Just a Quick one...or two

Just quickly wanted to blog this animation, its a great piece and gave me the inspiration for the mime idea.  I love the style and how it's almost interactive and how fast paced it becomes. Also how it mixes so many media and makes you think its an old fashioned film, like when the film reel runs and at the beginning where the disks spins with the title. The whole feel of the animation is just great, really inspirational!

And I love the style and character designs of this animation, the texturing makes it look so tactile and inviting with the slightly blue hue over the greyscale.

Another Idea!!

So I've been struggling hugely picking an idea I want to develop for my 3 minute animation, I surprisingly have quite a few ideas; from sasquatches to spacemen and fish to cavemen...but I don't feel that they're really up to par, but in a moment of inspiration I just had a great one! 

Mimes!

It looks great in my head but now to convert that to paper.

I've done a bit of research yet again and haven't found anything with a similar storyline, I have however found a few mime animations that I feel I can do better than. After furiously scribbling down notes and possible story directions I'm getting pretty into it. Expect some sketches in the coming days.

It is about 2 mimes fighting over a spot to work...maybe just beneath the Eiffel Tower but maybe that's too cliché. Lets just say in short, that they argue and fight with mime objects...that can only be funny right?


I'll leave out most of the details for now, but Mat, you will be receiving an email shortly!

Mayfly Development

Here are some developmental sketches of my Mayflies, I like the top centre design as it has the main features of a Mayfly whilst being simplified. I'll sketch up some more poses using this design and post them soon.

Mayfly

Similarly to 'Thought of You', I really wanted to make my designs and entire animation very simplified.  Taking the references of the Mayfly and really stripping it back to its basic shape.


Here are the references I used and drawings I made from them

And here are some initial ideas I had to simplify the characters

However I feel that they may be slightly too simple so I am going to add a little more detail so it is clearer what it actually is.

Pike Attack

An idea I had a few weeks ago was a fish-based underwater storyline, this was because it is a new challenge for me as I haven't done any underwater animation before. It was an idea with an evil pike or two and an unfortunate fish.
To help me to draw the characters and understand how they move I did some image research on Pikes. I drew them out so I can characterise them and develop the characters with an understanding of their main features.

Here are the anatomically correct drawings and images

And here are some characterisations I did, focussing quite a bit on an underbite for the fish. I thought this would help to give it more character

The Mayfly

After watching Ryan Woodward's 'Thought of You' it sparked inspiration for an idea, in short, the life of a mayfly. This idea is solely in 2D and hand drawn so I think this might be more down Mat's street :p and it's something that I have always wanted to do but never felt confident enough doing.  However because my idea is quite simple I feel we could definitely achieve this to a high standard! I'll email Mat with the full rough storyline and some sketches.

Using either photoshop or just pencil, I want the whole thing to be hand drawn with the backgrounds and characters being on different layers to give the animation depth.

I did a little research and found they begin life in a larval form known as a nymph.  Whilst in their nymph form they like to live under stones in fast flowing water or among plants in slow streams.  They usually stay in this state for around 1 year before all hatching out together and only living for between a few minutes and a day, this is because their mouths seal up as soon as they hatch from their nymph shells...weird! During this time they over run some towns and become a huge pest for people for a very short amount of time. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could show their life from a Mayfly's point of view, instead of seeing them as pests. They have to hatch, find a mate and lay thousands of eggs in just hours.

I have a more detailed storyline but don't want to blog it now...just in case.



I'll post some initial drawings I have made later on...

Inspiration

Here's a hand full of inspirational animations that I have found over he last few weeks, they're either funny or I think that they have been well produced.  Hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

A subtitled link is here