Tutorial Tuesday Sam:
I showed Sam(tutor) and the rest of the class my Script and Blockout for my Final Major Project. He was very happy and impressed with the effort. He really liked what I created and helps him visualise the whole piece. He asked me on the script that there was no detail of what Oracle Snowmana was doing before he meets Santa. Also said that the scripts dialgoue wasn’t great, and although the information is important on what was said, there needs to be tweaks on how they would address it in a conversation. Therefore he told me I can contact on one of the students who study ‘Film Studies’. He also thinks for the Mock Up was really good, and would be really nice to see an animatic blockout, showing how the story will go.
Life Drawing
In Life Drawing Lessons, we first did a few excersizes on the face and drew simple proportions to begin with. I struggled a lot first, because measurements and allignments of the face. However with a couple of more turns, I really concentrated and went better. When the model kept moving his face every 30 seconds, It was a struggle to keep up with getting the proportions correct.
I then moved onto drawing the body taking five minutes to draw the model and achieving the proportions correctly. It was very hard because I hadn’t had much practice on it and so I wasnt’ sure on if legs of arms were correctly positioned, having drawn too hard with the charcoal and could be less for the outline. With practice, and remmembering previous life drawing skills, I thought about scaling and used a thumb technique. This would help me measure how much distance is from the head to the neck, and the neck from the torso, and the torso to the feet. It was important to try and get the bend and have the first curve drawn, with markers on where the body parts would be.
Once achieving this well, I managed to get time to shade and give details to my drawing. Some shades were too harsh and here i could apply less pressure to the paper. At the end I did one 10 minute pieces at the end and managed to get a good outcome. However if there was more I could improve, it would to make highlights on the knees and thighs more prominent, as it looks too plain.
Overall Life Drawing helped me develop skills for storyboarding and drafting materials. This was handy for pre-work of the FMP and the workshops I was doing, such as Reinterpreting Compositions.
Workshop with Ben on Camerawork (DAY 2)
The whole class including myself went to a near park to take photos of the environment. We had to practice what we learnt in our last lesson and did what Ben(tutor) commanded. I tried to take shots adjusting the shutter speed to make it blurry when things played in motion, such as the birds flapping and eating food on the ground and cars passing by next to traffic light. The shots made cars go blurry. And then he told us to try and to make the shutter speed high within a dark area. It was hard to find any movement until I saw people walking besides the trees. I took photos and there was a lot of noise due to the shutter speed and was less blurry, which my teacher wanted us to spot. However When trying to retake my shot to do the opposite it looked better, with more motion and the scene brighter. The final excersize was to take a shot that showed depth of field. I needed to get a balance of aperture, as the less light that reaches to the sensor and less blurry, on the other end will become blurry on the background and more light will come through. I took a photo of the wall in focus, and turned out to go well which was in a distance. However the closer shots were difficult because I didnt realise that I should have had my shutter speed much less rather than it being high and being very blurry. However I practiced some shots at home, and managed to get more understanding of the camera. This was very important to have this excersise in class and outside class, as it helped me understand more about taking photos and think over the kind of camera shots I can be using for my FMP within the 3D world. It also understand terms such as ISO, aperture and shutter speed within a camera, as some 3d softwares use these terms, which I yet to understand
Workshop with Kelvin on Reinterpreting Composition (DAY 2)
Having completed the homework, I thought the overall outcome for the first screenshot of ‘Spiderman Into The Spiderverse’ went well. The first screenshot showed Miles grabbing Peter on the middle of the busy road as peters web is attached on to the train. This was full of action and therefore was easy to show rhythm in the scene. I kept thinking about the four elements, ‘grouping, focal, balance, rhythm’. They’re some challenging moments that I faced, such as the proportions within the drawings and trying to get the tones in the scene. I would need to improve this through more practice on life drawing and getting the anatomy to a good structure.
In the 2nd lesson we learnt a few sayings within a shot design. Such as ‘Shots are no built on characters, they are built on perspectives.’ Or ‘What you want the audienxe to feel should be the driver of every composition.’ What was something that I was intrigued was “shots that work, work for a reason, so use them” as every shot has a meaning. We looked at the dutch angle and saw an example in 12 monkeys. The Dutch angle helps to create an Off Balance feel, important way to make audiences feel confusion and tension, not feeling natural. We looked a less balance dutch angel like Corpse Bride art. For homework, we had choose a section of a script within a particualr scene in Hunchback of Noteradarm and draw three images in a sequence. And a fourth image of one of the three drawings, has to contain shading and lighting.
Friday Tutorial
I booked a tutorial with Sam and wanted to learn about how to transfer animations to unreal engine and retarget to the unreal engine characters