Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Today's session was focused on Timing and Spacing.  We started with doing a simple animation of a circle moving back and forth at a constant speed, then moved on to a circle that eases in and out, gaining then losing speed. After that we made a pendulum or arc for a circle to travel along at a constant speed, obviously this just doesn't look right, so we made another one in which the circle speeds up as it reaches the low point and slows down as it rises.

Much like last week we had another session of life drawing, starting of with a twenty minute pose. After that we moved on to a few more quick poses while being pushed towards simplifying our lines and choosing carefully what bits are really necessary to show a figure. I also took the oppotunity to try out something other than a 2B pencil this time which was nice.

Today we were tasked with following instructions to model a small trolley. We were given a sheet to follow while Simon also gave us spoken instructions. I can't deny I just followed the written instructions fast and completed it before he even got half way through, I still listened though and just spent the rest of the session sticking it on a flat plane, chucking a light in and rendering a short animation of said lights moving around the trolley.

 Spent this session working in pairs with Chloe Gardiner doing 'ideation' for Isaura, City of the Thousand Wells.

Today we didn't actually touch the computers at all (we'll not strictly true but I'll get on to that), instead we had a session on Character Design. We started with looking at 80s movies (specifically teen movies, like the Breakfast Club and Stand by Me) and the particular character archetypes they often used. After pseudo randomly deciding the amount of arms, legs and eyes are characters would have we were given a 'Character Class' or Archetype from the 80s. I ended up with 'The Princess', obviously referring to 80s archetype, not the Disney-esc one. We were then told to draw up 8 simple designs that fitted our given archetypes in about 10 minutes, which meant we had to work fast and employ good use of simple, geometric shapes. Once we were done we toured the room, looking at everyone elses work and giving our opinions on which three were our most interesting designs. After narrowing it down we then did larger, slightly more detailed drawings o...

Friday was the day for our 'Animation and Character' lesson, though like much this week it was basically just going through the basics. Learning Adobe Animate (A.K.A. Flash) was interesting since I haven't touched it in about 8 years so it was nice seeing how much easier I found using it. I'd probably chalk it up to skills from other programs and techniques crossing over. It did help actually having someone competant teaching us though. We went through the session learning how to make frame by frame transitions between a sketch of our own faces to our favourite food then to our favourite animal, then looping back around. It was a nice little task that took up the whole session, and though I feel I probably could have put a little more effort into it (still not great at drawing on a tablet, or in general) I'm happy with the result.

Today was our first time in 'Contextual Studies' which was fine, until talk of the essay came up. Now yes, it is formulative and yes, it's only 1000 words, which really isn't that much but if there is anything I truly despise it's writing. Of any kind (Which is the main reason I still haven't finished my film review for this week). The session as a whole was fine, it genuinely helped me think up few ideas I might touch upon when doing the rest of my thumbnails and I'm interested to see what we look at next week. It's just I'm really not good at writing. Now, yes, I understand I'm literally typing a diary out right now but it's not the same, I just can't write and think at the same time, all I'm doing right now is ranting out loud and dictating my rants. That's why last year I stuck to recordings for my journal. But I'll do it anyway. I mean, I literally did this exact same essay (just a thousand words shorter) last year fo...

On Wednesday (yesterday), we had our first session doing Life Drawing which was interesting at the very least. I had a rough idea of what to expect going in having done a bit before but that sadly doesn't change the fact that I really don't like doing it. I'm not much of a 'drawer' really, I can do it fine when it comes to a couple of thumbnails a day on the train ride home but to put out such a consistent stream over the course of 2 hours just...isn't quite in my ability range. Perhaps one day I'll get to the point where I can finish without needing a break but for now at least I'll just have to take it slow. Anyway, here's what I ended up producing, unfortunately I couldn't quite remember the timings given for each drawing but I think I got most of them right. Roughly 20 Minutes Also 20 Minutes A mixture of times ranging from 5 - 1 minute(s)

Since not much has happened over these two days (due to them being literally the first and second days of term) I decided to condense them into one post. Not really sure what I'm doing for this but here goes. Just a small thing I modelled while listening A nice little house we were tasked with modelling On Monday we started with an overview of what we'll be doing in the Autodesk Maya part of Toolkit 1, followed by a brief session of messing around in Maya and learning the basic interface. Luckily I already had a decent grasp of it from my previous year so nothing to hard, though I am 100% certain I've learned a lot of things in, how should I say, far from efficient ways. Mainly due to me just stumbling around the program in a crude attempt to learn it. So I'll be sure to pay extra good attention in following sessions since it's good to crush bad habits as soon as possible, lest they grow into horrific unchangeable problems. My Master Studies from Mond...