[Influences] Bradford Animation Festival 2011

Thanks to the University, we were able to get hold of passes for the 18th annual Bradford Animation Festival. This trip turned out to be incredibly useful and inspiring for my own work, as well as a chance to gain some inspiration from a wide variety of animations.
Out of the screenings I attended, two animations piqued my curiosity. The first was a 3D animation named "The Monster of Nix" I was inspired by the dark atmosphere of this animation, as well as the beautiful, dystopian art direction featuring some dark scenery and very distinctive character designs.

The art direction and feel of this animation were very similar to what I hope to achieve in the future with my "Oddball" series. I was also very interested in the dark atmosphere juxtaposed against the almost fairytale like storytelling.

The second animation that stood out to me was The Backwater Gospel. This was, again another animation where I admired the art style. I was also noticing some similarities to my most recent personal animation, Oddball Halloween. The animation included silhouette scenes with white, glowing eyes that I had used in my own work just days before.

As well as the festival, I also looked around the museum itself and paid great attention to the animation floor. I had visited many times when I was younger, but this time I was really able to appreciate the displays and let it really sink in. I was particularly fond of the original cels from animations I've seen. Looking at the frames from Animal Farm on display really make me appreciate the work that went into them, rather than taking them for granted on screen. There was also a Cel from the Discworld animation, Soul Music containting Death and Susan, two characters who actually inspired the creation of my character, Redi Halsey. Being a Terry Pratchett fan, it was a real treat to see this sort of thing.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time at the festival and left with a lot of inspiration and ideas!

[Drawing] Sketchbook dump

[Personal project] This time, it's personal!

Along with my University work, I spend a lot of time creating my own animations which go on various sites, including my own, http://www.clayos.co.uk

Below is a list and brief details about my personal work I've been doing since I started University:

Universithing: Night In

Universithing is a series of short animations I'm using as a diary of sorts as I go through University. In my first week, a quiet night in ended up with me going to see Gary Numan live, so I made a short toon to commemorate the amazing day!

Above: Sneaking Gary into the post was necessary!

Oddball: Halloween 2011

As a reboot of an old series of animations, I decided to create a short toon to celebrate Halloween.



This was received far better than I originally anticipated, below is a list of amazing things it's done so far:

• Front page feature on Newgrounds.com
• Over 21,000 views in the first 5 days
• Advetrised my Deviant Art and finally got me to over 200 watchers.
• Built up hype and requests for more in the series
• Got me a spot on the Newgrounds.com Roku Channel on TV
• Ranked at the 7th top scoring animation in the Halloween contest on Newgrounds.com

Above: It's... beautiful...

Axew Boogie:

After finishing my Halloween toon and getting praise I celebrated by doing a live animation session. I've made previous Pokemon loops in the past and decided to feed my obsession by creating another. The Axew Boogie was born!

The animation contains audio that plays automatically, so it's linked to an external site:

http://kreids-clayos.deviantart.com/art/Axew-Boogie-Finished-266054062

Along with these animations, I've also been busy creating character sheets for the Oddball series:

[Uni project] Toy Dancers!

For our final week long project, we were tasked with creating a pixilation animation with a humans and inanimate objects interacting and defying gravity. My finished project differed greatly from my original concept, which almost literally involved turning my room upside down.

My final idea changed greatly however, when I realised there wasn't a lot of interaction with inanimate objects I could do while either sitting on my side or holding myself up against a wall. Whilst rummaging through my clothes for Halloween, I discovered some of my steampunk gear, along with my goggles I frequently wear. This reminded me of a music video with wind up toys:

Above: For those not intersted in the song, skip forwards to 2:40 or 3:30 for the parts I'm referring to.

Obviously this level of animation would be difficult giving that I haven't had much experience in stop frame and the time limit in which I had to make the animation. Instead I decided to use various objects that I could give character to while keeping the animation fairly simple. For example the mouse, which behaves like a snake with the wire trailing behind and the scared teddy behind the fridge.

As for the interaction with the objects, I was again inspired by Dr. Steel's "crazy toy-maker" image and decided to add a simple story to the project. A toy-maker tries to create dancing toys, gets mad at them when they fail, toys get revenge.

The finished project is below:

On completion, this project turned out to be my favourite out of the four new styles and I feel that the previous work had helped me out a lot too. The political animation taught me the importance of lighting and the time lapse work showed me how important it was to keep the camera steady, as even the tiniest of movements can be picked up.

One thing I would improve in future work is to switch to royalty free music. The music choices aren't pop culture, but they are still licenced tracks so I should aim to avoid them.

It was also a chance to actually be in my work, and pull the set of classic faces below!

[Uni project] If only I had more TIME!

The goal for animation number four was to create a time lapse sequence focusing on changes in light. When the topic was first announced I had visions of a video with different styles and moods of music matched by changes in light, for example slow, calm piano matched to sunrise and then drop in the dubstep for night time sequences of overexposed car lights in the street. This realisation didn't take long to fail though as time got the better of me. I set out to film the first part of the sequence out of my flat window. The goal was to take a picture every 5 minutes of the sky getting darker while the lights in the building opposite began to turn on. I thought this would make an interesting transition from natural to artificial light. It was after filming this sequence for around 6 hours and getting 7 seconds of footage that I realised my original goal was too ambitious. Instead I chose to match the changes in light to a sound effect. After searching through my files, I managed to find a gem. The original PlayStation start up theme. With nostalgia running through my veins I added the fading sound to the animation I had filmed and then adjusted the timing by looping several frames.

Here is the finished animation:

Once my animation was complete, I was unsatisfied with the shakiness of the camera. Taking each picture manually meant that I ended up slightly knocking the camera in each frame. To avoid this, I wanted to try out a self capture program, so I got hold of the freeware "Tiphalos"

The animation below was an experiment with the program:

I often have trouble sleeping so the animation was interesting to see how frequently I move around.

[Uni project] SPACE JAPAN... and... politics?

Our third Animation project. We were tasked with creating a cut-out animation with the theme of politics. Politics being one of my weakest points, I decided to look up some news that didn't involve the stereotypical, big nosed MPs. It was after a short time of searching when a friend of mine linked to an article about the Japanese government. Here is the article:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/10-000-free-round-trip-tickets-japan-134142507.html

Seeing this as a link to government and politics, I decided to base my animation on this. My next problem was that I didn't know much about Japan. After some thought, I remembered how often I got frustrated about people thinking Japan was nothing but anime, giant monsters and of course, EVERYTHING being cutesy, so I vented this into my work.

The animation is linked below:

Looking back at the animation, this is to date, my least favourite outcome from an assignment. My main flaw was that I was extremely over ambitious for a one week project. I aimed to get the animation 10 around two minutes, explaining how Japan isn't entirely as people preconceive it to be, but time limits got the better of me and I feel as if the finished work was somewhat slap-dash. My second flaw is the voices, or more, lack of voices. My microphone was having troubles at the time and I only managed to record some quiet, poor quality lines which had to go into the film.

Finally, I had to improvise with a home-made light-box of sorts. The ones we used in University had glass panels, which didn't make much of a difference in the back-lit sand animations, but in a fully lit cutout animation I was getting reflections in the glass in a lot of the shots.

As a temporary improvisation, I created a box of my own using whatever I had lying around in the room. It was a cobbled together creation, but it managed to do the job!

Above: Improvisation is the mother of creation!

[Uni project] Sand Princess

For our second assignment, we were tasked with something many, if not all of us were inexperienced with. We had to create a short, stop frame animation using sand with the theme of metamorphosis. As a concept, this seemed fairly simple to me. I then discovered that sand is in fact, very frustrating to draw with. Not only did I Have to take the shadows into consideration (I was in fact using salt, rather than sand, which didn't seem to block light as much) but I had to try to accurately draw the same shape in each frame with far less accuracy than using a pencil. Nevertheless I got used to it after a few testers and I'm still fairly happy with my take on the topic, Sand Princess.
Here is the video:

If I was to change anything in the video, I would begin by practising a lot more with the medium. Imitating ways of leaving marks from videos such as the one below would help me with my drawing, although my work was on a smaller scale.

[Uni project] Assignment 1: This Are Meself

For our first weeks assignment we we had the task of creating a short animation in any medium of our choice that would introduce us to the group. For my work I chose to showcase my existing experience in Adobe Flash to create a short, black and white animation. I decided to make the animation seem light hearted and funny to reflect myself and even made fun of my younger self to show just how strange my thoughts were. The simplistic black and white style was inspired by comic books, along with text often appearing on the screen to highlight key points in the voice-over.

Here is the finished animation in .swf format:




I am pleased with the finished result as it not only managed to tell my life story in an amusing way, but it also said a lot about myself through the style in which I made it.

The music was royalty free and voices were recorded myself. If I had to change anything in this animation, I would have added more frame by frame animation to some of the "panels". Particularly the "artistic depression" part which was mainly a simple motion tween.