First attempt at value painted thumbanils.

My first attempt at a value painted thumbnail. Not clear enough for my liking, i feel like I need to do it closer up. The horizon could be an ocean coast line or distant mountains!

Fun with Brushes

Experimenting with brushes with a reckless abandon for anything legible, just playing around.

Pulling and pushing value practice.

Finished, but not Happy

I've finished my animation, but i'm not proud of it, I didn't get to lip sync ,nor did I get to use alot of what I learned in animation.

It frustrates me that It spent me so much time getting to this stage, I feel it needs alot more polish but it's finished and relatively consistent.

In hind sight I wished I stayed with my original pirate story, and drawn alot of it, but im still not very comfortable with drawing alot with consistancy, I plan to draw alot more in the holidays with our stress relieved, but doing anything other than resting with maximum hours in class has made my 'passion' time avoid drawing to much. Instead i've been working on the DND RPG im starting with my class mates, Im hoping it'll be a good resource for alot of us.

Thankyou for being excellent tutors, and I apologise for being an sub optimal student, this year has been rough for alot of people, and having not really drawn seriously in years, and not drawn consistantly in like.. 10 years (since graphics in highschool) it's been tough. But im' getting there.

Almost finished

Finishing the colouring of the last shot background!

So close to being finished.

Stop Motion Progress

Week 1 Production

We managed to find alot of materials though salvaging local recycling that businesses put out on the road at night, we also managed to aquire the Hesian cloth and various other cardboard / paper materials through Vaughn's requisition form and process.

We were mostly focused on planning and scale at this phase to work out our starting point.

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Week 3 Production:

We managed to get all of our cardboard in to start work, unfortunately i'm by myself so im processing the cardboard and experimenting with building types to make it easier for the team later.

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Week 4-5 Production:

Knowing our scale we're working on props to give an interesting background to the animation.

The robot is mostly finished.

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Buildings have been finished, but the robot has hit a hitch, losing it's legs, we're having to improvise to work out how to effectively give it the same presence, Reuben is using a hover platform approach and it is working well. Having no gluesticks left, and the $2 shop ones dont fit or get hot enough, is a real toll on production but we're working out things through folding / slits, using aperture wire to hold things together and masking tape.

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The environment is ready to go, we've worked out that the Hesian cloth works excellently as a as a base and everything is together able to be filmed.

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Reuben and I are ready to Film, I got out the camera, but unfortunately our area is now locked.

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Reuben managed to find David to unlock our area, we started filming but having issues with making the camera film at a set light in manual mode, not much was filmed but Reuben and I know what we need to do.

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Reuben and I are back, worked out how to take pictures in the low light on manual, needed to lower ISO and increase the aperture. Entire filming is complete in this one day.

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Editing now, me and Reuben are hard at work getting this finished.

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Reuben is finishing off the project with sound and Title Sequences.

BDM127: 20th Oct 2015

Working on placing all of my cameras for all 31 shots.

Using a system where I plan to lock a drawing layer to all of my shots, to draw over the 3D elements placed. Sketching breifly where things will be on the camera and then dropping in puppets.

Thankfully my puppets are realtively simple, hardest thing should be humanising / giving life and talking.

Worked out how to add stuff on Adobe After effects, seemingly pretty simple.

By using a drawing plane attached to the camera, we can effectively fake the perspective, and even cell animate the background through trace if needed.

Distractions

Having gotten into an interesting conversation with someone on social media, i threw around some ideas with the competing flags.

Currently Red Peak and the Kyle Lockwood Silver Fern with original flag colours seem to be
the peak contenders, I prefer the Red Peak flag based on balance, correct flag functionality and design (no graven images, looks the same from both side, easy to make out, simple etc).

    

Kyle Lockwood Silver fen

Kyle Lockwood projected RNZAF / Paratrooper flag

Read Peak Flag Design

I thought I'd play around with the flag to try to show that the red peak design is an excellent basis to put things ontop of, akin to how the german flag sometimes comes with the prussian eagle ensign.

I first decided to play around with the RNZAF Airforce Paratrooper flag, by default the flags are as follows.

RNZAF Flag

RNZAF Paratrooper Flag

The follow are my attempts to see what they'd be like with red peaks,

Using one colour change, the roundel I feel places correctly but the colours are too busy.

Utilising the colours on both top right and bottom, featuring the geometry still of the red peak flag, I feel this captures the original paratrooper design but still features our flag ,rather than having it nested in the left like the union jack. The simplicity of the flag lets it be used to easily be identified along side as a background for different purposes.


One of the hardest flags to deal with is the Civil Air Ensign, an international standard of flag that many an artist would 'cringe' at. Our current Civil Air Ensign is 

I attempted to play with the design to see if we could find a solution than just nesting the flag in the top left.

I then thought, what if the southern cross was on the Red Peak design?

This felt the most natural as it's the same position as the original flag, and would grant identity, akin to the german flag with it's prussian insignia, to allow people to honor the old and the new.