Month: January 2021

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For this week’s life drawing I decided to go digital and take the class entirely on my graphic tablet. It was a huge challenge and I can say that for gesture drawing, I much prefer the traditional way. Drawing on the graphic tablet was so restricting. Knowing that I have the option to undo ironically makes me so much more conscious of my drawing. The pen pressure was helpful in creating different line weights but it wasn’t the same as using a pencil. Overall, I feel like I need more practice but I much prefer drawing on paper.

3 years ago I watched this animation at the London International Animation Festival, produced by Peter Millard, and I forgot how much I loved it. Animation can be so simple!! I don’t know why I tend to overcomplicate it at times.

Last Tuesday I had the honour to watch a live talk by the creators of the film Wolfwalkers, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart, hosted by Kaboom Festival. In this lecture, the creators spoke about the whole process of creating Wolfwalkers and it was truly inspiring.

I must confess I hadn’t watched it until right before the talk began, but I watched it on the day and it was wonderful! The only film I had watched by Cartoon Saloon to date was ‘The Breadwinner’ and when I discovered they were also the creators of ‘Wolfwalkers’, I was stocked!

The Irish folklore story tells a tale of two girls in different worlds. Robyn’s world is told as ‘rigid and like a cage for Robyn and for all the people being oppressed by this new regime’ by director Ross Stewart, 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYxIFV7DNo). The square plain environment portrays this cold crude wood cut world the character’s stuck in. On the other hand, Mebh’s world is described as ‘free and instinctual, loose and colourful’ through the use water colour and hand drawn shapes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYxIFV7DNo). When the two worlds meet, you can easily distinguish which elements belong to the city life and which ones belong in nature, by the stylised contrast of line quality and weight.

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The style of the animation has been described as ‘pre-celtic megalithic’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjp9BJ9Ht5c), a style that follows the one adopted in Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey, 2009) and Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore, 2014). These are considered a trilogy by director Ross Stewart. Also found it super interesting to look at the behind of scenes of production and see the different lines of work!

In addition, ‘The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya‘ (Studio Ghibli, 2014) was key inspiration for this film, as stated by director Tomm Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjp9BJ9Ht5c). Takahata proved that computer generated animation could have the same loose and expressive feel as hand drawn animation and this led Moore to go to town with exploring contrasting styles within the same film, which is something so characteristic of Wolfwalkers.

To understand further expand my research about Cartoon Saloon’s films, I procured information about Tomm Moore’s work and came across this documentary.

It’s remarkable to see how Moore utilises contemporary artists such as Kandinsky as inspiration for his work! ‘Song of the Sea’ is a great example of this.

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This film personally attracts me through its animation style. The highly geometrical, roughly drawn, however organic characters contrasting with the almost two-dimensionally distorted rigid backgrounds is a style that has always resonated to me from young age.

Cartoon Saloon is the perfect envision of what I’d like to achieve in my career as an animator. I’ll surely be keeping an eye on their future work.

At the start of week 10, we continued working on what was taught before Christmas break. I completed my four-legged dear walk cycle and started a four-legged horse canter.

For the dear walk cycle, I looked at Richard Williams’ instructional videos about walk cycles. This one specifically really cleared up my confusion regarding walk cycles. Beside’s these, I also looked at the classic book ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’, also by Richard Williams, 2001.

I then decided to animate a deer since its walk cycle pattern is the same as the horse’s.

This is the final result after hours of looking at footage and understanding a deer’s walk cycle:

Following Steve’s brief on week 10, I got into reading the material he sent and studying horse canter cycles. I found some good footage on National Geographic ‘s youtube channel.

The slow motion footage truly makes a difference on understanding the legs’ motion.

It’s still a work in progress but I will be posting videos of it.

I found it quite complicated to re-adapt the rhythm of online lectures. I much preferred the studio ambience but obviously times are hard and adaptation is key.

It’s been 9 days since the beginning of 2021. Looking back at 2020, I can stay it was both one of the best and worst years of my life. Not wanting to be a Negative Nancy, more inclined towards the negative side.

Of course Covid affected everyone’s lives severely and I can’t begin to say how thankful I am I still have a home, a warm bed to sleep on and food to eat. Everyone I love it still around and in good health, and I’m privileged enough to do what I love. I was fortunate enough to have had a job that helped me move to London and start the Masters of my dreams. Of course that’s good and there shouldn’t be any ‘buts’.

…But. Covid did happen is happening, I lost my job in the midst of moving to one of the most expensive cities in the world, I haven’t seen my family for more than half a year. As an independent individual, I’ve been struggling to spend the last few months begging for help. It’s hard to cope when you can’t even hug your family. I never know what tomorrow expects. I never knew what money saving was until now. Every penny matters if I want to stay in the U.K..

All this being said, Covid is probably here to stay for a few more years and so I’ve decided to face 2021 with a more positive perspective.

I did manage to find me a temporary job. It barely pays for the bills but it assures me a month or two more in this country. University is still happening…. online, but it is. As all of my colleagues are, I’m fuming that I have to be paying 11000£ to stay at home sitting at my tiny tiny desk. But as I said, we’re being positive here.
Each day that goes by is a day closer to things becoming reasonably normal again and this is what I’m trying to focus on.

Hopefully, one day I will be looking back at this post I wrote on my uni blog in January 2021 and have a laugh with my mates at Cartoon Network. Who knows… Stay safe everyone ♥