Ellie Bowen Animation Journal

 My fully updated film with facial expressions and colour. I think the addition of the expressions brings out the character in my guy, and the colourful frames to show mood is one of my favourite decisions. Again, I’ve filmed it and a lot of the frames, more than last time, have ended up blurry, which is really unfortunate because I thought it’d really come together at this point and I’m finally pretty happy with what I’ve produced in the short time I left myself after focusing my efforts on the wrong area. 

  A short cut to the drip above my main characters head. I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out whilst I was drawing it, but I actually really like it. I think the disconnect of the drop from the ceiling could do with being a little bit faster than the rest of the animation but I’m not fully sure how to achieve this. Despite that small thing, I’m happy to have this close up, and it’s a bit different to the common close up of the coffee/hand shot. 

 This video for some reason didn't upload properly when I mentioned it in a previous post, so again here is the footage I've been working from as reference for my film.

  I also finished this series over the weekend. I found it really captivating and appealing, until it wasn't. Something that bothered me was that the costume design didn't fit in at all, when it was supposedly set in the 80s, they never quite seemed to get it right throughout the whole series. In my opinion, it could've done with being just a few episodes shorter. It would've been nicer, and a lot more mysterious, if they had left anything open to the imagination, as a lot of horrors do, but they tied up every loose end in the whole show which I found to end up making it quite stale. I did enjoy the first half of this series, though, but the ending let it down for me, and I didn't find much of it particularly freightening- or nothing springs to mind that scared me which isn't a great sign for something that wants to be considered scary. 

  Over the weekend I watched J.J Abrams' Overlord. I personally quite enjoy watching horror films, however I've always struggled to find ones I'd actually consider scary. This film was fine. It wasn't the best thing I've ever seen, despite the concept of it being quite nice, however I think it could've done with being written a bit better and needed better acting to fulfill what it wanted to be. The mix of fiction and fact was ambitious yet not terrible, but could obviously cause problems with audiences, especially history fans. Whilst I actually do like some war films, and find the setting of films in this time-period appealing and charming in their own way, I'm not much of a history buff. Like I said, this film was fine, but not as memorable as it could've been.

  Added in some more frames to connect the motions of my character a bit better, and I’m definitely liking it a lot more now. After my weird, shaky start at the beginning trying to make the walk cycle, my confidence was being tested and I didn’t feel 100% with it, but I’m much preferring it now I’m working on it as the bigger picture instead and spending a little less time watching my footage of myself and instead focusing on flow and speed. Next is to add some cuts perhaps, and his face. 

 Was feeling a bit upset about being behind because I was struggling with smooth movements, so wanted to get something full finished. Actually a little annoyed with this too, because some frames didn’t focus so it was a bit blurry in parts. But at least I have the whole thing sketched out in key frames now. 

 This was a first for a lot of things for me. First finished 2D animation, first time using adobe animate, first time using tweening. It took hours and hours but I'm pretty happy with it, when it's exported as a GIF its a perfect loop which is also great. Ran into problems with exporting, but I eventually figured out I had to select the ignore the background option and all of a sudden it worked... After a couple more tries. Also had problems making things into symbols and some pivot point disasters, but I powered through with the help of ctrl-z. Halloween is my second favourite holiday which inspired this and the instagram artist swollenbabyfat's lovely illustrations.

 A continuation of what I've done. I took Alan's advice and rewatched my reference footage, then drew the movements to the best of my ability through memory once I was confident I'd got the motion down. It was genuinely a lot faster, I managed to half my work time and still got more frames in than before. But speed is also coming with practise. I said in the meeting, generally, for still images, a strong suit of mine is being able to draw quickly. I was definitely trying too hard to have everything perfect right away, even though this is the first time I've done this, which slowed me down considerably. I don't know why I took a different approach to drawing movement than my usual drawing style, which is very quick, sketchy, messy- I think I'm just used to seeing very polished animation I thought there was no room for my style. By eye, I thought I'd done awfully and it really bummed me out, but after photographing what I'd done it didn't look as bad a...

  Since the beginning of the course this is what I've had playing whilst I've worked. So far, since we've been doing the cup of coffee project, it's not come up/been reflected in my work. So far.. I end up listening to a range of spooky stories, mostly 'true' stories whilst I'm doing things, from a range of creators, but this one has so many lovely voice actors and sound effects that it takes top spot for my listening. 

  Also, last night I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas (again). I don't feel the need to say much about it since everyone should  have already seen it, but it's absolutely my favourite halloween film, and also one of the films I cited as inspriation for my stop-motion films during my time at college. I love the claymation puppets in this, the classic Tim Burton movements, the signature exaggerated character shapes, I enjoy this film a lot.

On Monday I watched David Attenborough: A life on our planet. I'm a fan of Blue Planet, Our Planet, Seven Worlds One Planet, and they're sort of the only documentary series I've really been committed to watching so I was obviously interested in this one too. It had a contrasting mix of sadness and hope, and focused on what irreversible damage humankind are doing to the planet. It was quite touching and the message was so strong I'm going to be taking out a lot more meat from my diet. Definitely go watch it if you haven't yet, it made me cry.

Just over 20 frames long I've got part of my first scene. I'm concerned how long it's taking me, considering it's taken days already to get this far, so I've had a word with Michael and I'm going to cut out the background from now on and add it in later, and just work on the moving parts. As I was using the lightbox for the first time I felt like I was struggling or doing it wrong somehow, as simple as it may sound to just continually trace, and I didn't fully understand the walk cycle till the second step so it's been a slow process and a huge learning curve so far.  

 A short storyboard with only the key scenes listed. I’ve not added transitions or camera use because I don’t think I’m confident with myself technically to accomplish that on top of the movement. 

A new angle, this time the colours would be flowing through him. This takes a long time with watercolour because I have to wait for adjacent colours to dry before applying more.   

Page 4 is my first experiment with using colour to express how fantastic he feels with his good cup of coffee.   

Very simple work with key poses, exploring what he could potentially be doing in the film. 

I massively simplified the design. Hoping to be able to work a lot faster with this guy than having unnecessary details and instead focusing on his movements to expressing his tiredness and disdain from the beginning. 

First character unfortunately felt a little too detailed for my liking, as much as I worked on getting the tired, bad mood sort of vibe into her.