The sound recording session was really cool and insightful. I’ve got a basic knowledge in audio recording but I’ve never used the same programme so it was great to learn the fundamentals of it.
I went into the session not really knowing what I was going to say and I had no ideas yet for my lip sync exercise. The others in my group were far more prepared and had speeches and songs to record for their characters. I ended up asking my groupmates to ask me questions I could ramble about and see where it leads me, thinking they were going to ask me surface level stuff like what’s your favourite food etc, but it got very existential vey quickly when questions like “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” came up and it spiralled into some kind of amateur therapy session!
Listening back to the nearly 10 minute recording, I have found a few short snippets I can us for lip sync, but I might book the sound studio and rerecord if I get a better idea, or i might just used a voice track from the internet or something.
Today I visited a few galleries, one of them being Josh Lilley which was exhibiting Rachel Maclean’s ‘That’s Not Mi’ work, featureing the project – ‘upside mimi down mimi’ (except the ‘down mini’ lettering should actually be upside down I just don’t have a clue how to do that on wordpress! It was a great exhibition showing the fairytale world Maclean has created for Mimi.
Maclean mirrors and inverts throughout the works, employing technology and fabrication to hit repeated notes of uneasy, uncanny perfection in a seamless, sometimes seemingly virtual space in which the viewer is implicated. Each work is partnered to an inverted double, perpetually upending to reveal new forms and faces – a neat shorthand for the mysterious lack of an anchoring horizon in a digitally mediated life.
Paintings and sculptures of the two Mimis seem flawless and endlessly repeatable, as they are a mixture of digital painting and 3D printing that highlights the creepy effacement of individuality brought about by our screens, our modern-day mirrors.
The last piece you come to in the exhibition is Macleans first fully animated films which debuted at Jupiter Artland in May 2021. It shows the apple-cheeked child and wizened crone – the two Mi’s who are the subject of the who exhibit, as it tests and challenges the protagonist until its dramatic conclusion. It features a mirror who acts as the classic fairytale antagonist and does more harm than good as it isolates her, bullies her and tricks here, until dividing her in two.
This exhibition was particularly interesting to me as I spent the majority on last year on my BA final project creating a comic led fairytale world, not dissimilar to this one, but with far more iterations of the same character, and with far less metaphoric significance to anyone outside of the situation I was attempting to portray. That was very interesting o me though as I found everyone related it to their own experience, often far from the experience I was conveying.
So, hand on heart, I’ve been dreading this follow-up class ever since we had the first one! I’m not great at letting myself go and exploring space with my body as I’m very shy. And I don’t know whether it was worse or better this time considering I knew my classmates a little better? But anyway, it was actually quite fun and I definitely enjoyed it more than the last session, as it was all day so we had more time and it was more relaxed.
From the last session we were asked to study an animal and how it moves and bring that to our next session. I chose a penguin beacuse I just think they’re really neat!!
It turned out it was a pretty tricky choice, as when we were tasked with moving around the room as our animal counterparts, literally the only thing I could do was waddle around!! I mean, technically I guess I could’ve tried tobogganing, but I’d seen the state of my socks after ten minutes exposed to that floor, I wasn’t going to be putting my face anywhere near it!!
But it was okay because we ended up having to create a kind of hybrid creature of our chosen animal and human, and move in a way we thought this imaginary creature would. Therefore I ended up just awkwardly shuffling around like I do on the daily anyway!
Unsurprisingly, my favourite part of the session was when we sat down to draw! We had to create a visual of what out hybrid creature might look like. Obviously with penguins its very easy to go down the tuxedo path, but I didn’t think that reflected penguins very well, because as much as I love them, they’re really the epitome of clumsiness, but it’s not their fault, I’d be slip sliding everywhere too if I lived on ice 24/7.
Anyway, this resulted in me turning a gentoo penguin into a soft round lovable human, with their socks not on properly so they’re always falling and sliding on their laminate floors! There were also a couple of terrifying hybrids in between them.
It was cool to see my classmate’s work too! One that particularly stood out was someone turned an ostrich into a snooty ballerina which I thought was perfect!
This feedback session was really great for checking I’m up to speed with everything, as well getting to see my classmates amazing work! I do wish we’d had the opportunity to see some of Group B’s work too, but hopefully we can in the future!
I often struggle making changes to things once I’ve drawn a line under it in my brain, so thankfully I don’t have many adjustments to make, and I’m excited to use this feedback in future exercises too. I definitely want to try adding sound to one of the future tasks!
The feedback I got from Maryclare was very positive again, and she was much happier that I’d drawn the background this time. she commented that it was good that I was able to understand perspective well, and that I knew to draw the model much bigger as they were closer. She did say though, that when I draw digitally I tend to make the face much more cartoon-y, which is fair, I think its kind of my default setting as I do so much digital art in a certain style for my personal work, and it can become tricky to remove myself from that suddenly.
Overall Maryclare’s sessions weren’t terrible, just a little uncomfortable with how she talked to the models and sometimes tedious with how repetitive the poses she was commanding became, and because we got barely any breaks, I often found myself rushing through the drawing in the half the time, just so I could refresh my brain for a few minutes, or skipping drawing poses altogether.
I also wish we’d gotten to draw more poses where they’re wearing clothes because clothes and the way they fold and hang are difficult to work out and draw and I think that so often gets overlooked in life drawing classes!
Today we had an Adobe Animate introduction class. It was a fun class but I’m not really sure how I feel about Animate.
Our first exercise was to experiment with the brushes by designing a character. Shaun suggested we draw inspiration from objects in our room, but I just used that idea to step outside of my comfort zone with my usual ‘style’ and I created this character who I would definitely not want to interact with ever!
The brushes remind me a lot of Toon Boom Harmony brushes.
Then we were able to play around with the line art and other tools by making a simple animation, like a bouncy ball or a character waving. Naturally I resorted to Alfie waving, and as a last minute addition added a little flurry of snowflakes circling his head, drawn frame-by frame.
Other than learning the basics, I don’t know if I’d ever chose to use Animate by itself. It sort of just seems unnecessarily complicated and if it doesn’t do anything that TV Paint, Clip Studio or Toon Boom cant, I don’t really see much need to use it.
So with last weeks TV Paint class going disastrously for me, (I downloaded the free trail and worked on a background all day, just to discover that you can’t export or save files with the trial version…) I tried to stay positive this week! Having caught up and finished the head turn, Anita’s videos make the colouring and key-framing processes a lot easier to navigate.
Here is the sort-of-finished result:
Learning TV paint has been an interesting experience. Overall I do think I like it, but I still prefer Clip Studio Paint and Toon Boom Harmony!
Today we looked at how animals with four legs walk. It was really great to be able to see all the different examples as well as trotting and running examples too.
Because collectively horses are my enemy, I actively avoided animating one, and opted instead for a bear. I finished this quite quickly because I kept it very simple and it is far from perfect, but I will definitely be trying again with some different four-legged animals over the winter holidays.
Having missed this Monday’s lesson due to the puppet animation, I was a little worried about catching up, especially with this exercise being needed for the December hand-in deadline. I spent most of the week trying to catch up but I’m very happy with the result. The idea is that the character has just come away from doing something tiring, hence the tired walk, stops in front of the table, sees the cakes but isn’t interested, knowing he’d probably have to pay for them, until he sees the ‘FREE CAKES’ sign and he suddenly regains his energy. He decides to ignore the ‘please take ONE’ instruction on the sign and sneakily checks around before swiping the other four cakes and flouncing off with newfound enthusiasm.
Hopefully its clear in the actual animation, I just purposefully didn’t want to make him too reactive or exaggerated before he notices the sign.
In all honesty I’d been avoiding doing the puppet animation sessions for a while, simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything important on the Monday classes, and I didn’t really think I’d enjoy puppet animation as much. However I was very surprised at how fun it actually was!
Initially it took me a while to get my head around the dragonframe software and it was a lot of information thrown at us very quickly, but once we were able to actually start using it, it was a lot easier to pick up that I expected.
I had time to make 3 different attempts. After my first attempt I realised how much easier it is to get the timing more accurate as you’re not worried about the quality of the drawing or anything like that. I think this exercise really helped my understand more about timing and exaggeration in animation.
After some feedback from both Anita and Steve on my first and second attempt, I tried to add even more exaggeration to my third attempt. The only thing I think I struggled with was where the puppet is trying to lift the ball but its suddenly to heavy, I was trying to exxagerate that point and bring the ball the swing between the knees more, but I couldn’t seem to fit the arms and legs between the knees so therefore if you look too closely it looks a little weird!
Overall it was a really surprisingly fun experience and I definitely wont hesitate to try puppet animation again in the future.
