Final Major Project

Our final major project is our own thing. I'll be continuing the same pitch from my foundation course.
Here are designs that I had created back then and will be making changes to.

I'm thinking of changing the character design so that he looks a little less friendly, but I want him to actually be quite timid on the inside.

A deity inspired by the deer masks from the Tibetan prayer dances. I need to also create another creature borrowing from what my grandma used to tell me to scare me. . . something about a child-snatching bird-like creature that apparently had long hair and you could hear it when it was near because it had a certain bird call.

More to come! 

Live Project

I am now on the BA Honours top-up Animation course and our first assignment was a collaborative live project. The brief instructed us to work in groups to create a short 10-15 second film piece to describe one of the shortlisted books for a science book prize. This was a live competition hosted by the Royal Society and open to students from other universities as well.

Our group, consisting of Rachael, Tash, Sam and me were working on My Beautiful Genome by Lone Frank. I was assigned the role of designer but we were all going to work across roles to help complete the project. So I ended up doing a lot of compositing and editing after storyboards and concept images. Over the span of a few weeks this is what we came up with.

And our video was picked for Lone Frank's book! So we had the honour of attending the ceremony to watch our title sequence play on screen before the author herself came up to read an extract from her book.

I will upload moodboards, concept images, and storyboards to show a little bit of the process leading up to the finished piece you see above.

We won~ I'm really proud of our work and the prize money's a great bonus :>

Final Major Project 2012

An update on stuff I've done since my last post.

The five best pitches of the class got selected to be realized into final films for our 2nd year of Animation FdA at LCC. I was assigned to work on a film originally titled Sentient Race but later renamed Cyclic.

The project involved a lot of walk cycles using creatures designed by the director, Alistair. Unfortunately our project blog has been deleted but here's the final film.



Cyclic from AlistairArt on Vimeo.

We all divided responsibility to animate the creatures swimming or walking, this mean we had to make a loopable cycle of movement for each character.
I made a couple of the swimming sperm to create variation from the one that Alistair made. I also worked on some of the swimming creatures. The ones that are seen morphing as they transition from water to land were all animated by me and made to walk or run by me. I also animated the dodo-bird and the raptor as it jumped on it.

Tibetan Prayer Masks

Source: Tibetan Sacred Dance by Ellen Pearlman

I really love these costumes and customs as well from Tibetan Buddhism. Actually the religion is a fusion of the shamanistic Bon and Buddhism that was later introduced and adapted in this way.

I wanted to base my preproduction pitch project on the unique appearance of these masks. . .

also interesting is that the Mongolions who also practice Tibetan Buddhism have similar masks for their prayer dances (tsam). One could also look to Bhutan for their versions of the cham masks.

Doodles

old doodles I found...

This had to do with the my Tibetan myth themed storyboard project and influences from Tekkon Kinkreet style.
A strange drawing of a saint-like figure... but certainly not one.

Long haired Tim. :>

Life Drawing

UAL Life Drawing session... I went in once and they were focusing on hands and feet but I went ahead and drew the body because I couldn't resist.

3Ds Max Workshop Hand

We are having weekly workshops in 3DsMax with our tutor Rachel, and in the first class last week we were made to reconstruct flat paintings in a sort of collage.

This week's class we were shown how to make a 3D hand and I used a picture off the web as reference and also as a texture to paste onto the model.

So this is what it looked like! It was a little frustrating and I often lost the gizmo tool and accidentally hit some buttons that off set a lot of things. But it was quite satisfying to be able to recognize my model as a 'hand'. c:
We didn't learn how to paste a texture on the palm though, so when I rotated the perspective to look, it was the back of the hand again where the palm should've been.