Study Task 1 (Week Commencing: 14/10/19)

At the beginning of the week I focused on colouring in my character's turn around sheets, using the background artist's concept art as an indicator of what the colour scheme will be like.

I felt the blue tones from the moon and the skin tones from the man complimented each other really well however, this was based on the colours I saw on my laptop screen. When I transferred the turn arounds to the Macs in university, the tones had a yellower hue.

I did the same technique with the beast character however I was nervous that the fur was too dark. I took my character sheets to my team and was told that as the mood is supposed to be dark and eerie, darker shades would work better. I was also assured the wolf wouldn't blend into the background too much, as the moon would be the main background focus in any shots the beast was in.

I shaded the human character and then got to work with colour correcting the piece so the skin tones looked more like what I had in mind.

On Wednesday in class, we were given feedback from our lecturer on the work we had done so far. We were also instructed to make a Gantt chart so I got to work making one. However, once we had received our feedback, many of our original ideas and jobs had been changed so I made another.

We were advised to change the way we went about introducing a stop-motion element to the final outcome so, rather than separating the crow's world and the world the crow sees, we are now planning on making a mixed media animation where the background will be 3D while the characters remain 2D. Because of this, I now have the extra job of drawing a turn-around of the crow character as this was originally going to be a 3D puppet.

We were also criticised for the background, as we were informed the woods didn't seem chaotic enough as the trees looked too symmetrical. So, we were advised to minimise the amount of trees present, and even challenged to reduce the background to just one tree. I questioned this decision as one tree doesn't make up a forest however, as the background is now going to be 3D, fewer trees would be easier to make considering the timescale we are working on, and the team's experience with stop motion. So, Joseph began sketching some rough ideas for a new background with only one tree.

After this lesson, I colour corrected the human turn-around. I still used the concept background art for my turn-around however as I wanted a rough idea of the colour palette even though we will no longer be using it.

I also shaded the beast and began the crow turn-around.

In Friday's lesson, we were given a seminar on cinematography. Then in our Maya session, we looked at render layers and compositing. We needed to add shadows, reflections and colour to a scene of a block jumping around a lamp.

I found this session incredibly useful as these were skills I hadn't practiced before.



Link to Maya Video

At the weekend, I continued to work on my turn-around sheets. I based the crow's design on Kate's concept art for her 3D puppet while still trying to keep the characters consistent throughout. Once I have completed this turn-around, I will colour and shade the crow, and then move onto the dynamic pose sheet.