Beatriz Antunes | CSM MA Character Animation Research Journal
I know, again with the Aaron Blaise talk. I saw this video today and I thought I’d stick it on here because I really want to try doing this exercise.
It reminds me of the Aladdin’s carpet (which was probably animated by Blaise since he worked on the film as a 2D animator) and I’ve always been fascinated by it. It was probably my favourite character in Aladdin.
I’ve been binge watching Aaron Blaise’s videos while working on my own animations. It’s been a huge source of inspiration lately. He manages to simplify animation that looks so complex to the ‘average’ eye, I’m such a big fan of his.
Aaron Blaise is an animator and filmmaker and he’s worked in films such as Brother Bear (2003) which he also directed, Aladdin (1992) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). He was nominated for Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
The animator’s videos usually consist of livestreams of him animating short scenes to demonstrate the process of animation, from concept to completion. What I find most interesting about his work is how confident he is about every single stroke he draws (well, obviously since he has 30+ years of industry experience). His art feels not realistic, but 100% believable. The way he makes even a 2 drawing sequence come to life is out of this world. His lines are fast and loose but the final result is clean and very easy to interpret.
Although he is undoubtedly talented, he has said in his videos that it’s nothing but constant practice. Guess that it’s like going to the gym, the more you go the stronger you get. I aim to be disciplined enough to make myself practice animation at least daily. Even if its just a silly little animation.
The video below was very useful for my facial acting exercise. I used it as a reference to draw my characters’ facial expressions. Even the smaller details such as having your lip pout when you’re frowning can make the biggest difference.
My classmate Polina has bought his character animation classes pack and was kind enough to share a few bits with the class. It’s around 50$ and the more I watch his videos, the more I’m convinced to buy it. The guy really knows his animation.
Besides animation, Aaron Blaise also does… pretty much everything art related! But I had a look on his website and he does a variety of concept art, character designs, background art, environmental art, character studies, etc etc.
I really appreciate the energy in his work!! I strive to translate such energy in my work.
Look at how beautiful this illustration is. The contrasts and the lighting are chef’s kiss.
As someone who is very much into character designing, this funny little character warms my heart. And you can clearly observe that Aaron used only a few intuitive lines to draw this character.
He also does more realistically painted pieces. Absolutely beautiful as well.
I was scrolling through the inter webs and found this cool article on Creative Boom with a bunch of websites for Graphic Design inspiration. Design is something I’ve always been drawn to and incorporating good Design in animation is something I definitely want to do in future projects.
Something for future reference!
For week 12 and 13, we did body and facial acting exercises.
I experimented using both on one animation and for that I took the following video for the red character reference. (Not only the following, took me about 10 tries to get the move relatively realistic. It’s surprisingly hard to act.)
Getting video reference was super useful!
After my tutorial with Christina, a few attempts at timings and animating various emotions, this was the final result of my rough animation.
Still a work in progress! I’m having a lot of fun with this acting projects. Even more excited for the lip sync group project.
I’m so happy I finally got to truly understand Adobe Animate and After Effects!
On Tuesday’s classes, Christina and Shaun taught us how to use these softwares.
I created the character bellow based on illustrator Pencil Bandit (https://www.instagram.com/pencilbandit).
For the first After Effects exercise, I created the following mood board:
The mood board was created based on the series ‘Steven Universe’. I looked for illustrations/ pictures of warm sunsets and tropical scenery.
For sound design, I wanted to create depth. I put together 4 different sound layers of the engine sound, birds, wind and a horn in the background.
For the second After Effects exercise, we were instructed to create a short animation of a character struggling to hang on to an object/ pull theirselves from the object. I created the following character struggling to do pull ups at the gym.
I started by creating the character. Posteriorly, I followed Shaun’s steps to create this exercise. I actually found it quite easy to complete it! For some reason, when I used After Effects before I never got around to understand parenting and how different layer can connect.
In the beginning of the academic year I created a Pinterest board and the initial intent was to use it for this one project, but I kept adding up to it and it’s become a character design inspiration board. Every time I see something like I pin it on there so it has the most miscellaneous stuff. It’s been extremely useful and it’s an automatic go-to every time I have to come up with a character for an exercise.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/mariabeatrizar/pins/
Some of the cool stuff I’ve found on there:
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.
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.
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.