Of all the manga and anime of its kind, Afro Samurai is my all time fav. I love its western influence finding some of the traditional Japanese ones quite hard going.

Created by Takashi Okazaki the series is all hand drawn which in its self makes it a huge achievement, along with the great characters and story.

An animator who I have followed for quite some time is Peter Kunshik Chung (born April 19, 1961 in Seoul, South Korea. He is best known as creator and director of the tv program Aeon Flux. 

He is also responsible for directing The Animatrix seen below, an adaptation from the well known film The matrix, but done totally in 3D. 

Family guy is one of my all time favorite animations. it started off as a drawn cartoon, the characters are amazing, here is an image of one of the first concept drawings of the pilot episode. 

The Family guy grew in popularity they developed the characters more. and moved in to creating it on computer. 

 

They started making the animation on programs such as Toon Boom, as they were able to reuse and create the animations easier. this also gives them the opportunity to use less animators and work to i higher standard.  

This is one of my favorite animations, one of the reasons it is so effective, isn't just the amazing animation, 

but the writing. The characters are great, humanized making the viewer engage with them more, 

being able to put yourself in there positions.

Animation principals and techniques.

 

Here is my finished animation. I think over all the project went well. I believe i portrayed emotion well, considering i was using vehicles, meaning i had to show say the emotion sad, by slumping the cad and lowering the grill, rather than effecting facial like features. This is what i found most hard. once i had got the hang of modeling i found it a lot easier and quicker to do the project. if i were to do the project again i would like to re-model the whole thing again to try and get realistic looking vehicles. i think now with the skills i have developed i would be able to do this and use proper UV mapping to texturise the vehicles to make then look more realistic. Also i would have liked to spend more time on the road surface, traffic lights and background. 

  I have almost finished my animation. i have modeled the vehicles and animated them, i have just put in a camera and am now going to focus a little more on the background detailing.

  

Here are some production pictures.... 

These images show how i created my car, i made it out of a cube polygon, i put 3 subdivisions on the cube, then in vertex mode distorted the points to arrange them in to a car shape. i the made wheel arches but introducing a wheel and placing it in the body with a booleans. i then cut out windows extruded them and placed a glass texture i made in the hypershade menu to the windscreens.

  The things i found most difficult during this project was giving the cars emotions, i wasn't able to effect eye movements or mouths, because i was using bumpers and cabs. i think i managed to pull off some emotion thought this animation, aggression, playfulness, boredom,

 disappointment...

Another area which i am interested in, is 3d Architecture or interior design. I first saw this type of animation on television on gardening programs or restoration projects. only short 20 second videos, but they show the viewer a huge amount of detail. the chances of getting in to this field of work i imagine is very hard as you would have to go through an actual building studies course. 

  There are a few directions i think i would like to move in to, in the future. i have always been interested in games design, as i have a vague interest in gaming and i larger one in character design. i have always enjoyed drawing characters in my art and think the next step is moving towards modeling them in 3d. 

              

  I also am rather interested in background work, i particular like the imagery seen in call of duty. The Photo realism is a real triumph in this stain-age of CGI. 

Smirnoff Vodka Advert

hereis another ad that stands out to me when i think about CGI in advertising. the huge scale of it is what appeals to me, with great detail to the various items being ripped from the sea. I think we have allot more in terms of CGI to be seen in Smirnoff's advertising with i am looking forward to.

Character design

My gimp character development on second life.

Here in my most recent avatar character i have made.




we were given templates which we could then edit in Photoshop which when then brought in to secondlife would mould around our avatar.




I started by using an image of a leather jacket which i cropped on to the template above. I then had to on Photoshop, sculpt the arms on to there separate templates.



Again here you can see where i made the separate templates for the avatars head and face. The images were sourced from the internet the sides being a single leather sheet texture. I had to blend the face, which came from a fancy dress mask, to some background leather texture.

I then created a whip for my character. its made from 2 spheres connected to a cylinder. then attached to the top are a load of cylinders which i have given different effects to. wind flow, weight, gravity...

Guinness advert

This is one of my all time favorite adverts. When i first saw it on TV i couldn't believe that i was an advert for alcohol and not some huge block buster film. The effects are top notch, the spent millions on the 3D animation. what i liked about it the most was the comedic parts and the journey you as the viewer follow through the 3 characters as they regress through evolution.

Fundaments of Interactive Media

Tales

 

    Over all i think this project went quite well, i was asked to produce an interactive digital fairy tale. I decided to keep my project very traditional, sticking strictly to the story and i wanted to give it the feel of a real book. I decided  to aim it at young children to early teens. The fairy tale i choose was ‘The Ugly Duckling’, written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, first published 11 November 1843 in New Fairy Tales. i decided to base my project on this particular fairy tale as it was the one that stood out largely in my childhood, i also liked to characters,  and wanted to show the emotions of the ugly duckling through my drawings.

    I started by designing the characters, this was mostly done on Adobe Illustrator, as i could draw in vectors which would make animating the characters possible in Adobe Flash. I had planned on making the three farm yard characters, ‘Pig, Cow, Sheep’ mouths animated whilst the titles were showing. I found this difficult and only towards the end of the project managed to make one work through making a movie clip. This is something i will have to develop when using flash in another project. I made most of my backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop, using different brushes and opacities to achieve the fields and water. Then after importing these backgrounds in to Flash’s library, i dropped them in to each individual scene, compositing the character drawing on top.

  I found action scripting quite hard from the beginning and think i have only recently become comfortable with it. I started by making the hatching scene. I did this by creating five hatched eggs, and five un-hatched eggs, on Adobe Illustrator. Then i covered them to buttons, then placed each egg over another in sequence. Then on symbol editor i made the buttons highlight able, so that when you dragged the mouse over the eggs the button below would show. For the ugly duckling i put a ‘on release, ‘go to and play’ to the next scene. For the farm yard scene i had to show a still image of the three farm yard animals with titles, then over the top have each of the amimals as buttons. When clicked on each animal, you would be directed to the allocated scene. I then had to make a button with came showed up after you had clicked on all the animals. At this point i wanted to place the game which i had adapted. i then made a button in the shape of an arrow to direct to the next scene, again this was done through action scripting ‘gotoAndPlay’ ‘next scene’.

    I introduced a audio track which i downloaded and converted to an mp3. I chose it as it had low soft tones, in a classical capacity. Here i had to search for tutorials on the internet as to how i could have a track playing through my product. But i only found out how to play on click with a button. I imported it in to Flash’s library, and dropped it in to a frame on my first scene, then on properties i looped the track and played it throughout the scene, i haven’t yet found out how to cut it off at the end.

   If i were to do this brief again, i would have liked to focus on another fairy tale, and gone for a much more games based approach. I think i need allot more attention on action Scripting which i will be doing in my spare time, looking through tutorials.