Photoshop drawing of charachter

Practice  using drawing tablets and Photoshop, to draw my character.

Weekly Summaries- Dynamic Animation- Week 5

Week 5: (27.10.17)

What I learnt:

This week we were introduced into TV Paint and Wacom tablets. This was my first time using both of these technologies. At first, I found it uncomfortable using the drawing tablet, but with practice I slowly eased it to getting used to it and my drawing lines becoming more refined. On Tv paint, we learnt how to import reference imagery, and how to add frames. We practiced this by recreating our animations of ball bounces. Mine came out successful, I even further experimented by adding secondary action and backgrounds, however I need to experiment further with the tools, and how to export correctly.

Progress this week:

To further understand jumps, I watched a live stream of Aaron Blaise ‘Basic physics & Timing of a bears jump’. And a video on ‘Time and spacing’ by Richard Williams.  For both character design and research, I decided to further understand the human walk by recording walk footage myself.

'What makes an hero?' -Matthew Winkler, Ted-Talks

from this information compared to the film 'Frozen', I believe the character Anna ( Elsa's sister) is in fact the hero of the story. She is the one who goes on the journey, to find Elsa, meets the mentor, Kristoff, fights off the snow creatures, left to die by Hans. Try's to fight off the magic, saves Elsa. Then dies, by freezing to death. She is the  reborn, and is reward by her sisters love, and a new equilbruim.
Because of this, I need to find what role 'Elsa' plays.

Weekly Summaries- Character Design- week 2

Weekly Summaries- Character Design

Week 2:
This week we had a class of 'acting for animators' we learnt two theories, one of how we do things physically and what kind of emotions they must feel- the focus’s on the external.
The second is focused on what’s going on with a character internally. Overall in the lesson we focused on different ways to do an action for different reasons.
Every actin has a different objective; every character has a super objective- the big objective in life. We also this week designed our characters,
refining them from our sketches, we then made a clay model version, and began our turn around.

Semiotics For Beginners - Daniel Chandler

http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

'Homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of 'signs'.'

' 'we think only in signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.302). Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning.'

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce

'Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of:

a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and

the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents. '

'The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material);

An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign;

An Object: to which the sign refers.'

'

	'Symbol/symbolic: a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt: e.g. language in general (plus specific languages, alphabetical letters, punctuation marks, words, phrases and sentences), numbers, morse code, traffic lights, national flags;
	Icon/iconic: a mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (recognizably looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it) - being similar in possessing some of its qualities: e.g. a portrait, a cartoon, a scale-model, onomatopoeia, metaphors, 'realistic' sounds in 'programme music', sound effects in radio drama, a dubbed film soundtrack, imitative gestures;
	Index/indexical: a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified - this link can be observed or inferred: e.g. 'natural signs' (smoke, thunder, footprints, echoes, non-synthetic odours and flavours), medical symptoms (pain, a rash, pulse-rate), measuring instruments (weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit-level), 'signals' (a knock on a door, a phone ringing), pointers (a pointing 'index' finger, a directional signpost), recordings (a photograph, a film, video or television shot, an audio-recorded voice), personal 'trademarks' (handwriting, catchphrase) and indexical words ('that', 'this', 'here', 'there').'

Semotics of Colour -

http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=69

Useful quotes:

'Umberto Eco (1985) defines colour as a cultural unit, which means that as a sign it combines both the individual and the social.'

'Miroslav Dachev (1997) used the cultural unit of Eco in introducing his reflections on colour in Bulgarian symbolist poetry of the late 19th and early 20th century in a monograph. Dachev introduces the concept of coloureme '

'Kress & van Leeuwen (2002) deal with the visual colour by analyzing the colour speech and visual rhetoric, but not colour language. They achieve results within the adopted methodology of systemic linguistics'

'colour is multifunctional in terms of Halliday (1978; 1993) with ideational, interpersonal, textual functions.'

'Kress & van Leeuwen recognize that there are two ways to produce meaning of colours. The first is psychological – by associations that come from the culture and the past, but also from present current advertising and brands.'

'The second way is to accept the visual qualities of colour – hue, saturation, purity, modulation, differentiation – as semantic distinguishing features. They are placed within the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions.'

'we are faced with colour idiolects, dialects, with national and regional languages of colour. Thus, we enter by the physical properties of colour, once – in the territory of natural language, and secondly – into the social and individual culture and tastes.'

'van Leeuwen declares that ‘looking at colour as a semiotic resource not only means looking at colour technologies, it also means looking at the way colour meanings are developed.’ (2011: 2). '

'(Almalech 2001; 2011):

– One and the same colour can have opposite meanings. I call this intra-colour antonymy.

– Many colours can mean the same feeling or idea. This is the inter-colour synonymy.

– Both effects are due to the small number of tokens in the colour language – visual and verbal'

'Semioticians are dealing with the translation of colours. Kourdis (in print) speaks of intersemiotic translation between language and colour in advertisements. Leone (2009) presents a semiotic interpretation of the art of Marc Chagall on Moses while receiving from God the Tablets of the Law. He indicates how the visual colour matches the biblical text.'

'Wierzbicka (1990) presents a scheme, which combines the evolutionary sequence, the prototype theory, the macro-catagories and the fuzzy sets. Her understanding is that prototypes are natural objects, rather than Rosch’s salient colour areas. Wierzbicka points to specific objects: red – blood and fire; white – light; black – darkness, night; blue – sea and sky; green – all plants; yellow – the sun at noon'

'Borg surveys the colour categorization and colour terminology among the Negev Bedouin (1999) and the colour usage in the modern Arabic colloquials (2007). He uses the macro-colour categories to demonstrate the richness of colour expressions that stand outside the set of basic colour terms. '

'The presence of a red veil, red and white clothes, bouquet (green) and gold in all traditional weddings through the ages – regardless of religion, the type of social order and technological level – is a universal four-syntagmatic encoding of the traditional wedding. (Almalech 1996)'

'Physical and spiritual purity has been a universal signified of white for centuries across many cultures. With the same lexical meaning, purity, white is used at funerals – in Ancient Greece, in modern Japan, etc'

Tv paint introdouction

In todays session, we were introdouced to 'T.V PAINT',  a 2d animation program that enables you to draw and create frames, with an drawing tablet.
This is my first experiment using a drawing tablet and the program, which I found its most useful qualities was adding layers and being able to hide layers whilst animationing, which iv found rare in many other programms. I look forward to experimenting with other types of drawings and animations to come, experimenting with tools.

Weekly Summaries- Character Research- Week 5

Week 5: (27.10.17)

What I learnt:

In this weekly session, we pitched our essay ideas to groups in the class, my ideas received positive feedback. Ideas such as Elsa’s previous design concept of being a villain, and Elsa being relatable to many homosexual people, with theories of her being gay, ideas were suggested to me. Also in this lesson, I was taught on the rubber hose type of animation, where animation has defied the physical laws and properties. Disney however made cartoons that obeyed the physical laws, they focused on human and animal antimony- they moved away from rubber hose style in the 1930’s. Disney creates a fake sense of reality.

Progress this week: This week I researched into articles on the internet, that talk of Frozen’s popularity. ‘They're being swept up in an obsession that, echoing my own childhood fixations, feels both communal and deeply personal. Better still, the object of the obsession has powerful things to say about sisterhood, storytelling, adolescence and female autonomy.' I also have set up an essay plan; analysing the questions from different aspects of how to answer the question (and what I will research into) I also have planned the structure of my essay.

Experimentaional poses and guest animator

Todays session was very interesting to me, We had an animation director from 'BlueZoo' animations  teach us about making characters, they key point to me was about keeping design loose and simple, even the final designs look best simplified.



Also In this session, we practiced pose for our characters for more ideas, and to see if their body design works well. we used line through the body's for key pose shape, then each of us stood and made poses for us to draw our characters doing.


We then pushed our work forward by doing attempted walk cycle key poses for our characters from side and front view.

Life Drawing; Hands

In todays life drawing session, we focused mainly on drawings hands. Drawing eight overall, first four in the time limit of five minuets, then the second batch only three. The male model continued to strike different poses with his hands; I found this some what challenging, some poses made it hard to draw a hand because it was over lapped with anther hand, so I had to fill in with my imagination they details and parts of the hands. Also, the model was at a angle in the middle, which made me really need to focus as he was not close.  The last drawing we did was of his full body, but due to drawing to high on the paper, and running out of time; I missed off the head. But I feel my accuracy of proportioning the body together has improved.

What I like about this drawing is the use of mixed media, accidently given extra time on this one, it enabled me to add in more shading, but with a different medium and add highlight, also in a different medium. In this, the graphite stick enabled me to give a lighter touch to the shading, which works well with the charcoal, the white chalk also linked well, with its same properties of charcoal.