29 November 2016

What If? Metropolis - Revised Thumbnails Part 3

Basic linework structure of the Final Painting

Slightly more detailed structure of the Final Painting

27 November 2016

What If? Metropolis - Revised Thumbnails Part 2

The second of my revised Thumbnails. After receiving advice from fellow students, I made sure the Horizon line wasn't as visible as before. I have a feeling this is the painting I will make my final 3D Render.

25 November 2016

Adobe After Effects/Photoshop: Parallax

I created a painting in Photoshop using multiple layers (5 total), brought the Photoshop file into After Effects and animated it to appear ass if it were panning through an actual 3D space. I based my painting off of various pieces from my "What If? Metropolis" Project.

What If? Metropolis - Revised Thumbnails Part 1

This is a Maya Paint-over thumbnail I created. More to follow soon.

23 November 2016

What If? Metropolis - O.G.R. Part 2

What If? Metropolis - Final Painting

This will be my final painting for the What If? Metropolis project. I will break down what will be a matte painting and what will be a 3D Model in my O.G.R. Part 2.

Life Drawing Part 1

These are the photos from today's Life Drawing lesson. I shall upload the rest of my work from my previous life drawing classes at a later date.

22 November 2016

What If? Metropolis - Thumbnails 28-38

Thumbnails I created a while ago and had yet to upload, went in and re-numbered them to fit with the current timeline

What If? Metropolis - Thumbnails 26 & 27

Another building design, plus a sketch for the monorail system I'll use as the mode of transport within the city.

What If? Metropolis - Thumbnails 23-25

These are some thumbnails that I drew by hand on Sketch Paper, then scanned in to my computer and painted over in Photoshop.

18 November 2016

Adobe Animate 101: Run & Walk Cycles

In Today's lesson, we were tasked with creating Run Cycles in Adobe Animate. I decided to include the work I did last week on a walk cycle as a comparison, not only between the movement of the characters, but on how I had improved using the software, moving from premade shapes and lines to drawing freehand.

Basic Walk Cycle
Run Cycle (12fps)
Run Cycle (24fps)

15 November 2016

What If? Metropolis - Thumbnails 9-21

Top Row: From Left to Right; Establishing Shot, Building Colour test, Building Height test, Map #1, Housing Design #1, Curved Building
Bottom Row: Lamppost Colour test, Housing Design #2, Tree, Low Angle Shot, Cityscape Design, Map #2

What If? Metropolis - Thumbnails 1-8

8 basic thumbnail sketches for the city of Innavo.

From Left to Right: Tree (Var 1), Bush, Tree (Var 2), Bench, Bin, Lamp, Statues, Map


8 November 2016

Edward Scissorhands: A Review

Fig 1

In this review, I shall be looking at Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 20th Century Fox, 1991).

Throughout the film, there is constant contradiction between creativity and conformity. One of the most obvious/apparent cases of this happens within the first few minutes of the film, where we have a shot of the suburb, all the colourful houses and perfect, green lawns, then in the background is a dark, depressing, monotone hill with a bland, grey mansion atop it.

Fig 2

The mansion on the hill is a good juxtaposition of the suburb below it, the latter representing "conformity", all the houses looking extremely similar, all the men leaving at the exact same time every morning to go off to work, etc, and the former being the contrast, the "creativity" (it is the mansion of an inventor, after all), despite being more drab and dreary. 

Fig 3

The contrast between the two location goes even further than the colourisation and hues, though. The actual way they've been designed and structured plays into this. The buildings in the suburb have all been built the exact same way, as you can see in Fig 3 and Fig 4, similar in the way that Levittown, a suburb in New York was designed, with each house being a carbon-copy of the previous, with one house being built every 16 minutes at the peak of construction. William Levitt himself called his company "The General Motors of the Housing Industry", and we can see that the suburb within the film definitely has that mass-produced feel.

Fig 4

The Mansion in which Edward resides is much blander, greyer and stretched out, almost Gothic in its architecture. The mansion and Edward himself were most likely designed to deliberately be a stark contrast to the typical "complacent" and "unimaginative" society of then modern America.

A quote I feel supports this, and ties things together, is "The final image of Edward in the colourful gardens, surrounded by nature and creativity reinforces the idea that American society is too sterile and narrow to cope with one who does not conform." The film, then, can be viewed as a satire, on how America was stuck in its ways, and was afraid of change, of non-conformity.

Bibliography & Illustrations
  • Fig 1 Edward Scissorhands Poster (1991) From: Edward Scissorhands - Directed by: Tim Burton
  • Fig 2 Edward Scissorhands Town Still (1991) From: Edward Scissorhands - Directed by: Tim Burton
  • Fig 3 Edward Scissorhands Town Still (1991) From: Edward Scissorhands - Directed by: Tim Burton
  • Fig 4 Edward Scissorhands Town Still (1991) From: Edward Scissorhands - Directed by: Tim Burton
  • Quote: Edward Scissorhands (2011) From http://www.mediamatters.co.uk/media/EdwSci.html - Written By: Ann Devine