Project report

Cuberush redlight challenge

I went to find a competition to finish my 3rd responsive, since I had already tried animation and succeeded with 2 of the submission I felt like doing an illustration. A friend recommended me to go on a website called cubebrush where they host weekly challenges and competitions every month, the theme of this week(15) was "redlight", I quickly thought about what I should create as I had a lot of ideas, so I started to thumbnail throughout the week trying to create a simple composition that will not take long to make as I've only got a few days to complete.

So I started with these thumbnails and tried to develop some of them, and here is the result:

So here is the process of developing the thumbnails, as this challenge is character based I had to find a composition that will give off the impression of "Red light" then I decided to go simple with a pose that would not take long to draw and with an object, floating in the air which I decided to be a red crystal.

I then started on the lineart that took a while with a bit a trouble with the hands, but I used a 3d program called DesignDoll to help me with hand reference, once the lineart was done I moved on to colouring the base.

unfortunately, I didn't save screenshots of the later stages of this drawing but I learned a lot about colouring techniques in terms of shadows and highlights, resulting in the final result which is a big jump from this piece. I looked at a few references here and there to help me with the composition and colouring, here is a Pinterest link to my board of references  

I love the final turnout and would consider this to be the bigger project out of all the briefs I've tried to work on, as it was not easy to create this piece of artwork. submitting it to the website was quite simple, all I had to do was make an account and submit to the challenge, here's a link

hope I win as it looks like I have 5 likes currently as I'm writing this blog, the more likes I get the more likely I can win which I have to wait for! 

here is the art board:

Applied animation week 11

Due to some work I had to do through easter, I only managed to work on refining the script a little with my dad and hopefully it will be done soon. and hopefully, I can start on animating my parts of the animation which includes the book scenes and a bit of the keyframing of the merchants shaking hands. not doing any of this work for two weeks has put me slightly behind but I hope to catch up soon.

Loopdeloop chicken

The theme for this months (March) loopdeloop is "Chicken". During March I thought I would have the chance to create something to submit but unfortunately, I missed the deadline again. But apart from that, I had an idea for the theme, the idea was making two people in cars play chicken, and as they are heading towards each other a chicken appears on the road, ending with the two drivers having to swirl around to the other side they were facing. I loved the fact that I included 2 concepts that people can relate or reference too, the 2 concepts being "why did the chicken cross the road?" and "let's play chicken, or are you afraid?".

After coming up with the idea, I immediately came up with a small description of the concept and created some storyboards. here are the storyboards:

as you can see the storyboard is very long but that's to keep the anticipation before the surprise of the chicken crossing the road.

After the completion of the storyboard, I didn't have time to start on it straight away as I had to focus on my other work resulting in limiting my time to create the animation and submit. Final week of the deadline approached quickly, I had to change my idea as it was too complex and would take a while to finish, I discussed with a friend about an idea I just came up with which developed into a ninja chicken, it was a very simple concept of a ninja chicken using a staff to dodge the rocks attacking been thrown at him, I only had 3 days to quickly make the animation.

Creating a style that was simple enough to animate was quite easy since I already had a reference to the chicken I drew in the storyboard above. As it was a simple shape I managed to draw quickly but not quick enough to complete it for the competition. here is the result of what I got done, and should consider finishing for my own benefit:

What I've learned from this, is that I really need to organize my time for the animation work I need to do, I've realized that this style I've developed or rather learned, is simple and quick to produce, and has open my variety to styles I should consider, as it will help with getting animations and concepts done on time.

art board:

11 seconds club ressponsive brief march

March's 11 seconds club animation contest was difficult as I have never lipped synced to an audio clip before, I managed to submit a day before the deadline which I was proud of since it's the first successful submission for responsive.

The process of achieving this took a while because I had to learn the basics of how lip syncing worked. I first decided on what program I was going to use, I choose Animate CC because I wanted to experiment with its capabilities of adding sound clips to the timeline, I then learned that you can change the audio clip to stream so that I can hear every sound/note on each frame which was very helpful.

The audio that was downloadable from the website featured 2 people having a conversation. when I first listened to the audio, it sounded like two men in their 50's talking to each other as if there was a business discussion happening between them. so imagined what the scene could have been like but was unfortunately not included in the final result as the 2 characters were taking much of the space that will be explained through the process I undertook.

After setting up everything in Animate CC I needed to learn how lip syncing worked, I already had some knowledge of how it worked so I just found a mouth reference sheet that I could work from. I learned about this from a famous YouTuber under the name "Domics" who creates 2D animations that involve a lot of lip syncing, he also created a tutorial I watched a long time ago (around the time it was released link for lip syncing)  here is the reference sheets I used, 1 2 to help me with understanding the mouth movement used for each pronounced word.

I progressed with just animating each mouth right next to each other on the canvas (voice 1 on the left and voice 2 on the right) heres a screen shot of what it looked like:

As you can see above I have the audio clip in a layer at the top and the mouth layers underneath (it does not really matter where the audio layer is, but I prefer it at the top so I can see the decebels highlighted by the orange sound wave). After creating most of the mouth shapes Ithat I did striagh ahead I started to notice a pattern that I could go back and use the other frames to quickly finish the lip syncing.

After a few tries trying to create the right shape mouth, I started to get the hang of it. most of the time I would imagine how my mouth moves when I say each word, Does it stretch and get thin or get tight and thick, this method plus the referance sheet helped to figure out if the mouth looked wrong or not. I spent most of my time on lip syncing. When it was done I moved on to how i'll be composing the scene, to include both characters and lips. this idnt take long because of the limited movement from the characters, I mostly wanted to concentrate on the lip sync as it was my first time. here is a screen shot of the faces I pictured them to have for the voices:

Heres the final result:

Art board:

this is the letter I received after submitting to 11secondsclub: