Evaluative Blogs #2
- Mort
- Jan 31, 2020
- 3 min read
I collared C at one point (he's an extremely busy man rn) and asked him for advice regarding the jumpiness of my previous bird animation and he recommended rotoscoping as adding more frames would take up a lot more time. I delved YouTube and found a video which had a handy lil walk cycle of a chicken - my aim with this was to bring the colour experiment chickens from the summer to life.
I started off by simply tracing the line around the chicken - this took a total of 62 frames at 18 frames per second, made much easier by rotoscoping. I then traditionally prepared the watercolour splodges, using watercolour inks which I borrowed from a very gracious classmate. Once I had scanned the 13 of them in and edited them into the animation, I stumbled upon the effects button in the timeline menu and went to town on the hue/saturation option leading to this final animation:
I really love this as it wasn't too difficult and I had a lot of fun while producing it. I learnt that the watercolour inks are a lot more vibrant than actual watercolours, however, they act very differently due to their ink-y nature. While the ability to mix colours extremely fast and effectively is valuable, I'm unsure if the vibrancy is worth the loss of control. Or maybe control comes with practice. So far, rotoscoping has proved to be much more fun than simply using references because you then don't have to worry about figuring out perspective and proportions whilst also making the focus move.
Moving back to the magpie composition for a moment, having finally found a brush I like (the one used for the chicken - KYLE Ultimate Charcoal Pencil 25px Med2) I worked on fixing the compositional issues and drew up another rough sketch of the scene, putting more detail into the fountain. While there are some elements of the background that have been removed, I think the composition still works as the chair and edge of the shed door imply that there is more to see off the page. I tried to exaggerate the magpie's pose in order to give him more life, however, I don't think I've quite got it right yet. Otherwise, I think we're reaching the end of the compositional wriggling and will soon be able to focus more on the media for this piece.
Alongside the animation and magpie composition, I was also working on the storyboard for the robins, sketching their story out in pencil and checking up with S regarding the flow of the story.
The flow was correct, however, there were some issues with the positioning and negative space around the characters, and so S suggested reworking the panels using silhouettes.
Some of the compositional issues were resolved here, using acrylic also allowed me to do multiple iterations of the same panel or page quickly, and with minimal effort. This allowed the flow of work to run smoother than if I was using any other media and resulted in some interesting shapes. Working on the background proved near impossible at the time otherwise the panels would have ended up being very muddy.
Once the robins were as resolved as they can be at this stage, I returned my attention to the magpie page.
The sketch progressed to a finalised line, however, I quickly decided that I could improve the pose of the magpie and so redrew that character. The backdrop varied between panels, the top being edited through hue/saturation for the further background, and the bottom featuring a gradient into the sky. Through popular opinion of my fellow peers, the bottom panel appears more natural, however, a neater version would be more suited to the final version. Another critique from my classmates was that the softer line, and red tones of the original composition were favourable aspects that I should carry forward. Resulting in this (hopefully) finalised version.
This is where I'll leave the blogs for now.
Yes, I write these when I forget to charge my laptop pen.
Mort.
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