Study Task 2 Evaluation

What worked well:

• Beryl's redesigned hair
• Beryl's cap, jacket and boots
• Beryl's final colour scheme
• The use of the guitar and slingshot in the dynamic poses
• I generally liked how the logo turned out
• The consistent use of stripes on the minor characters to keep the Beano style
• General references to the Beano developers in the characters

What could be improved:

• Keeping the characters consistent in proportion between poses in general
• I did feel like the background characters were somewhat generic
• General improvement in drawing and colouring style when it comes to backgrounds.

Study Task 2 - Character Design and Development (Character Line Up and Background)

I had a general idea of how I wanted my story to go and what kind of background characters would be in it. Using the same principles of character design we were taught in the beginning of the module, I came up with a few characters I liked.

Every character intentionally sports stripes somewhere on their clothing as a shoutout to the Beano style (though it's a bit harder to see on the gardener) and after some experimentation I went with classic villain colours for my bully. I also named the gardener and elderly lady after David Law and his daughter Rosemary (the original inspiration for Beryl).

I drew the background of the street in my story to put my line-up on. Though I'm unlikely going to use this background from this perspective, I thought it worked well to place my characters in context, granted my backgrounds are a bit limited by my artistic abilities.

Study Task 3 - Analogue Character Modelling and Realisation (Part 4)

We had to do an animation test using our stop motion puppets. The results were as follows.

Learning points:

• Wire frame plasticine models are hard to move in part without moving other parts with it
• It is difficult to maintain consistency of the plasticine due to this
• The prop guitar suited the puppet well
• For future reference I would wound the gauze tighter to avoid loose and heavy plasticine bits.

Study Task 3 - Analogue Character Modelling and Realisation (Part 3)

As part of my dynamic poses for Beryl, I had her jamming on an electric guitar and I thought this would be a nice addition to her plasticine model too. I drew out the parts of the guitar in Illustrator and got it laser cut and the lovely people in Woodworks helped me glue some of the pieces together. I glued the rest of it the next day and cut the heads off of nails to make the tuning keys.

Pieces for Beryl's guitar

The guitar pieces were glued and nailed in place on a board while the glue dried

The completed guitar

Beryl the rocker!

Study Task 5 - Maya 3: Moom

This week we were introduced to the Moom character in Maya and spent the session learning how to pose them to help us with previsualisation of our Beano dynamic poses.

Obligatory Saturday Night Fever pose

Made a quick model guitar so it could pose like Beryl when she's rocking it out

What worked well:

• Facial expressions
• The use of references to make the poses work

What could be improved:

• The rocker pose could be more exaggerated with more back and neck curving

Study Task 3 - Analogue Character Modelling and Realisation (Part 2)

I got a lot done in our full day of puppet making. I think the most difficult part of it all was to pad out the foamy bits and retrospectively, some parts would have been better if it were more tightly wounded.

I managed to finish covering the body in plasticine and all that was really left was the head and some odd details here and there, which I came in and finished off later in the week.

Almost done with the hair

Made a cameo in Zhama's Angel Face in progress

Puppet completed!

The complete puppet turnaround of Beryl the Peril

Study Task 2 - Character Design and Development (Dynamic Poses, Silhouettes and Logo)

For my dynamic poses I pulled some references from pictures of myself as well as a random picture from the internet.

It makes perfect sense to me that a 'peril' would own a slingshot and would be good at causing a bit of trouble with it. During my research of Beryl I learned that she owned an acoustic guitar (that she couldn't really play). I upgraded this to an electric guitar (that she still can't really play but is being self taught).

The silhouettes were basically the dynamic poses blacked out plus an altered pose with the slingshot (also from reference).

I had a few ideas for the logo too but the one I coloured out is the one that appealed to me the most.

Study Task 3 - Analogue Character Modelling and Realisation (Part 1)

We took our finalised designs down to Ceramics and thus began our first proper introduction into the world of stop motion and puppetry. It turns out our designs as they were printed out were a little too small to work with so they were scaled up on paper to use as a guideline to make the wire skeleton.

By the end of the week I had Beryl's wire skeleton done (including the joints) and her bulky parts foamed out. We had also taken our wood slabs and metal rods from previous wood and metal workshops and combined them to make the stand for our puppets.

Study Task 2 - Character Design and Development (Final Turnaround)

Being the fickle creative that I was, I ended up making a couple more colour scheme options that gained some likes along with the few that I had posted on the blog, after I posted the options to the blog.

I ultimately went with one of the original Beano colour schemes that included blue and white stripes on the undershirt.

I was originally averse to this colour scheme on the original comic because I simply didn't like how the colours worked, but I felt it worked on the redesign because there was a level of symmetry in the colours on the top and bottom halves of Beryl's character design i.e. two reds, two blacks, two blue-and-white stripes. It also served as a nice shout-out to the original Beryl.

Study Task 5 - Maya 2: Lighting

This Maya session is where our previous photography inductions came in useful - we learned how to light up objects in a scene in Maya which entailed a knowledge of the types of lighting in a scene, i.e. the key light, back light and fill light. We also learned how to apply textures to objects. I like the flexibility and sheer amount of possibilities in using Maya to control assets like shadows and how reflective a surface can be, though as of yet I have a long ways to go before I can master this program.

Unfortunately I couldn't manage to get a render due to Maya crashing on me consistently which I believe had something to do with me playing around with an ocean texture, but I'll hopefully use my newfound knowledge in future Maya projects.

What worked well:

1. The effect of lighting on the different textures within the program
2. The ability to toggle certain shadows on and off to make certain light sources stand out

What could be improved:

1. Saving often to avoid losing everything every time Maya crashes