A little bit of reshaping...

Received some feedback on Friday after my client project presentation about my lion model. He looks a little too 'human' at the moment, so I've been doing a little bit of reshaping today.

fyi...his head isn't joined to his body yet...

I was told to think 'Alex from Madagascar'...and this is my result so far...I think he still needs a little more work on his arms and torso. I'm quite happy with his mane at the moment..still reminds me of a helmet though...I'm working on it.

Client Project, you'll have to take a back seat this week..

Whilst I'm in the throws of mild panic attacks about my research project...
I give you a not-so-headless version of my lion

Slow progress..but I guess that's better than no progress? I'll admit I'm not super happy with the way he looks at the moment, he definitely needs a lot of work..but that'll be reserved for next week whilst I finish off my research project presentation.

The only word I have for all of this, at present, is: sigh...

Research Project - Reading List

Just a little note of resources that I'll be using for my research project work...

The Animator's Survival Kit - Richard E. Williams 
The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation - Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
Acting for Animators - Ed Hooks
How to Cheat in Maya 2013: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation - Eric Luhta, Kenny Roy
Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right - Jason Osipa
Gesture Drawing for Animation - Walt Stanchfield, edited by Leo Brodie
Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation - Donald Crafton
The Disney Villain - Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas

Cartoon Brew:
The Milt Kahl Head Swaggle
Why Is It So Difficult to Make Cute Cartoon Characters?

Cartoon Research

Power Centers and Personality - Keith Lango

Power Centers and the Importance of Body Language - Tea Time Animation, in a lecture presented by Frank-Joseph Frelier

Posing a Character

Animation Studies Online Journal

Gesture Generation by Imitation: From Human Behaviour to Computer Character Animation - Michael Kipp, 2003

I'm about 80% sure there's a very important reference that I've forgotten here...

Assigned Client Project: 'Nottingham Loves...'

Three weeks into my final year. I will blog, I promise.

For the assigned client project, I will be working on an animation for the Young Creative Awards 2014. The brief asks what we think 'Nottingham Loves...' or what we love about Nottingham?  
  I'll be honest, I didn't have a clue what to do at first and thought I may be at a slight disadvantage coming from London - even if I have been living here for roughly 2 years now...
But after some mind-mapping, I managed to get this far...

...and after some more thinking, I decided by topic would be 'Events at Old Market Square'.
My first few concepts for this idea involved a lot of architectural modelling..which I don't want to do, to put it simply. I want to focus on character animation, so I've decided to base my animation in a white world. For the 'events', I've chosen 3 events: GameCity, the Christmas Market/Winter Wonderland and 'Nottingham Riviera'. Each event will be represented by an object (as per listed event): an arcade machine, the 'North Star' swing ride and a deck chair and parasol.
For the character, I've decided to use a lion to represent the lions outside the city council house in Market Square. Here are my initial character drawings and T-poses for my designed character:

My idea is that the character will interact with each object with some sort of..distraction between each object. I've drawn up a storyboard..but having spoken to my tutorial group last week and getting a few more ideas, I think I'm going to redraw this so that it doesn't look so...plain...

That's it so far...I'll end with a screenshot of my (headless) character model so far...