Monday 22 March 2010

Quick Garden Shots

This morning as it wasn't raining I ran outside at 7.30 and took some photos of a couple of the heads in my garden just to see what things would look like, conclusion: NOT GOOD. To be fair the light is rubbish and I haven't even finished the heads yet, I wanted to see whether they'd be acceptable without anymore painting but they're not ready at all, they just blend into 1 big pale coloured mass in the light. I think I need to hunt for a better garden setting too but I haven't got a lot of time so I can't be too fussy. If things go terribly I'll just have to photograph them in the photography studio on Thursday. Here are the photos (also I realise that the hands are the wrong way round, I'm just incredibly bad with things like that)

Sunday 21 March 2010

Panic Progress

This week I've been frantically trying to pull something together to put into this Panic show on the 30th. After gathering some photos of various people pulling panicked faces I started to make my papier mache heads last monday and today they finally look like people! After a nice 7 hour session of painting today the heads are on the way to being finished; I need to photograph them outside though and this weeks forecast is rain every single day which isn't ideal but I will find a way! Here are some photos of the progression from balloon and newspaper to characters (with a few steps missing as I forgot about the documentation):





Thursday 18 March 2010

Chekhov Experimentation

I need to resolve my Chekhov project by next week so yesterday I started to experiment on Photoshop with some of the images to try and whittle down my work to 10 final images. I think I'm going to make some kind of book to go alongside the animation so I've also been playing around with layouts for simple concertina books. John Walsh showed me a few tricks to use with inverting the colours and layers etc and I tried them out yesterday:


I also completed the first half of the animation successfully, yesss! It looks really nice because of the old-fashioned quality of the stop-frame and I think I've done a good job of adapting the drawings into moving image. I still have to plan and film the second half but it's not quite as fiddly as the first so hopefully it shouldn't take too long.

Sunday 14 March 2010

Panic and animation FAIL

I started my Chekhov animation on friday and it was a massive failure which was a shame; I think I was really panicking about getting it done quickly and making it perfect first time which was just stupid really so I've done some more planning about how to improve things and make it easier to film and I'm going to try again next week. Fingers crossed it'll be a bit more successful.

Over the past 2 days I've also started work on the Panic brief for the Noise Lab exhibition. I'm focusing on panic faces and I've been asking people to pull exaggerated faces of panic for me to photograph. I want to do some papier mache fun 3D work again of some panicked heads so I want some photos for inspiration. Today however I've been working onto the photos that I've taken already; I want to do a few bits of experimentation before I start doing the 3D stuff though I haven't got a great deal of time. Anyway below are the photos that I worked into - they look quite interesting; I wanted it to seem as though the panic (and panicky sounds) were sort of emitting from the people.

Monday 8 March 2010

Owl-y


Just a nice side project for myself to improve (let's hope) my drawing/painting and keep myself doing work. I want some visuals to go on my website as well and I thought these little guys would be appropriate because of the domain name.

I just got back from Prague and have some blogging to do about that so keep an eye on the journal!