Developed Characters

Here is the developed characters in the reflective style of my chosen artists.

My Three Chosen Artists

These are Artists I have chosen whose style which I believe will suit my character the most.

Sam Kelda
Sam is an Illustrator who likes cats. He was born in South Dakota, got a BFA in painting and currently works at a bakery.

I like chose him because his work seems like the type of work that would be suitable for animation. I also believe that the simplistic style he has would add depth to my magician character.

http://www.samkalda.com/blog

Stephan Schmitz
Stephan is an award winning illustrator in Switzerland.

The reason I have chosen him is because although his style is rather basic, they do have hidden meanings which say a lot. It proves that art doesn't need to be detailed to be eye capturing and that less can be more. Therefore I think it would suit my character.

http://www.stephan-schmitz.ch/index.php?/project/illustration/

Richardo Bessa
Richardo is an artist who was born in Portugal and is currently located in London, UK.

The reason I have chosen his style is because I wanted one style that added detail to experiment with my character. I think this type of style would suit my character because there's a lot of dark colours usually involved, which suits the theme.

http://ricardobessa.com/

Week 5 Project

I'm happy with how this project turned out.
Innovate Animation - Week 5 Animation from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Final Dynamic project

Dynamic Project 2 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.


To update this project I've used a mask to cut out the foreground buildings and used a video of flying birds in the background. This was to make it appear as if the video was not a still image as in the original video, snow was the only thing that was moving in the video. Not even the trees were being moved by the wind, thus made it appear static. That is the reason I added the flock of birds video.




Brightness and contrast
To make the foreground buildings stand out more, I also cut them out using the mask method. I used brightness and contrast to make them appear lighter than the building behind to give a better slight of realism to the effect.

Yuri Norstein

This week's project will be based on Yuri Norstein's work. He has created a 1975 film called The Hedgehog and the frog. His style was made in a similar way to the silhouette animation. He used stop motion with figures. The difference is he painted on his backgrounds and characters and coloured them in as they will be seen on camera with the lights towards the models rather than underneath them.

For my part of this project, I was required to create a stop motion puppet bird which can be manipulated for movement for the animation purposes. 

Here was the process of the animation we were doing.

Snow tutorial

This tutorial looks like it might help with the snow effect on my project video to give some method of snow for the background. It uses a similar method of particles only that it uses snow.

In the end I decided not to use this because it didn't add anything new to the composition. Though I think this video is worth mentioning as it could help in future projects.  After Effects Video Tutorial: Creating Realistic Snow from PremiumBeat.com on Vimeo.

JellyFish Pictures

JellyFish Pictures is a visual effects and animation company based in London. It has over 100 artists employed at the offices. Their work is spread into services of advertising, television and film industries. They are known for their recent VFX work on the movie "Kingsman: The Secret Service." It has been in production for 14 years, expanding their animation and graphic work for multiple media industries. It has received awards for its outstanding visual effects.

Sources: http://jellyfishpictures.co.uk/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/jellyfish-pictures

William The Magician

I have added further development to William's character. I have also decided to change the story a bit based on peer feedback on my character presentation.

Manual Cinema Project

This project will focus on live preforming stories using silhouettes and cutouts. Since Halloween is coming up, the project will be based on that.

In our group, I have created the backgrounds that will be used for our project. I used black card and a a pencil to mark out silhouettes before using a crafting knife to cut them out..

Dynamic Project

This second task project is based around adding dynamic fire to a video.
In this instance, I used a video of a building. It was quite hard finding a video that doesn't have the camera move because that would've made the project a lot more difficult than it needed to be.
I also added some blaze and some smoke to make the fire appear like it's actually there.
Dynamic Project from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.


Here is a link to the video I used for this dynamic project.
 https://pixabay.com/en/videos/snow-city-cloud-cold-ice-gel-2443/

This was a one minutes video of a stationary camera focused on buildings which have heavy snow. I expanded the footage by putting in fire that I used for the test project, using the same method. I've also added in some extra flames around the mass fire to make it appear more settling.

Haze
I've also added haze to the fire in this video but it is very difficult to see as the white sky background is blatantly solid.

Adding haze can be achieved by first inserting a new solid layer. Then going to effects > simulation > particle background. Using the parameters, click the canon. Changing the barrel to 152, the particles per sec to 73, the velocity to 34 and the particle radius to the default (3) will make a wider spread of particles.

Here is a test of heat haze which can be seen more clearly.

Fire Haze from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Particles

The video below was made using particle simulation as well. The difference is that a leaf was used to replace the red dots that usually appear. This method could be used for a lot of things that fall from the sky such as snow, rain, hail etc...
Particules from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Two Character Concepts

For the two characters, I have created multiple visual concepts. I have experimented in ideas using three shapes, triangles, squares and circles. I mainly used triangles for Lucky Lucy since female bodies are quite curvy and tend to use a lot of triangles. I had a play around with the techniques and exaggerated on the characters' proportions to give it a cartoony look.

Lucky Lucy

William The Magician

Update on Group Project

Here is an update on our group project. Sound has been added. And the animation has been slowed down. The last scene has also been cut out because it would've overlapped the 10 second limit.
Group Project - Week 3 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Group project - Week 3

This week we focus on the silhouette animator, Lotte Reiniger.
We recorded a simple Jack And The Beanstalk clip using her method. We used puppets and a camera to create a stop motion animation.
Group project1 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Final Visual Effects project

Here is my update on my Visual Effects task one project. For this, I have added a 3D shadow and a sound effect. I've also added a squash and stretch to the ball to make it a little bit more dynamic.
Visual Effects - Task 1 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.


3D Shadow


This method did make an impact on the lighting and although it can be altered, I decided to leave it how it was since I thought the darker lighting gave it a better look. A solid 3D layer was used to determine where the shadow needed to be.

Fire effect

Fire Effect from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

 This is the end result of a fire effect.

First the layer was duplicated. Then a mask was used to cut out the rock and put it on another layer. This way the rock will be covering up the fire and make it appear as if it's behind the rock. A fire with a pitch black background is joined into the layers. The background needs to be pitch black otherwise it would not work.


Smoke

To put some smoke in, first adding a solid layer is needed. Particle playground found in the effects tab is then used to make the fire. Adding this effect will initially show red dots displayed on the stage. Tweaking needs to be done in the effect settings. The gravitation pull needs to be set to zero. This should make the particles start floating. Colour should be changed to grey or amongst that area to make a smoke color and then adding a blur, since smoke isn't solid.Typing in Wiggle (1, 5) in the timeline will make the smoke wiggle, making it appear like the wind is carrying it away.

In the end I'm glad with this smoke effect, although it is rather basic but it is important to know since major realistic smoke can be made using this method.

Character Analasis

Lucky Lucy:


As she stands there, leaning against a gambling machine, tossing her winning chips from one hand to another, she glances maliciously at an old couple approaching a poker table "Now for my next score" she thought  "I see those poor unfortunate suckers who are about to lose their retirement funds and have no idea about it. Time for them to revaluate their lives. Sucks for them but hey, a girl has her needs too."


William The Magician:


Children were cheering, parents were smiling, shop owners were listening. All for this one man. A man of entertainment. A man they trust. A man they admire. How little they know. The show will begin soon. "No need to be nervous" William says kindly to his puppet friend "The show will start soon and it will be just like any other. Our luck has not run out so far. I doubt it will run out now. Those pathetic rats and their parents won't know what hit 'em."

Week 2 - Group project update

Innovative Animation - Week 2 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Week 2 - Group project

For this group project, this will be based on the work of Rokni Haerizadeh. We decided to take a video from an animal testing process and add the head of an animal to the protesters to reflect on Rokni's work.

Task One - Adding to stock footage

For task one, I have downloaded a 1080p HD video from Pixabay of people walking around in the street. I will add a CGI object dropping to the stone pavement in the foreground. A shadow will also be included to make the object seem more believable.


I took the silver ball from the internet image using a .PNG file as .JPEGS aren't usually transparent and are more likely to leave white flakes around the edges taking away the quality. The silver ball was then animation manually using the position and size sub-layer keyframes under the transform primary layer. The shadow, like the ball, was also animated manually at first. However I found out that this method was unnecessary since a shadow can be put in using the 3D method in After Effects.




Here is the result.



Visual Effects - Task 1 from Jack Vanes on Vimeo.

Here is the original video.
https://pixabay.com/en/videos/street-walking-crowd-people-urban-1694/

Visual Effects

Visual Effects are a process of methods using computer graphic imagery (CGI) to integrate onto footage of either animation or live action to give it an enhancement. For this module, I will be exploring the different digital experiments which are appropriate for using.

This module will consist of four tasks. 

Task 1: Basic creative problem solving with stock footage, 5 - 10 seconds (Weeks 1 - 2)

Task 2: Chroma keying and compositing 5 - 10 seconds (Weeks 3 - 5)

Task 3: Dynamics 5 - 10 seconds (Weeks 6 - 8)

Tasks 4: Personal project, 10 -20 seconds (Weeks 9 - 12)

Here's an example of early visual effects used. King Kong is stop motioned and was done in front of a black screen to super impose a different image.



Here is another example of early use of visual effects used in the 1900s.

Character idea experimentations

Character Experiment 1
This video aroused my interest. It shows a man who is obviously broken from his experience from combat. Explaining how he relives that moment over and over again and how his body wants to experience it again. He also feels as though nobody would be able to understand this kind of feeling.
I will use some part of this video to make the character.



I will use these dice and the deck of cards as objects to add to the character's story.

 

 

This is the character I concluded. Her name is Lucy but everyone calls her Lucky Lucy. She is 25 years old and she lives in Las Vegas. She works as a waitress in a casino. And she also often plays the role as the dealer when the other dealers are away. She is a con-artist in the casino. She cheats at poker games, which people often dismiss as luck, hence the nickname Lucky Lucy.




Character Experiment 2
I will use the magician hat and stick and this written text to create the character:
"We want to create puppets that pull their own strings. - Ann Marion"

I have constructed these characters, who is a magician who is known as William and a puppet named Robert. He tricks everyone into thinking he is using his magic to bring his puppet to life as false magic trick, unbeknown to them the puppet is actually alive. He goes to the local shopping centres, where he and the puppet entertain children until closing time. When William is outside of the shopping centre, he uses Robert to squeeze through the vents to disable the alarms. William and Robert then loot as many stores as they can before opening time.

Since magicians are known to naturally wear gloves and since Robert is just fabric, no evidence is ever left at the places they rob. And nobody suspects that it is the entertainer magician.