Pre-Production Animation

So for the end of this pre production animation we had to animate a scene from are animatic, my idea eventually developed into this music show consisting of a battle between Hitler(the judge) and the hermit who is this character that lives below the stage and controls what goes on up on stage. The short film evolves around this fight between Hitler and the hermit and there different tastes for music. The whole animation will also be in the style of Robert crumb and have some of his rude and unique content in.

The animatic is a clip from only part of the whole story so may not make much sense:

I chose to animate a scene of Hitler going crazy over one of the acts in a way very similar to wolfy from red hot riding hood. Here is the animation in a progression from the rough animation to the final coloured clip.

Progression

The final Animated Clip

Getting the style of Robert Crumb

A main aspect of are pre production project was to get the artists style and try to create are work in a very similar style. It took lots of copying and practising to get a similar looking style to his amazing illustrations which are so unique and feel like I still haven't achieved it.

I started with just looking at his work, copying it and then trying to put that style into my own characters. I originally just used a Biro pen to do the drawings but later on started to use ink in the same way that Robert Crumb did to try and get inside his head and do the work as he did. Watching This video was also a great resource to get an idea of who he was as an artist. The Confessions of Robert Crumb

so i copied his work and finally adapted it to fit with my characters in my project. One of my characters is Britney spears and instead of trying to make her look like Britney I decided to try and make her look more like Robert Crumbs work but in a way more simplified.

The next thing was to try and create my backgrounds to look similar to that out of Fritz the cat.

I wasn't that pleased with the outcome and didn't feel like I achieved the style as well as I could have but I still enjoyed creating them.

Fritz the Cat

For my Pre-Production Project I chose to look at the art work of Robert Crumb and came across the animated film Fritz the cat, created from the comics Fritz the Cat by Robert Crumb. Many people would say that this film is Outrageous because of its very racial and crude content. But I disagree, yes it has got allot of content in that may be offensive to people but then again so has every film. I watched the film mainly for the style and to study the animation its self but found myself loving the film for its content as well.

But anyway I studied the animation as i would have to mimic this style in a piece of my animation and also looked more in depth at the backgrounds that where painted in this film. I went on to find that they where painted by Jonny Vita. It was this water colour effect that particularly intrigued me.

When trying to find these backgrounds I found this blog to be a great resource www.michaelspornanimation.com

Backgrounds from the animated film Fritz The Cat:

The 11 Second Club

So my 11 second animation for December is finished. I had originally hoped for it to be completed within December so I could upload it to the website but i accepted that that wasn't going to happen as I had other coursework to attend to. But it is now complete and handed in. I really enjoyed this project and felt like I have learnt allot. It was a great task to do as I went through the whole animation process from scratch starting with initial sketched and ideas through to the final rendered animation shot. so here it is ...

First rough animation.

Final 11 second Animation.

11 Second Club Animation

So we where given the task of doing an 11 second club animation for one of are modules.
The 11 second club is a competition where each month an 11 second sound clip is given out on the website and anyone can animate whatever they want to the sound clip and they enter them on the website at the end of each month. http://www.11secondclub.com/

We where given this task half way through the month so we didn't have to enter it to the website, but the idea of doing this task is to get us to create an 11 second fully finished animation within a month.

as we started the task at the end of November we had the choice of using the November sound clip or the December. This was the sound clip that I chose to animate to.

I started buy listening to the sound clip over and over but the first thing that popped into my head was what I stuck with. it was the idea of an angry character running into a door, kicking it down and then stomping up some stairs angrily as if he's after someone and then at the end he falls through the floor boards.

I chose to use the Alex rig that I found on animation buffet which is a great resource for a range of different rigs out there.

http://www.animationbuffet.blogspot.co.uk/

I had played around with a few rigs and found this was nice and simple to use, had all the features that i was looking for and i liked the overall look of the character.

I then sketched out some environment concepts which i would then have to model in Maya later.

and a quick sketch of the layout of the environment and where the character would be moving about in that space.

L.A.V Tests

The next step was to do a few L.A.V tests for reference to make it easier to understand what actions i will have to animate.

I Then modelled the very basic environment and done the rough animation to fit it in with the sound.