturity of a few of us shone through. All in all it was a very useful week, if you're ever finding it difficult to draw people, get yourself a legally, consensually naked participant and draw them in funny positions for a little while and your drawing skills will have replenished by the end of it.

Drawing with charcoal and white chalk on mid-tone paper

(and again) in this sketch the model looks slightly as if he's melting or is suffering from a sudden abundance of gravity...

 I ran out of space near his foot so drew it on the other side as though it was a game of snake or pac-man

Le Piece de Resistance... the maturity of it all...

I was considering the character I had been designing yesterday, wondering how I would draw them from the side - as we need to be able to draw them from all angles to create blueprints for a 3D model to rig and I remembered how I had drawn the model from the side and it informed my thoughts on how I would draw my character. More on the character later...

Cheers

More pictures...

My little sister wants me to try and animate a horse and cart for a film she and her classmates are making. After several hours of text volleyball I've gleaned that instead of the normal horse and cart I thought she meant... like so...

She wanted a prisoner carriage... So my pathetic attempt is this...

I know, I got a bit tired by this stage and hopefully if I actually manage to animate it for her I hope to all the powers of the universe, real and make-believe, that it looks better than this...
Anyway modeled off the Child Catcher's cart, I plan to have the driver's head loll about as though they're asleep and make the cart wobble side to side like it's on a rubbly road or something but I will have to see if this fits the purpose for Miss Ellerton's film first.
Does this count as a job? xD

Being bored in the middle of the night can be fruitful when you're in a constructive mood

I was bored, I felt creative, I got out paper and drew a gun from memory. The gun isn't a work of art in my opinion but I am particularly proud of the fact I could draw it from memory having only really drawn a gun from reference images online once. (Having never seen a gun first hand either - if my memory serves me well)

I felt I deserved a gold star.
Cheers

Phileas the evil cat

I felt like drawing a cat yesterday, so I drew one. His name is Phileas and he is the cat of an evil genius, only he has no capacity to be evil himself. He's a bit daft really, too friendly and curious, he's forever doing silly things. I intend to make a quick animation of him in my spare time every once in a while, I think it would be quite cute to have a running joke seeing what he gets up to in the days when he isn't sitting on his master's knee having his head stroked so ferverently his eyes are near poping out.

I like drawing mermaids it seems

I like drawing such mystical and mythical beings, the best part is you can make things up and come up with your own ideas that can fit in with the set ideas of famous tales. People would recognise this as a Mermaid without me telling them but would wonder why she had what has been described as a lion's tail, however they didn't really question it too far - obviously they haven't seen mermaids in real life so who's to say they don't really look like this.

Monday morning - 11:50 still counts, only it's Tuesday

At last the module I have been focusing on previously has been handed in and whether or not it's any good is not up to me anymore. I don't like it as it is extremely cheesy and definitely not how I had hoped it would be but time and a lack of a laptop did not allow me to do what I had wanted. So please don't laugh.
 In any case I have some things I can also upload to update this blog on the happenings in the lives of the animation students in Newcastle College; I'm fairly sure I won't be the only one who is now working on my morph animation. This is for the next due module so I will upload the tests I have exectued...

This was line test 1, just to make sure the frames flowed cohesively.

Line test 2, I wanted to make the Duck Billed Platypus (yes that is what it is supposed to be) swim for a bit before he morphed so tried this but in the end he just looked a bit daft as though he couldn't swim.

Line test 3, although in this he swims backwards I added a few in-betweens in so he swam a bit, imagine this but the other way round.

Final line test to show you, I regret using so much black pen in this test so I will probably end up re-drawing all the frames in pencil. The images are slightly too defined at the point of the JCB in my opinion so I'll probably end up using a dark pencil or something instead of the black gel pen.

I will post more stuff in a minute that is unrelated to this - I got into a drawing phase (yippee) in which I produce 3 whole drawings I have been meaning to upload for a while.
In a mo...
Cheers

MY LAPTOP IS A THREAT!!

Because it is dead and gone... Thanks to the screen deciding to fizz up and break, I've had to move all of my files onto the College Macs which has destroyed the links between files, textures and animations... So today's task is to sort all that out and try to get on without my laptop. Hopefully this isn't going to put me too far behind that I can't catch up.

Anyway, before my laptop killed itself, I had just about completed all of my scenes and was ready to render. I'd stuck two scenes together because they'd be better together, I will be checking to see if I can amalgamate any more of the scenes so the whole animation will flow better.

So this week is blitzing everything, making sure everything is ready to hand in, polishing things off and so on. So again I will go do this now instead of wasting time ranting about my stoopid laptop.
Cheers

Monday Morning (in the most loose of terms)

Not much to report really except that I have been working hard on my scenes in Cinema 4D and that I have had to resize images so that C4D doesn't have a panic attack when I try to render. I have 3 more scenes to complete and sound work to find a way to do. Anyway I'm going to sign off so that I can actually do these tasks rather than merely talking about doing so.
Cheers