It's not MY Life

I've got an in-house job at a company/campaign called Your Life. It's ostensibly video editing work, but I will post any animation-based updates on here as they come.

News

I recently took on a commission that's a little exciting. I've finished the first part of the overall workload (unfortunately it's the smallest part) but it should be complete in around a month.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the project, I can't reveal any of the details until it is made public. As soon as it is I will put all the material on here, but in the meantime, sit tight.

Hotting Up

I was pitched a brief, by a company, based on an pro-NHS campaign. They wanted me to come up with some ideas on how to animate the script they'd written.
I sent a written treatment and they requested some style boards for further consideration.
Below are my rough designs (they wanted a specific style):

 

Blitzkrieg Bop

I've been tasked, by a band, with designing a logo.

At present I've been given some sample images - one explicitly being the lightning bolt design they want - depicting some classic comicbook-style imagery. Including some pop art and Kryptonian sigils.

I'm awaiting to hear back about a few queries I've had, including colouring, etc. Since I'm unsure if the logo I've been provided is their existing design or just another example piece (it does look a lot like it belongs to Black Adam.)

In the meantime, I've been doing some rough edits on the design and playing with colour variations. Also investigating typefaces, as they would like the band name included in the design.

I'm having to be careful since the colours most of the example images are using are the classic red & yellow, which - when applied to a lightning bolt - basically give you the logo for The Flash.

Examples of potential typefaces. Some may need a little more tweaking than others.

Face Off

I applied to a company that creates stylised likenesses of celebrities for use on a variety of products, their response was to request that I demonstrate my capability to create imagery in their established brand style.

I have begun working on something.

Having tweeted it without context, people have managed to identify the individual in question. Which is a good sign.

Comical

Inspired by a project called Twitter The Comic, wherein a group of artists illustrate selected tweets and turn them into short strips, I have decided to practice my comicbook illustration by producing fully-fledged comic pages based on tweets I find amusing.

Below are some preliminary sketches based on two tweets I saw today.

 I'll post more when I've collated some finished pages.

Flexercising

I watched a video, the other day, by a Youtuber I follow who is also a bit of an art geek. He has recently enrolled himself on a cartoon course and was relating the various tasks they'd been asked to perform on the course.
They reminded me of some of the drawing exercises I'd done over the years I'd been at uni.

One of which was making a series of quick 30-second drawings of random objects. I found a random object generator online and used a timer set at 30 second intervals to draw the objects listed.
Obviously they're largely imperfect and rough-looking, especially some of the things I obviously find more challenging to draw, but it's a good way to reacquaint myself with drawing, make quick visual decisions and learn what areas I should focus on for improvement.

30 seconds is a surprisingly short amount of time to draw some things, which you don't realise until you're doing it.

Started a new sketchbook

Using this to carry with me for sketching on the go. Had to do something garish, terrible and stupid so I felt less precious about marking in a fresh book.

Terry-ble at updating

I've been working for some time, on-and-off, on this silly little competition project. But I've been very bad at keeping anyone updated on its progress. There came a few stalls when I had some crashes and lost a lot of work - and some of it can get quite tedious to animate, so it's very demotivating to lose it. Additionally, I also intend to splice in some live action footage of an old book. Finding the right book for the job also hindered progress, but I have something now.

Here are a few images to show what caught my eye in the British Library's collection and illustrate the work I did to make them "animateable".

This, I believe, is the original, unedited version of this image that I downloaded.

Here you can see the edits I made to the base image itself...

...and this shows the embellishments and extra elements I added to animate the image.

Another of the images that caught my eye.

Side-by-side comparison of the original (right) and the edited version, with cut out elements in the centre.

Still of one live-action book shots, onto which I intend to superimpose the animations.

Yes I Kafkan

My final year project is partially an animation project. For it, I am adapting one of Franz Kafka's short stories In The Penal Colony. It's set on a remote island, where an explorer is being introduced to the strange archaic methods of torture and capital punishment being used in the land. The characters are a zealous Officer of the old regime that is very much behind the process, his soldier assistant, the explorer who is against it but feels torn between his morals and his ethical need to not interfere with foreign cultures and the unwitting prisoner who is to be put to death. The machine that is to carry out to procedure is also a major feature.

A rough storyboard capturing the scenes I see in my head and the major plot developments.

Preliminary sketches of the machine. The design on the right is the one I prefer, but carefully reading the descriptions in the text, it will probably end up looking more like those on the left.

 

Bloody Chamber

A staple of illustration courses, in particular my own, the assigned project was to look at Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a series of reimaginings of classic fairytales by the likes of the Brothers Grimm et al.
For this particular venture I was assigned the tale The Werewolf (a loose adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood) and had to produce a series of, at least, six images chronicling the whole story.
I started by reading and breaking down the text into particularly noteworthy events and passages, that conjured the best visual imagery.

Initial sketches of passages whilst analysing the text.

A hand (or paw) is a big feature of the story, so I decided to focus on hands/feet/paws for the scenes I was illustrating. This provided a good way to convey the action in particular scenes without getting bogged down in replicating the text to the letter.
Also since the tale is quite bloody, and based on Little Red Riding Hood, it seemed fitting to have red as theme in the images. I decided the visuals should be black & white with a particular feature highlighted in red. This was easy for the violent scenes and subsequent featuring of blood, but did result is some rather contrived methods of incorporating red into the preceding images.

Preliminary layout roughs for chosen scenes:

Mildly contrived use of red for the knife handle and the claws of the wolf (also the ring in the previous photo), kinda appropriate for the sock, and obviously works fine for the blood.

Red works much better for the scenes after the wolf attack, because of the severed limb. Although, again, bit of a stretch with the spectacle frames.

Red on the stones for final image is questionable.

Quick summary of the story (spoilers): The protagonist is tasked with delivering a basket to her grandmother. She is also armed with a knife for protection en route. Whilst travelling she is confronted by a wolf, which then attacks her, but she is able to use her knife to cut off its paw. The wolf beats a hasty retreat and Red wipes the blood on her apron and wraps up the severed paw, for reasons. She eventually makes it to Grandma's where she finds said matriarch feverish and delirious in bed. On closer inspection she finds her grandmother's hand has been cut off. She goes to check on the paw and finds it has become a hand - complete with her grandmother's ring. She denounces her granny as a witch and a werewolf and the towns people chase the old lady into the street and stone her to death.

You Me Brum Brum Train

Whilst working on the animation project, in the wake of my drawing trip to Birmingham, I created this short animation from my train tickets and recordings I made while travelling/in the station.