Cinema 4D

This is a character I created on Wednesday using Cinema 4d. I used a cube for the body and for the arms. I then used a circle for the eyes and used a spline to create the leaves.

Mr Carrot Man..

Odd Co Live Brief

We have been given a brief from Odd Co which is a toy company, we have been asked to come up with a simple toy and see if it is good enough for them to go into production with. I am excited for this brief, even if I am not successful, I will still have the experience and also the sketches and 3d works I will be producing for it.

Cinema 4D Letters

I have tried out a few more of the mograph techniques on Cinema 4D. I wanted to try out the different colours for the letters and also the lighting. The idea came randomly so there isnt much to explain about them.

Water Effect and Title Video

I have been trying to do some water effects as for my final animation one of the scenes takes place in the bathroom and I wanted to see if I could add water to the bathtub. I used cinema 4D and used the random effector and also used the noise texture on the material.
I like how this has turned out. I like the reflection on the sand as if the sand was wet.

I also played around with doing a signature video with my name and this is one I came up with:

Spare Time Doodles

I love to doodle, here are a few of my sketches I have done in the past little while. My sketch books are very random, some pages have about 40 doodles to one page, I can see them all but to someone else it probably just looks like a page of pen/pencil. I have loads more which I upload some more at a later date. I have a picture I did of hands and a rose for my cousin which I am making into a painting, I will upload that one once I get my portfolio from college. I have lots of paintings which I have done but I gave them away as gifts so once I find my photos of those I can post those :)

Coming back to drawing after dealing with computers all the time feels great, totally clears the mind and gets me back into the frame of mind to do my projects. Love it!

Other Work

I was asked by my cousins burlesque leader if I could come up with some designs for business cards and possibly for posters. She gave me a few images for inspiration from an animated burlesque calendar, they had a traditional style to them, red lipstick and pined up hair (pin up girls).

 I spent a few hours on illustrator trying out different pen strokes and designs.

She is currently looking them over to see what she thinks so I am waiting for feedback for any tweaks.

This is a project I gave myself to do on illustrator. My cousin had asked if I could do her a painting of two hands with a rose in the palm and then have the verse she got married to. I did a sketch and started the painting and thought I would try illustrator as I havent used it in a while, its always good to brush up on programs. I am planning on adding a dove to the background as if the hand is letting the dove go.

Sausage Man Moves

I have rigged Sausage Man and have done some movement tests for him to see how well he moves.

Rosaleens Wedding Decor

My mam has a wedding company and has asked if I can help her redo her website and if I can come up with some 3D designs to add to it. So when I was making my name title I decided to try out a few for her as well. It is again on Cinema 4D and I tried out difference textures with different lighting.

I like the black and white design better as I feel it stands out more, the green one reminds me of B & Q or a garden centre so that one I am definitly not going for. I have sent the black and white to my mam and am waiting back to hear what she thinks.

I also tried out a few other textures on names, trying out backgrounds, lettering and lights on cinema 4D.

The two I like the best are the first one and the last one, they stand out more to me and look better (in my opinion).

I am enjoying working with cinema 4D now, at the beginning of the course I wasn't too much of a fan but now that I have had more experience on it I am liking the tools and what they can do.

Giving myself a name

I have decided its time to come up with some form of ident for myself, I spent the day trying out the 3d texts in cinema 4D and have come up with the following:

Everything is always better with sound :) I am happy with the my first attempt at my own signature ident.

Back Garden

After sorting out the weeds and rubbish in the back garden I decided to try doing a 3D model of what I would like. We are also planning on breeding our dog this year so we need some space for her so this is what I have come up with so far, it is a work in progress so it is not complete yet.

The concrete section is going to be fenced off so the puppies can go in there and run about. The back at the moment is just concrete slabs so will be a very big improvement if we actually do what's on this picture (with a bbq and table of course as well :)).

Testing Cinema 4D Textures

I have been playing around with Cinema 4D testing out the textures, I have come up with a few scenes using simple shapes.

First one is a TV and the second is of a Lab.




I am tempted to add a TV to my final animation once I have sorted the right texture for the screen.

Final Animation

For my final animation (Squegg who I mentioned earlier) I have decided to do the animation in a house, as the story is based on him moving in with his dad. I also am interested to learn more about this as when I worked at an architects firm I always asked if I could sit with someone to see how they make these buildings they are drawing into real life. The opportunity never arose so I thought why not teach myself.

I have now however changed the character and the story. I have went for super simple and created Sausage Man. I have tested a few textures and I am happiest with the Pizza Crust texture, it looks like burnt sausage so think it fits.

The new story is Sausage Man waking up and turning on his ipod he then sets about his day listening to the song. My friend has a band and has said I can use one of his songs which is great, it is a rock song. Sausage man walks out of his room into the hall towards the bathroom. As he walks down the hall shapes come from the ceiling and walls following him. He turns around thinking something is behind him but the shapes shy away. He makes his way to the bathroom and starts to get ready, he notices the shapes and quickly turns around seeing the shapes around him. He takes a moment to take this in then starts tapping his foot to the song realising he controls the shapes, he turns in a circle with his arms out while the shapes spin around him. Eventually when the song dies down the shapes all start exploding and disappearing. He is shock and is confused as to is he made it all up, he then goes back to his room.

For the environment I used cinema 4d, starting with the boxes for the rooms, then added the furniture, textures and lastly lights:

I still need to work on the hallway, fixing the floor and lights and also for the bathroom I need to add the towels and bottles.

MTV Ident

Our third group project of the year is to create an MTV ident. We were put into groups of 4 and were told it has to be 'organic'.

Our team spent the first day/night looking at idents and seeing which ones we thought were good/which ones inspired us. We decided to go with the cut out animation using black card, we used blutac as we couldn't find split pins but it worked out better in the end, the movements were a lot easier.

We split the work up with myself and another team member cutting out the animals and animating them on the lightbox. While another team member took the shots on Dragon and then added the black videos to live footage. The fourth team member created the logo and also took park in added the black videos to live footage.

Here are the videos that I took part in (cutting out the characters and animating them on the lightbox).
 The other videos are taking a long time to load so I will upload them later. I enjoyed this group project as well, again I thought we all got on well and managed to work smoothly to get everything finished on time.

Group Project 2

We have been given another group project, the brief is to create a one minute b-movie. We were split into groups of 4 and had a week to do the project.

With my group we went straight into brainstorming, researching black and white movies, how the titles look, the type of music they played. We found inspiration in old style cut out animation, scary video games and also old movies.

We then decided who was to do what, one of our members unfortunately had to go away for a week so the three remaining members went on with the task. My part in this project was the actress, some of the filming, some of the editing, cctv scene,titles and sound design.

The original story: A was a man was walking to the chemist to pick up his medication, when he picks it up he takes one and on his walk back starts hallucination that the trees are going dark and eerie and he starts seeing creatures and zombies, he ends up going mad and curling up into a ball in the middle of the street, eventually when he opens his eyes he looks at the medication and realises its the wrong one and looks around and sees everything is back to normal, he gets up and throws the medication in the bin on his walk back to his house. 

With out other team member gone it made us change the story a little bit as he was going to be the actor. We all went home after the first day and took images of where we lived to see if they would fit as the environment of the filming. The next day we took into consideration that we would have to film in a chemist, and weren't too sure on how that would work with the time we were given as we all live in different areas so all the filming needed to be done in class. In the end we found a street and kept referring to the storyboards one of the team members drew and tweaked the scenes as we went.

Second Story: A woman going on a walk and stopped when she notices the street cracking,when she looks up there is a monster. She runs away scared, not knowing what the monster is,as she is running more of the monsters are appearing. She turns a corner to find more of them and realised she is trapped. She runs to a wall and crouches down in fear. It switches to the CCTV cameras and they slowly go off, she has been caught by the monsters.

I liked how this turned out and am surprised with my sound design, I enjoyed working on this project I thought all of the team members got on great and we were all taking everyone's ideas on board and had a meeting every morning before starting work to see what everyone wanted to change and if they wanted to add anything. 

This is the final animation we did. I am happy with how it turned out, the sounds I used I found on free sound websites and  to create the CCTV scenes I used after effects, also for the titles I used photoshop for the font. To put it all together we used Premier Pro. As always, more work can be done to it as in editing, I think some of the scenes showing the monsters coming out from behind the walls could be a little longer and also I think the scene where the cracking concrete is can be tweaked as it jumps a little bit. Apart from that i'm happy :)

Group Project

Time for a group project! Our brief was to use pixalation and film. Our tutor split the class into three groups, gave us a camera and said you have one hour to create something...we set off brain storming.

We came up with musical chairs and named it magical chairs. We thought it would be a simple idea to use as it would be a good way to show off pixalation. We all agreed on this so set to work. Once the filming was done one of the group members found the magical round about song and I think it fits perfectly.

This is what we came up with:

Animated Tests for Squegg

I hand drew some of the movements for Squegg, as I am not sure if he is better suited as a hand drawn character rather than 3D. I may come back to the 3D character at a later date to make something with him but I am more towards traditional animation for this character.

For the animation for the traditional style I was thinking of having him walking down a street, with fruit stalls and street lamps and as he is walking down the street his leg comes off creating a worm, he is a confused about his and a little scared but with in seconds another leg grows back so he shrugs it off and keeps walking but the worm follows him and other worms start coming out of shops and out from the ally ways and then his other leg falls off and does the same and continues like a loop. Then he realises this is strange and turns out to find hundreds of these worms behind him, following him and just bobbing about really eerie and they start coming towards him until they get him. This may be for a good one for me to work on sound design as well, sounds more like a dancey song for the fact its loops...we will see..

Squegg

For the second year we are staring off with our year end project, we will be working on this throughout the year while working on other projects. I like this because it means we can spend more time looking into things and doing tests to make it as good as possible.

My idea for this is about a half egg half squid character called Squegg. He came about while I was researching characters and thought of Ursula, Teenage mutant ninja turles, Jack from Nightmare before Christmas, Spongebob, and Humpty Dumpty. Random combo but thats what came to my head.

I came up with the story of this young lad who has lived under the sea with his mother and one day decided he wanted to live on land with his dad and see how life was. He is 19 years old and likes to do typical teenager things, he enjoys drinking with his friends and getting up to no good. When he moved in with his dad he got into the life style quickly and picked up a few friends. He enjoys basketball and graffiti.

Next step is 3Dize him....

After creating him I wasnt too keen on this character, there seemed to be a few egg shaped characters about so thought I needed something different and also I seemed to have made it difficult for myself with the spiraly hands. Even though I like them am not sold on the whole design of the character.