Maya Modelling: Head (1&2) Blocking

Narrative: Slapstick Comedy Research

For our project we have started to focus on the slapstick genre of comedy and for this I have researched into the classic slapstick comedies where the essence of the comedy is most pure. Facial expressions and body language seem to be key when looking into slapstick comedy. 




 

When looking into these videos, they show two characters that are almost opposites of each other so they can work against each other in both personality and characteristics, having two characters work against each other would be a good direction for our animation to go in.

Maya Lip Syncing - Part 1

This is my first attempt at lip syncing just using the jaw movement to start off with and then onto the lips at a later stage using the Generi Rig.

CG Tropes - Tilt Shift Lens

Today we had learnt about how to create a tilt shift lens within Photoshop and how to apply it to after effects as well. These were the two I had created for the tutorial.

Narrative: Ideas and Thinking Time!

After being given the 'Safari' and 'A little of what you fancy does you good', we had done some brainstorming together and we have come up with a few ideas when looking at the style of animation and funny narratives that we could incorporate. We had come up with the idea of a TV production with an interview with the animals, similar to creature comforts (Vid 1). As this will be a short animation we have decided to focus on a family of animals rather than lots of different animals due to time restriction and also technical restriction :). When looking at how they are going to communicate we was thinking using speech bubbles and little illustrations showing what the animals are thinking rather than having to find a voice over artist, or using expression and body language to communicate to the audience. Similar to the Antelope in this video:



 So therefore we had started to brainstorm different animals that we would find in a  safari and different plots and story for each one and how it can be used to for our motto 'A little of what you fancy does you good', or each animal being greedy leading to a consequence in their actions. Here are a few of our ideas, any feedback is welcomed :) :


Hippo- Hippo that is on a diet as it has had too much to eat, pans over to his brother who is eating a lot of food. 
- Sees a flamingo and hallucinates and sees it as a piece of fruit or something eatable.
- Creeps up on the flamingo and eats it, showing a little of what you fancy doesn't do any harm ( unless you are the flamingo!)

Porcupine- Porcupine character eating pine cones around his family, he is looking around at the others and pulls out a pepper pot. 
- He discovers that he likes pepper on his meal, so he keeps on adding it to his meal. 
- The lid of the pepper pot falls off so there is a big pile of pepper on his pine cone.
- He breaths it in and then sneezes and his spikes all pop out and go everywhere, into his family, ( maybe killing a bird in the background? )
- Finally is left naked like a mole rat and walks away on two feet embarrassed and ashamed of his nakedness. 

Giraffe

- Giraffe with a neck trying to reach the tree, 
- There is another giraffe with a long neck eating all day, the journey of the little giraffe trying to reach the top and by the time he got his food, the last leaf was gone.
- Finally zooming out to reveal the long neck giraffe has fattened up .

Elephants

Idea 1- Helium - Pair of elephants find a balloon in the safari from one of the children who was in the car going around. 
- They catch the balloon and play around with it, whilst finding it funny with their high pitched elephant noises. 
- They try to compete to see who can have the highest pitch, they both end up loosing their voice so they try to inhale more of the balloon and they inhale so much that they drift off like they have turned into the balloons themselves. 

Idea 2 - Water - playing fighting in the puddle that they are in, throwing water over one another. 
- One of the elephants gets annoyed, so sucks up the whole puddle turning into a huge elephant that is out of proportion and waddles away from them leaving them with no water (something along them lines) 

Flamingo

- A flamingo that is getting hungry decides to treat himself to a fish. 
- he is greedy for getting fish, so he jumps around his pond area catching fish like a 'wack a mole' game at a carnival. jumping from place to place head first collecting these fish in his mouth.
- Each time his mouth will get bigger and bigger for all these fish and his head becomes too heavy to balance himself and cannot lift his head up from the ground. 
- End result of him falling over and the fish escape back into the pond with the flamingo left with nothing. 

Meerkats

- All playing around on this car that is going through, at first it would be all happy and joyful.
- As they begin to brake the care with the windscreen wipers and the number plates etc, the car 
eventually flips and leaving a wreck that they cant play with, leaving them with nothing.

These are all the ideas of animated shorts that we have come up with so far, I am liking the porcupine, the elephant one with the helium and the flamingos these are my favourite ideas to date. I want a short animation that is both funny and gets the point across about 'A little of what you fancy does you good' and too much greed is not good. After figuring out which animal family we want to pursue with we can then start to think about character design and how we want our worlds to look.

More inspirational videos: 

Group Project: Take Your Fancy

Today we got our briefing for our narrative project and were assigned groups. Myself, Ruby and Candice were given:

 

''ON SAFARI''
&''A LITTLE OF WHAT YOU FANCY DOES YOU GOOD.''

''On safari'', instantly I thought of animals, safaris can either be in zoos in captivity or wildlife safaris in Africa in the wild where the animals are in their natural environment. Our first thoughts where to have a funny animation that can make the audience laugh and for it to be enjoyable to watch. Some inspirational videos that I have been researching when looking for a style of animation were these below. While also looking a style is important I want to look for interesting and funny narratives so the ''Rollin Safari'' videos instantly came to mind. When looking upon ''A little of what you fancy does you good'', we have discussed how this can be approached a little differently with the opposite - A lot of what you fancy does not do you any good. Therefore we will look into this when researching into ideas and narrative for our animated short. 

Summer painting Time!

I need to get back into the flow of things so I thought I'd start it off with a quick environment painting :).