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.

Jan Harlan at LCC

Wednesdays are elective classes at uni for second and 3rd year students. `

I chose to go to the class that deals with the Stanley Kubrick Archive, and today we had a special guest over to have an informal talk with.

Jan Harlan is Kubrick's brother in law.

He seems a very passionate, romantic type of man.

I took some notes which I will scan and upload here soon.

He's a nice fellow who does documentaries and says that making a film is easy, anyone can do it, but to make a great film is the hardest.

I'll be back with more.

My Showreel

Just updated my showreel with the last work that I had done!

Close up

Some old photographs.


I like toy guns. Preferably those that look like old western pistols.

wooden cat figures my mum bought me.

The purple sunset behind the sud-stained window at my student residence.

Sound & Vision

mind maps for trying to work out sound & vision project.

My three starting words were curious, navy blue, record player.

I wanted something curious, started to think about people born with different appearances or conditions.

Then I just thought I could do something like a shop of curiosities as I thought about how there were cabinet of curiosities a few centuries ago.

Since this was a collaboration project with the sound arts students, it was cool to have 'record player'as one of my given words to start from. I decided I should just include a gramophone which got me thinking of old eras like steam and such. Steam punk is pretty nice visually, I love the brass and wood combination so I made my gramophone like that with reference images off the net.

i liked the idea of curio cabinets that is also in the old days, so I thought about making the main character a curiosity of a sort, which brought me back to mythical creatures of Tibet -- the garuda!

Here's one of my doodles. Though he turns out quite differently from here for easier animation.

Worst Job Ever Assignment

My choice for the 'worst job ever' was 'being shoes', so I depicted the shoes being worn by a hairy legged man! I thought it would be nice to have the shoe find a love interest even though he only sees her (the fancy red shoes) only briefly before her owner hops onto the next train. I also included stepping on gum, walking over broken glass and into muck!

Here, I took pictures of my brother's shoes and drew on them after printing them out...

Here are a few images from my storyboard project. I used my wacom tablet to draw these in photoshop. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of the aspect ratio....

My favourite image is of the shoes on the tube platform. <3

Classmates

An Encounter - storyboard project

My final project in the Foundation Art & Design course at Wimbledon was a storyboard for a short story that I didn't have time or enough experience to really create. I'd like to try it some day when I have enough experience and confidence to pull off the project.

Here are the character sheets:

Here are some of the storyboard images that I recreated in photoshop gimp {free program similar to photoshop, as I didn't have the software at the time}to look like stills for what the animation could potentially look like.

the green skin of the fish with gold specks is a swimsuit I owned. It's really lovely here, and this is my favourite of the images.

I like the watercolour paper texture I used for the boy's skin.

The texture of the dragon's skin is actually the back of my hand! The iris is the skin of an onion. It looks really pretty, huh!

I'm not too happy with this one... I used my hair for the yak's body, and a cookie my friend gave me as the mud gunk texture.

Zelarut!

A fun assignment for the class to do over christmas break!

Everyone had to draw a character designed from information written by 3 people separately.

One person invented the name and background information, another person wrote the scenario for the story, and the last person... I'll have to find the sheet of paper to remember!

I ended up with a character that was a giant short-tailed blind mole-like creature named Zelarut with muscular arms and big claws to dig underground. He was building a sort of revenge machine for someone having cut his tail or something like that.

Here was my first drawing

This character needs to be a little human-like, I thought to myself. So I drew on some black glasses! Look at those muscles...

Anyway, I got sketching and since Zelarut is building a machine I thought I should make him like a scientist. And also since he's blind I was considering making a seeing-eye guide dog to be his side-kick and helper.

Here was my final design of Zelarut. I'm pretty happy about the eye marquee accessory that is a digital screen, I was inspired by Daft Punk's helmets and thought that this could be a good way to show expression! I will do some more drawings of his expressions, should be fun anyway! :P

Post Card Project

We were given the assignment of making five A6 sized postcards of anything about ourselves.

I love mythical creatures and old stories, so I decided to draw some Tibetan mystical creatures.

Naga

Garuda

dragon

makara

snow lion

I did these with watercolours. I'm not too good with paint! But I love the makara.

I referred to illustrations from Robert Beer's Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols and Motifs. I love having this book <3