Storyboard Project - 'Extraction'

This gif is part of a larger storyboard/animatic project I've been working on about a spy who's been captured and he has to fight his way out with limited resources. This is really just a reason to practise storyboard as it's what I intend to specialise in, specifically action sequences.

It's inspired by spy thrillers like the Bourne series or the most recent series of Bond movies, as well as videogames I've played like Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid. But I also want to incorporate a sense of humour that I think those IPs lack, not explicitly comedic but it doesn't take itself so seriously. When trying to explain this I think of the climatic sequence of Blade which I love for how it finds moments of comedy in a narrative that takes its ridiculous premise so so seriously.

Some basic character design sketches, I want simple designs that are easy to draw to focus on the direction. It also has science fiction elements such as the metal visor in the first image.

I only intend to take this as far as an animatic for my portfolio, I think this takes some of the pressure off and lets me focus on the skills that I am trying to develop.

Animation evaluation - Bin kick

These are some rough keyframes I provided for a group project this term, they're a little rough but I'd like to take a look to see how I could improve.

I don't think a lot of these drawings are solid enough to be considered keyframes, even at the best of times I've left things like hands with little visual information making it more difficult for the inbetweener to know how it should look. Shifting volumes are still an issue in my animation as a whole, with body parts sometimes changing quite drastically. This becomes even more obvious when it comes to cleanup phase.

Although on a positive note I think this piece of animation has a fairly good sense of weight, I utilized anticipation and follow through to try to make this action appear more violent then kicking over a bin actually may be to better suit the narrative of the piece.

Designing for Animation (Is Hard)

Developing visual design for animation has its own very specific challenges unique to the genre, something I have discovered having recently been assigned as art director on our live brief project. My initial set of designs I thought to be most visually appealing were not suitable for animation, they only seemed to work from the few angles I had drew them from and it was difficult to imagine how they might move. My team members also voiced concerns about the amount of unnecessary detail of the characters considering the time limit we had. At the time I found this frustrating because I didn't see any issue with these designs but in retrospect they were not at all suitable and I spent too much time fighting that rather than fixing it.

So I went back to the drawing board and altered the designs to simplify the shapes and remove unnecessary details. But I think it went to far into the opposite direction and we landed on bland characterless designs. Which forced me to change how I was thinking about my design philosophy for project, although at this point it was too little too late and we had to stick with the lack luster designs.

So with that in mind I'm spending time focusing on designing characters for my third year pitch. I've been looking at the art of Andrew MacLean for inspiration, he is a comic book artist but I think his art would be perfect for animation. As you can see to the left his art style is very graphic, with geometric shapes that are easy to identify, he uses shorthand when the characters are at distant such as faces boiled down to main elements. I think his use of the lines within some characters may be excessive for animation but I've been using his designs as a point of reference when designing my own characters.







Compare his face in the image below to the own above, he doesn't depict as much detail at a distance because the necessary visual information is still conveyed just with less lines, which is a more economic approach for animation.