Daniel Hammond

 I found Children of Men to be a really good watch, it had a really dark but surreal feel to it because it feels so much like how things are now in the world. Especially, given similarities like the global pandemic and whatnot, which is pretty crazy when you consider the film came out in 2006. The film focuses itself around the idea that its 2027 and the world has been in a state of total human infertility for 18 whole years. Then the youngest of them all passes and its devastatingly dark and miserable. Then the product of this catastrophe, at least in England, is to stop all immigration, becoming a place lead by the police. Killing and imprisoning immigrants. Despite this however, there is a single pregnant refugee called Kee, who the main character, Theo Faron comes across due to a series of events and choses to care for and protect. Switching the whole film from this horrible reality, to a story with some hope for humanity's survival. After watching it, I'm honestly quite d...

 I did a quick pen tool exercise sheet and found the pen tool isn't as complicated as I thought it was. I always avoided the pen tool in Illustrator before but this made me realise its actually much easier than I made it out to be.  We also found out how to use the rotate tool and mess around with its settings which was also fairly simple. We ended up making flower like shapes and made them into symbols which we could save in a folder and use again another time, by importing them in new files.

 Today, we were taught some shading methods in Adobe Photoshop using blank silhouettes of shapes and random silhouettes from the internet. I think I did fairly well I probably could have pushed the values more and made them look less basic but, regardless they look okay and I definitely learned a little more about Photoshop.

 Once again, after following the online tutorials I have added UV's and laid them out effectively in the UV grid as well as put together the rest of the model ready to be textured in Adobe Photoshop. I feel like I'm understanding the UV process fairly decently now and am pretty happy to be learning more convenient modelling tricks than I had used before.

 I was able to add basic preset textures to the lego car model using the online tutorial session. I've used this method for texturing before but, I've never really knew what I was doing and never adjusted settings because I didn't understand what they were. However, this has made that process make way more sense and now I actually understand what some of the settings on different material presets do. Which is pretty cool.

 I animated a running cycle today, for the first time ever and I don't think it went terribly. It was nice because it took half the time to make when compared to the walk cycle. Below there are 4 exported gifs showing the animation of the character standing on the spot and in motion, played at both 12 fps and 24 fps. I actually think I prefer the 12 fps animations they look quite nice and don't hurt my eyes to watch. I feel like 12 fps makes the run look super casual whereas, the animation played at 24 fps I think would maybe be better in something more exciting explosive background. Like a race or battle scene.

 I've now completed modelled all the assets to the final render for the chicken coop scene. The next steps are to UV all objects and texture them. Then I can import them all into one scene and have a completed render. 

 I've animated a walk cycle, first focusing on following my reference as best I can and drawing the figure moving over 24 frames. After this I took my figure, duplicated and merged the layers and made the heads of the character line up making the character walk on the spot. Then finally, I did the same thing however, this time lined up the characters dominant foot with each other to make it actually seem as though it was moving rather than flowing on a curved line. My animation is a little clunky and you can really see it in the contact and on the spot walk cycles. But I think they're still pretty good, drawing it was super strange at times, I kept forgetting how to walk. Got there in the end though. Dominant Feet Making Contact: On the Spot: Initial Guide Walk Cycle:

Progression Gifs: Establishing Shot: Interior Shot: Low Angle Shot:

Karl Kopinski:

 Today I worked on completing some point perspective exercises covering: 1,2 and 3 point perspectives. I think overall it was an interesting exercise three point perspective was a little strange at times but, I think I understand it just as well as 1 and 2 point perspectives. I’d like to try this again but, trying different shapes than just squares and rectangles. 

 I now know how to make gifs properly in Adobe Photoshop which I will need for when I create the gifs for my three pieces and I know some basic tools in Adobe Illustrator. Which is the software I used to make my pizza slice; which is just an several shapes adjusted and combined or grouped.

 I'm now working toward the end of this project and I thought it would be good before jumping in and painting to try get one final thumbnail for each final painting, that I can work off of to produce the final three paintings. Some of these are just more ideas however, the first three thumbnails show my final direction for each painting. ___________________________________________________________________________

 Today, we progressed the bouncing ball animation to the next level by making three individual characters out of our bouncing balls from last lesson. The first character I made has a tail, the next has little feet like Kirby and the third and final character has cat ears. To do this I just used the brush tool and on separate layers drew different things on the ball three times and exported all three individually. Overall, I found the exercise quite fun I've not looked into secondary animation too much before so it was fun to practice and work out what ball would look like if it had different characteristics. Whilst keeping to the principles of animation like timing, spacing, squashing and stretching. 

Bill Plympton: Plympton uses extremely strange proportions and scribbly lines to draw characters in a comic-like way, traditionally using warped perspectives on the rooms and environments around the characters. He often times reuses frames like in his animated short, "Cheatin'" in which his character repeatedly pulls out ridiculously long weapons from a set of draws. In this animation Plympton reuses the initial pulling reaching into the draws frames but has two sets of animations one going in one draw and the other from the other draw, and he alternates between the two. Richard Williams: Another traditional animator, who works with greyscale and colour pencils, rendering each frame for a paper stop motion animation. In Richard's animation 'Prologue' it features many characters with each frame realistically shaded, with pencils only. I found his work pretty incredible. I've tried animating traditionally on paper before, I can't even fathom the amount o...

Today I did what I was suggested to try do last time in life drawing and drew bigger, the last two sessions I’ve only ever used one sheet of paper, this time I used two. I feel like my first two drawings actually went quite well today, however after that my brain absolutely switched off and my drawings went downhill. I think overall though drawing bigger for this is better, I think it makes mistakes easier to approach, notice and avoid rather than when I draw smaller. Which makes my mistakes super noticeable and takes away from other forms and shapes in the drawing because they are all super bunched together. 

I was taught how to create new brush presets using images and how to edit my regular brush settings, so I made a monkey rubber. A brush can only be made from a black and white image and you must select it and click edit, then new brush preset. This works for both making a new brush and rubber. We also went over some quick methods of thumbnailing things by blocking in foreground, mid ground and back grounds in using blacks and grey tones. Giving ideas for perspective and depth.  Note: Familiar objects or people can be a good and easy way to set perspectives and distances in thumbnails.

 I've decided to focus my paintings on Armilla - the city of pipes and I did some more thumbnails, really exploring the idea that these pipes are powering or carrying a source of power to the abandoned buildings made of china and pipe work. I' personally a big fan of large hero buildings in environments so I really tried to push the idea that whatever was built and left here is humongous compared to the homes and other various buildings scattered around it, receiving or feeding the giant buildings and structures looming over them. At the moment I'm really liking the top left thumbnail and bottom thumbnail the most. Though the bottom right I explored the idea that maybe what they see is just the peak of the iceberg and the city is perched upon pipe like stilts. So, I'll thumbnail more ideas with that in mind and see where it goes.

 I have a better idea as to which city I'd like to do the paintings for now, and it's between the city with wells and the city full of pipes. So I did some more thumbnails for the two, digitally in Photoshop.  I think after doing this I'm going to do my paintings of the pipe city. Mostly because ideas seem to come a lot better for this particular city and I really like the idea of the city still running off of some old power source funneling into houses made of china with pipes and cogs. I thought also of not doing houses made of china and instead making the city seem super abandoned and having all the pipes they left be mega overgrown and rusted. But, I also don't think I've seen a home made of china before so I think it would be interesting to design. I also think the concept is quite fun and it'd the only description I really felt motivated to draw to so I think it's the right choice. Now I have two weeks to paint three pieces.