Wolves Orthograph Views

I've used orthograph views to resolve the design further and make any changes after discussions with Leo and Justin Wyatt. Also, I should be thanking Justin, Andriana and Dom for their feedback, when I stopped seeing designs objectively.

The bad wolf.

tied with black matter his shield-like body moves lucely, by parts separating and coming together as he moves. When solving his front and side designs, bulky, sharp and mean qualities were kept as he represents Anger, hate, and greed.

The good wolf.

Changes to this one were in legs, referring back to dogs anatomy. It should be expressing that he is peace, hope and serenity.

So, hopefully character fronts are as interesting as the concepts themselves. If these will be 'approved', I'll move to fully resolve them ( back views, 3/4 view for the good wolf, and details) and move to modeling stage.

Soul , Title and Background Designs

At The Wolves Within,  preproduction is  soon to reach its ends.

To wrap up character design a sort of another one is created  for human soul. Native American doll is a representation for it. Sheet of ideas vary from quite typical puppets in native American art to some more loose ideas which would offer themselves  more as a spirit of mysterious nature.

I quite like the one which is formed of floaty cloth. It keeps the idea of using a doll to represent the soul but pushes it at the same time to suggest a less obvious nature of it. I see it working quite charmingly with the light stream idea in the sacred environment

The developed character and environment designs  suggested an  approach for the title : sharp silhouette goes with flowy shape within it, to embody both the bad and good wolves design language.

Next,  a base sheet to present whatever information was needed . Native american ornament shapes and  the relevant colour pallete was arranged in a way to suggest inner space/ our psyche.

 

Lastly, these are some  experiments  for the blog banner:

'The Wolves Within' Development

 Character Fix

Tuesday was a day of feedback on wolf Characters. After discussion with Leo and Phil, I also talked to Justin Wyatt. In short, it was obvious designs needed some problem solving and revisiting.

 For the good one things seemed to go over the top:  decorativeness  and saturated in complimentary colours  were obfuscating the shapes. I've added some mass to his neck and change the 'face make-up' .A little nice touch, suggested by Leo, was to get rid of eye pupils.

In contrast , the bad wolf , presented other set of problems. Mainly regarding shapes of the back  part of the body and how it would work in animation. He was looking stiff as a statue figure. The challange was to figure out how he'd work. So I've come up with this idea, which was kind of evident in the design already, that the bad wolf is tied with an anti-matter/black matter which is holding him in place. So when he moves parts come together and distance away.

I added tail ( finally :D ) and fixed the spine line.

Wolf Terrain Suggestion

I thought to give it a go and create a suggestion of environment to express more clearly what kind of thought I have about it. I find it quite hard to describe it in words.

It is presented in flat view so we see the transitioning from the bad wolf 's affected  environment to the good ones. Also, keeping in mind it is a race from unconscious to conscious , I was imagining the environment would correspondingly  build from 'nothingness' to a fully crowded space.

This concept is also testing the idea for the environment to be quite desaturated in colour. Lighting would be quite colourful: Green (blues, violets) for the bad wolf , golden (whites, oranges) for the good one.

The White and Black Wolves

Last week I have chosen two wolves for each, bad and good one. For the bad one there was a debate, both seemed to have their own strengths.Therefore I tried to compromise the design and came up with this third wolf. I believe it is nicely encompassing ideas of both of the previous wolves.

 

  

 

Friday , we both with Leo have discussed the visual development and approach for character resolution in terms of colour and texture .  So these are close to resolved character designs for both of the wolves .

The dark one was developing quickly and soon I realized it will be quite a challenge to make the good one‘s design as interesting. The idea to make it purely white with only accents of other colours soon proved to be insufficient. Because his also less saturated in shapes in regard to the bad one, so it seemed like he would loose  0:2 if shapes and colour don’t  come across as “complicated” as the bad ones. 

These designs  capture how I’ve imagined them to look like. However at this stage I’m still ready to change/redo designs if our further discussions would ask to do so.

Life Drawing - Grasping the Essence of a Human Figure

Life drawing of past few weeks. There was a chance to join first year students in the class, as they have two of them and two models. Which is nice, there is plenty of space to draw " from an elbow" and models swap, so we'd get older man and then a woman model later.

Also, Chris Hunt keeps things varied. We'd have 2min. pose drawings and then,  half an hour long measurment practice drawing.

 

 

 

The Selection of 4 Wolf Designs

Discussions of the past 2 weeks have directed development of wolves design to these 4, selected out of.. so far 22 different design ideas for both of the wolves. I hope we could select one of each and I could start concentrating on them two. To solve how they  work together and so on.

Wolves might have 'features' of other animals, for example, a bat. They informed these designs as native Americans have a assigned meanings and signs to almost every common animal. For example, Owl being a bad omen, wolf being a symbol for moral teaching, polar bear being a good omen. It was also very common in their culture to give names of an animal to a person, which he deserved. These reasons lead to considering such other-animal incorporation in to the personalities of two wolves.

 It would be very appreciated if you could express your preferences now.

Retake on Wolf Character Designs

I had an opportunity to speak to Justin today. He gave some really useful advice considering the take on designing. Just how to start and think i different approach to mine. So I managed to pull some new shapes quite quickly. So here is new set of designs for both evil and good wolves.

More at The Wolves Within

WW: Character Development

Having received loads of feedback from both, tutors and classmates I went in to refine some of the more successful examples . Mainly clarifying the construction. I believe by this point It will be clear weather these can be taken further or I should try and come up with some new ideas for wolves' designs.

Animatic #6 with A Soundtrack Composed by David Keefe

Lately for The Wolves Within we were arranging to get someone to compose a soundtrack which would have both, Woodkid's - Iron and Native American tribe music feel to it. And to our big pleasure, Dave Keefe, aka Mustard Kid also a CG Arts  student who graduated few year ago, offered his help :]

The soundtrack you'll hear in this animatic, he calls a demo, adding that rithm can be changed, also not all the elements are yet in place.

Having that and some feedback on our latest animatic # 5, another one is piled together to further tackle the problems of rithm and mood.

Work Placement @ Picasso Pictures: Permitted Publication

Finally James Boty, a director at Picasso Pictures gave the permission to publish project  work I did during those two weeks back in May. Looking back at it, it was an exciting experience, an eye-opener too. I was lucky and happy to have had the chance to meet all the freelancing animators, directors and studio’s producers who truly convinced  and inspired to finish my own creative projects ( Ivan the Bird).

As for this document, it showcases the  pipeline I took for  producing 5 critters. Drawings were done by designer called DJ. I was translating them to 3D models and designing their textures.  The nuance of it was the complexity and details had to be suggested using only the color pass and there the director comes asking to make them transparent-like and so on.

We had to write a diary on our work experience, which can be found here .

 So there it is:

Work Placement @ Picasso Pictures by JJ Jolanta Jasiulionyte

Environment Thumbnails

Some capturing of ideas for environment. I was thinking in sort of three levels: we start from nothingness ( unconscious) then the bad wolf enters, so the environments he "lights up" is revealed as sinister, as if this is what he'd build. Next takes over the good wolf and we see firm golden-brown-like clifs, (lighting for it would be web-like, but for purposes of thumbnails I didn't go into details) Some key shapes, flow and behaviour of environment is there, remembering it is an innerspace, I played with dinamic and theatrical presentation.

@ The Wolves Within

Design Ideas for The Bad and Good Wolves

Life drawing is really fixing things for me, drawing gets more fluid.
Today I had a chance to sketch out some ideas I had for both of the wolves. These are the sheets of variations in shape and structure ( I left other aspects like surface texture, colouring out of consideration). The main references while creating these, were wolf anatomy, of course, and Native American carvings. Influence of their culture will be even better pronounced when we select particular designs and work on their better resolution.

Well, now its time to ask for your opinion. If you have any preference or comments over any of the wolves, drop a line :]

Also, for more, visit The Wolves Within blog

Voiceover for The Wolves Within

When  The Wolves Within started, it was clear a voiceover will be needed  (however if it developed in such directions where it seemed to  take something away, we’d loose it) .

Again, the most beneficial website for this was voiceover.co.uk  . There's a variety of choice in categories (mature voice, ageless commercial , deep and so on )

, I introduced our  project  and the course projects ( a showcase 2011 was very handy here). Also, and importantly,  let them understand we are students  . Asked politely  if they  could possibly take it as an unpaid  project.

It seems we’re in a true luck, because all of them three replied immediately.  After few hours we had one recording  by Philip Banks, and still waiting for another to come.

So here it is:

Jack Parell sent 5 recordings of his:

Wolf Character and Environment idea sketches

I upload some more in-shape sketches of wolf characters and thumbnails for environment.  This is only the very first ideas I tried capturing and serve more as guidelines on which the design would rely.

In my honest opinion, and also from Bob's and Godwins feedback, it seems this can be pushe way much further. The anatomy studies are playing here a lot, but maybe the boldess should instead.

And these fairly vague thumbnails aim to explore directions for environment. However, lots more, for sure, will come.

Ormie The Pig (2011) by Arc Productions

"Ormie is a Pig, in every sense of the word. Pig see cookie. Pig want cookie. But they are out of reach... or are they? Ormie attempts to gain the warm sweet taste that is his obsession. "

Arc Productions present an animated short which is a fantastic example of character animation. A pig is trying to get a cookie that is all you see for entire 3 minutes. But precisely because the animation is figured out down to every frame, these 3 minutes doesn’t seem to bore the viewer.

Simplicity in the art direction and editing would be another thing to note. Only what and when it is needed, perhaps this was the key aim: aqua-paint-like background and merely the objects the character is interacting with; story is told mostly in one long take and camera facing front.

Ormie the Pig is quite a charming piece.