Character and Narrative

For this brief, I will be reinterpreting and recreating a scene from a Fry and Laurie sketch. I have chosen this scene, set in a jewellery store (starting from 2:42):

I think it would be really interesting to play around with the facial expressions of the characters in this scene, as the emotions of the characters keep changing - particularly Hugh as he goes from confused to frustrated and agitated.

I've made a storyboard with some key shots so that I am ready to start animating:

 

Admittedly, I've been a little lazy with my last few animations and just animated as I went along, so I'm hoping this will help me to plan out my animation better and allow me to animate a little faster, rather than getting stuck in the middle!

I'm also going to have a try at the character designing brief. In this brief, I will be looking to redesign 1 (instead of 3) character from Neil Gaiman's 'The Sandman' graphic novels.

I've been reading the comics to give me an idea of which character I would want to redesign, but I haven't decided which one yet.
I've decided to try and take on this brief as I won't have access to a computer over the next 3 weeks, so I'll keep myself busy with character designing and sketches instead!

'In The Style Of...' Evaluation

The aim of my most recent project that I have been working on, 'In The Style Of...', was to relaunch a children's television programme. I had the choice of three different programmes: Paddington Bear, Roobarb and Custard, or The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Of these three, I chose Paddington Bear.
With my chosen programme, I then had to reboot them in the visual style of either Studio AKA's 'Lost and Found', Passion Pictures Australia's 'The Lost Thing', or Studio AKA's 'Varmints'. From these styles, I chose 'Varmints'.

Through this project, I have learnt how to model a character that I have designed and rig the character, ready for animation. However, during this process I encountered some problems. I designed my Paddington Bear as quite a fat bear with chunky and stumpy legs, as I thought it would give it more character when I started to make him walk during the animation process. Although it became a problem when I started to rig and animate him. Having fat stumpy legs meant that my character had limited leg movement - he could only bend his knee a certain amount, otherwise his calf would disappear into the thigh and if the foot was pointed up too high, his ankle would sink into the shin. I also modeled him with a big round belly, which meant that if he lifted his leg up too much, the thigh would disappear into his belly. The result of this was that when I started to animate him walking, he looked like he was waddling slightly.
A lot of his movements seem too block-y, especially when he's walking over to his suitcase in his hut and putting his hand down to rest on the table - his arm is outstretched for quite a few seconds and seems to bounce as he's walking. In the close up of him closing his suitcase, I can see that his hand doesn't stay still against the table. I need to change the chain on the arm from a FK chain to an IK chain to make sure his hand is planted firmly onto the table. The walk in these few seconds is also quite..wobbly. He looks like he's limping and ready to fall over. I've made some changes to it, but he still looks like he might fall backwards. When he's walking outside and swinging his suitcase, I think the timing is slightly out and the suitcase doesn't have the weight that I wanted to try and emphasise on. I'll definitely be taking this back into 3ds to redo the walking at some point, as I'm quite unhappy with it.

This project has also taught me that I need to manage my time better - I spent way too long thinking about the design of the character and modelling him. The problems I encountered with rigging meant that it took away a lot of time that I should have been using to animate. This left me rushing to finish the animation part, which needs a lot of reworking to get it to the standard that I know it should be at.
I definitely want to come back to this project in my spare time to try and correct the mistakes I've made and work a little more on the post-production side of the animation.
But for now, here's how Paddington looks...