LAUAN 503 Character and Narrative - Casting Workshop One

In our first casting workshop, of four, we learned the first steps of making a two part mould out of clay. This involved pressing an object into the clay to submerge exactly half. After building walls around the mould, we then mixed and poured in the plaster.
We also learned about texture plates. This involved making a textured pallet by scoring into the clay as we wished. This process could be really useful for making textures not only for puppets but for floors, walls, props etc for stopmotion.

LAUAN 503 Character And Narrative - Inspirations

This Weeks Inspirations 31/10/18

• Cinematography and Title Sequences

-Alfred Hitchcock

-Steven Spielberg 

-Clint Eastwood and western films 

-Film Noir and German Expressionism

-Catch Me If You Can

-Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

• Reading

-Earnest Hemmingway 

-Setting Up Your Shots: Great Camera Moves Every Filmmaker Should Know - Jeremy Vineyard

• Online

-http://www.watchthetitles.com/

-http://www.artofthetitle.com/

-https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting

LAUAN 503 Character and Narrative - Week 2

Week two has been a successful week. I wrote the script which brought the story into life. Rhys and Gabbi's work on the character design has also meant that the vision is becoming clearer. Over all the team seems happy with directions and division of labour.
I've personally been working on the background and world art for the animation. I'm particularly interested in perusing this role within industry so was more than happy take on this task . After numerous mood boards, sketches and digital paintings we settled on doing a 1950's adventure poster-kind of style concept.

Concept Art This Week:

WWW- Team working well together, good division of labour, good ideas, the script is good too (never written a script before), initial ideas for concept art are really interesting and original, story is concise and malleable. Also I completed a time plan for us, so organisation is also went well this week. 

EBI- Feel that personally I could have produced more visuals this week, could have made designed more rockets and space backgrounds.  - However, it only took three to settle on a theme/style so perhaps quality over quantity. 

Also : MAYA

-We also covered compositing, shadows and colouring on maya aided by After Effects. I found this extremely complicated and hard to grasp, however still managed to export. 

Inspirations this week:

- Steven Universe Art & Origins by Chris McDonnell and Rebecca Sugar 

-Awaking Beauty :The Art of Eyvind Earle by Ioan Szasz 

LAUAN 503 Character and Narrative - Week 1

Firstly, we individually rolled story dice in order to construct a narrative. My story dice rolled 1) an astronaut on the moon with a little flag 2)a satellite dish 3) a box. I constructed a story about a female astronaut who forgot to take her flag to the moon which was the chosen narrative in my group- I was made director off the back of that. After brainstorming ideas about style, character, medium and who will perform each role, we individually created primary research.
Decisions reached so far:

• Gabbi & Rhys' Roles : begin researching and designing character as an adult and a child on art boards
• My Role : background research and design, script 
• All : research and design the rocket, space logo and potentially a satellite
• Mediums : mix of digital 2D -AE, PS, TV Paint 

Decisions to develop:

• Storyboard
• Character design
• Sound/ music
• Style - this is the main one as we all have very different existing styles, meeting somewhere halfway or perhaps trying something completely new may be a feasible idea.

WWW- Good flow of ideas as a group, good sharing of roles, good initial research and ideas

EBI- Possibly work a bit faster as a group, push research further into initial sketches and small moving ideas.

MAYA

This week we also learned how to make pendulums on Maya. Overall, familiarising myself with the work space again was very useful and the final pendulum worked nicely too. This practice focused on easing and over lapping action.

WWW- familiarised myself, pendulum accurate, gained more confidence with software

EBI- Pushed the pendulum further and explored more of the principles of animation such as secondary motion.