Ratatouille Podcast #7: Cooking Up CG Food

Flying noodles

Character animation

- The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams

Olympics 2008 Monkey - BBC Sport

coloured characters (two tones)

background artworks

The watercolour paintings take me one to two days to finish one, depend on difficulties. I tried to match the character with the background by adding shodow and textures in Photoshop, which looks better now.

There are around 58 shots altogether in my animation and I will be finishing the first 10 shots by Monday for the presentation.

watercolour animation

refined characters

Chinese classical

looking for this kind of music for my animation....

I made my own light box!!!!

A3 size light box

It took me 2 days to make it and I only spent around $50, very satisfied with it. Now I can do the frame by frame sketches!

How to make your own light box

http://www.characteranimationin3d.com/lightbox.htm

Chinese Building References

Keep researching on chinese buildings and clothings, I found some useful references from two classic Chinese movies.

"Farewell My Concubine" (directed by Chen Kaige)






"Hero" (directed by Zhang Yimou)

Research on Chinese buildings

Gobelins Studio in France

http://www.gobelins.fr/galerie/animation/

week1 Idea of animation

I am planning to experiment 2D animation on this brief. Aiming at around 2 minutes, I want to create a narrative animation with entertaining approach. The story is about the main character pretending to be an excellent chef to enter a noodle cooking competition, putting wierd food together..... and then end up being kicked away. It is going to be Chinese faces and buildings.

I am going to hand drawn the backgrounds, coloured with water colour. Thinking to draw the charcters in pencil sketches (frame by frame), scan them and colour in computer, either Photoshop or Corel Paint. And put them together with Aftereffect.

Week 1:
Research of animtion style
Refinement of concept, storyboard and characters

Week 2:
Refinement of storyboard and animatic
Colour palette (coloured characters)

Week 3:
Production - colouring of backgrounds

Week 4:
Production - colouring of backgrounds

Week 5:
Production - finishing all backgrounds
Production - character (frame by frame sketches)

Week 6:
Production - character (frame by frame sketches)
Production - character (colouring)

Week 7:
Production - character (colouring)

Week 8:
Post-production
Testing and debugging

Week 9:
Testing and debugging
Packaging
Final presentation

Change of concept

My initial idea was about a panda who is a normal delivery boy learning cooking from a noodle master. I have this idea for a long time, to make an animtion about panda with chinese style. However, I realised I have to change the concept until I watch Kung-fu Panda, they are too similar.



The movie is awesome and it inspired me somehow.

character research

Image source: Surf's up official website
http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/surfsup/

sixty 40

more of their works:

http://www.sixty40.com/work_archive.html

http://www.edugandapandashow.com/

week 7 character design

I did some studies on pandas, their movements, patterns, etc. Then I develop my character design, I aware that panda with longer arms and legs will look better when I animate.

week 6

Animation Style

the Dínamo Digital studio - Brazil
http://www.dinamodigital.com.br/

I found that the style of few of their works are exactly what I want to do, like more cartoon characters and colourful backgrounds.



Title: Malu
Director: Ricardo Carelli
Agency: Santa Clara




Title: Meus Prêmios 2007
Director: Ricardo Carelli / Ricardo Fernandes

This is a promo for the annual Brazil awards show. I really like the rhythum of the music and the little dancing characters. The jelly-like creatures move and walk funny, they interact each other in the scenes. The colours work so well!




Mika "Lollipop" music video
Director: Bonzom

The black wolf character in this mv is nice! I love the part the girl was being swallowed and actually seeing the bones of the wolf. Interesting pop up texts which match the voice.

Character design

some photos of pandas from "getty images"

My initial concept is to create a 2D animation about pandas - a funny story. My idea wasn't come from the semi-permanent (the edugapanda), I have been thinking to make an animation of panda for a long time!

week5 presentation

In this project, I spent most of the time painting and editing in photoshop. I painted 22 pages in total, I can make a children book with them....I used acrylic paint to do all the paintings, with A4 sized drawing paper (fits to my scanner) the hardest part is to paint the outlines, have to be smooth and perfect, otherwise white bits can be seen when I animate it. I tried my best to fix everything in photoshop.

animation style

the clips of "Mcdull, Prince de la Bun"

this is a movie from Hong Kong, most kids like it, but it is actually a black comedy, which talks about a single parent family. The style is very different from the western's ones, in which they added a lot of Hong Kong elements.

week3 animatic

This is the animatic of my project. The timing is not quite right at the moment. The background music is the bonus music of a dvd magazine (artist: Tom Verlaine, album title: Around, Track13: Wheel Broke)

"T.O.M" student film
Directors: Daniel Benjamin Grey, Tom Brown

The narration voice in the video is unique, I like it so much, in which arouses the people's attention. The contrast of the quiet environment and the kid's voice is effective which make me want to see it again and again. The story is kind of abstract, why does the kid putting off the clothes? doesn't want to go to school may be. Thinking to do hand paintings for my animation as well.



"Usavich" by Kanaban Graphics

I like it because it is so funny, I like animations that make people laugh when they first see it, this is what I am trying to do also in my project. In this animation, the character designs are good, there is a series of around 25 animations of it, which are all at youtube.

week2 storyboard

THE BIG-HEAD POSTHUMAN

My character is a kid who is born big headed, he's name is samuel. His brain is 3 times bigger than others which makes him an intelligent kid. My intention is to make a funny story, and it is pretty direct.

Keep researching

Figuring out what kind of posthuman characters I want to do, looking at australian artist, Shaun Tan's works, the characters with tall heads are cool, huge brains, thin bodies. Think about technology and human, we are getting more and more information, human's brains may get big, and with less exercises (facing computers all the time), bodies get thin. In this way, the characters look interesting, still thinking the characters may not walk with legs, floating machines instead....




Shaun Tan - the lost thing
(pages of story book)

Eres Unico, directed by Hector Monerris

I like the style of this animation, esp the beginning of it, the shots of sitting on the bed and looking at the mirror, nice lighting! the character is simple and effective, in which I also want to do I guess he is using after effect, a bit of maya, photoshop or may be flash.

Variety of posthuman

Robotic human
- a combination of human organism and engineering



Socalled - "you are never alone"
Music video directed by Benjamin Steiger Levine
(Source: stash DVD screen shots)

I like the colour tones of this music video, brown and khakis, kind of coffee colour. Robotic human with these colours are interesting, different from other science fiction robots (cold colours like blue, silver and white). And for this video, they used rubber models i guess, no amazing 3D computer effects, good use of warm colour to get the balance.

Please refer to the youtube video with the full music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tS4OWiozmw
(*Embedding disabled by request)

week 1

Proj 1 - Animating the Posthuman

Posthuman??

-hi-tech human

-developed human (mentally or physically)

-still being human man-kind or becoming machines, robots, monsters, etc

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem

(Image from http://www.cublog.de/)

According to the definition at http://en.wikipedia.org/:

'A posthuman or post-human is, according to transhumanist
intellectuals, a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically
exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."

The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors.

As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar.'

Start of year 3

Hi Everyone
This is a blog for MMD3307 Digital Arts Studio 5A, welcome!