Aaron's Animation Blog

In this post I will take you through my journey in the art of life drawing. Life drawing has been a great addition to my artistic endeavours. I have learned so much from life drawing, it has taught me that the human body has a flow with its unique curves and connections. Life drawing has made me better with how I draw poses of humanoid figures. I now understand that balance in a pose helps it look believable. In earlier drawings you can see that I only drew what I seen and didn't think about how the forms and shapes of each body part come together. Overall I believe that life drawing has helped me become a more confident and understanding artist.

I was tasked with creating the sound that guides the viewer through the beginning of this documentary. I voice acted as the documentary presenter, I was inspired by David Attenborough from documentaries such as Blue Planet and Planet Earth but the writing was inspired by the opening cutscenes from the Little Big Planet games, these openings feature the voice of Stephen Fry along with writing that speaks of creativity and imagination. These opening monologues are usually accompanied by grand orchestral music pieces which really help set the atmosphere. Once I had obtained inspiration, I wrote a script that gave a run down of how the world operates whilst making it seem extraordinarily interesting. I wrote the script in Celtx and I had to make sure that it stayed in the time limit of 30-60 seconds. Here is the script. Once I had the script written, Matthew brought a blue snowball microphone in and we recorded the voice over in a quiet space. I recorded the sound to audacity wh...

We had to create an animatic, we made a shot list for a single narrative and each member in the team drew up a storyboard, this would allow us to lift different ideas from each member's unique style. This is the shot list we made, we wanted to evoke a documentary style, we did this with a continuous long take that takes the viewer through the lands. Here is my storyboard I feel like I captured the camera movement accurately, I made sure to only colour important objects within the scene such as the animals or the ink as they would be the dynamic objects. I used some ideas from my concepts like the forrest tunnel. After making the storyboards, the group got together and we decided to do a group animatic. This would have each member create a portion of the animatic and another person would edit it together. We assigned Matthew Atkinson to editing and the rest of the group would create the animatic frames within Photoshop. From the shot lis...

For this week I studied the principles of animation and applied them to my work. I created some animation studies in Adobe Animate, these studies showed off principles such as timing, squash and stretch. After I made these studies, I applied some of the principles to my own work on the Khromatic Plains. Here are my animated studies. These animation tests helped further my understanding of timing within animation, I also realised how important the squash and stretch technique is in order to create a convincing sense of weight and movement. I have had previous experience with Adobe Animate therefore I was able to produce these tests without much trouble but for the next animation test, I used Photoshop which handles animation differently and I was also using a more complex image. Using Photoshop for animating was a lot more complicated than using Animate as it uses a less strict timeline that isn't based on frames. For this animation test, I wanted to show off how one o...

I wanted to familiarise myself with The Khromatic Plains so I made various concepts to show my vision of the world and its bipolar nature. In this concept, I wanted to represent the utter beauty of the perfect world. I used extremely vibrant and contrasting colours. I wanted to make the painting feel as if it was completed on paper, I did this by using different textured brushes that helped create a water coloured feeling. I also represented the vastness of the world by showing the distant lake and mountains. The deer on the foreground is supposed to be made from paper, I tried to replicate the feeling of paper by adding a texture using a brush on photoshop. I also added a drop shadow to each body part as this makes the deer look as if it is sitting atop a painting. I was inspired by Bob Ross as he would created these vast landscape paintings. For this piece, I wanted to represent the unfinished world. It is a mirrored version of the previous piece to show how equal ...

I have been transferred to a new group, and with this transfer comes a new world to work with. This world takes place in an artists sketchbook and shows off two sides of the artist, the perfectionist and the imperfect sketchy artist. I am really interested in working with this world as I feel that it has a lot of potential. It is also very different than the last world I worked on, Desolado. Due to this world being vastly different to Desolado, it might be more difficult for me to transition into this new style, only time will tell. For this sketchbook world, the focus is more on how the world looks and behaves rather than Desolado's more story oriented world. Once I was transferred to The Sketchbook world,  we were tasked with creating a storyboard for an opening animation for the world. I thought that our world's beauty would be a great candidate for a documentary style akin to Planet Earth with David Attenborough. Everyone on the group seemed to agree and we began to p...