Meowch! Loop De Loop

The Loop de Loop theme this month is Whoops, and I thought I'd use this opportunity to recycle an old rotoscope from first year that I never ended up using. This time I chose to keep it a cat.

Original unfinished rotoscope animation

The finished loop looks like this:

It made it onto the site (though Neil temporarily misspelled my name to everyone's amusement before it was corrected). This is the first time I tried out the aesthetic of blurring the background and I like how it turned out, I think I'll end up applying it to more animations in the future.

What worked well:

• Taking out the outside linework on the cat
• The simple bird animation in the window
• Cutting down the actual movement compared to the original rotoscope
• Using a colour palette created from pixellating an image of a kitchen
• Blurring the background for focus

What could be improved:

• The tail seems to curl from the wrong part of the tail at one part near the beginning
• The ending smear turned out a little messier than I'd hoped

Epic Battle - January 11 Second Club

I wanted to do an 11 Second Club but interestingly enough the sound file this month is a cinematic piece, so I thought it would fit an epic battle of sorts. I also wanted to try my hand at making a monochrome animation, inspired by the music video for Siames The Wolf.

This is the first time I tried my hand at effects animation and I had a lot of fun with it and even though it's not something I want to specifically specialise in, I would like to dabble in it more if it adds to my animations. I also learned how to use some TVPaint features to get the monochrome effect I wanted which I think might come in useful for future professional projects. All in all it was a good learning experience.

What worked well:

• The effects animation in the beginning
• The trumpeter twist at the end
• Using the invert effect in TVPaint to help with the monochrome shading
• The shots

What could be improved:

• Some more movement could've been included here and there
• Possibly adding more detail in the absence of movement to make the shading more interesting in certain parts of the dragon

Update 06/02/19:

I came in 7th! :D

SPnU Musician update

Over the break, we went over the musicians we met during the Leeds College of Music and LAU Animation student meetup and decided on Eleanor Baker as she was happy to do some horror music and foley. I dropped her an email and she kindly agreed to be our music person.

First week after the break and everyone sat down together while Prathik altered the After Effects file and tweaked the animatic to implement the changes we discussed earlier. I sent the updated animatic to Ellie and we all picked out our scenes to start making roughs on.

The next step is to make a start on the roughs.

Adventure Pirate Axolotl! December Character Design Challenge

Happy New Year!

This month's CDC challenge was to create an axolotl adventurer and I noticed there were no pirates in the submissions, so I made one!

I decided to go the cutesy route and also try out drawing with Procreate (which I recently bought) and overall, I think it turned out alright.

My submission was accepted onto the Facebook page

Although I don't intend to specialise into character design specifically, I think it's still good to keep it in practice for any general work I might end up doing. I liked the Procreate app - it's something I can see coming in useful in the future for professional use.

What worked well:

• The cutesy look came through well
• The base colour and shading was generally good
• I had a little trouble drawing the rope but it turned out alright in the end

What could be improved:

• I think more contrast on the skin would make it look better
• In retrospect I feel I should've shaded the leg so that it doesn't look separated or behind the torso part
• I could've exaggerated the pose more.