Tuesday 30 November 2010

Finished 11 second Club

Here is the streamed mpeg4 of the 11 second club animation. The lip sync is a little off when played in a quicktime player but works fine in VLC which I fin rather strange, but either way I'm sure you get the idea.

*Drum Roll*


November2010 11 seocnd club (2) from Anima Films on Vimeo.




I am having trouble uploading things to moodle with my Internet at the house I am renting, so I hope it chooses to work for the deadline.

Saturday 27 November 2010

Experimental Update

I mentioned in the previous post that I would give the 11 second club a brake for the day and work only on the experimental project. Things are getting there slowly. I had decided to make a plan/frame by frame semi storyboard of what I will be doing with the experimental project. This is because when I came to animating onto the film I was totally stuck for ideas. I have combined the dope sheet with this pictorial plan so hopefully I have made my life in the long run easier. The only problem is actually getting round to filming it on the projector, I have not had a "camera induction" and therefor I am not allowed to borrow film equipment from the media centre. If any of the tutors who will be in on the Monday coming and could help me out with this problem please email me. I will also try and get in contact with you in the same way. I would like to say in advance that the help will be much appreciated.

Any how here is a pdf version of the visual plan for my experimental I realise the notes may not make any sense to anyone else but myself but hopefully you can get an idea of what I may be aiming for:

Experimental Frame Image Plan

I know this seems a little to late, but I just wanted to post these two videos by the animator Len Lye who I have been inspired by in the planning of this project.




Big thank you to Ann Owen (one of my lectures) who mentioned him and his exhibition which is in Birmingham. I had no idea who he was until then and am grateful for the introduction to this inspirational artist.

Friday 26 November 2010

update on 11 second club

I am getting there slowly following the procedure i mentioned in the previous post; inking after making sure the volume of the character is correct (which in some parts is a long and arduous task). It has in retrospect taught me how important keeping the figure in proportion during the line art process is. If it isn't it does cause all sorts of problems you would have never thought existed within the physics of the character.

inkwip2 from Anima Films on Vimeo.

I have started the planning prcess for the Experimental Project which I will work on first thing tommorow morning *fingers crossed*

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Random Oldies

Since I may be removing my facebook account I have decided to move some of the images of my work I had on there to here just for the time being before I create a deviant art account.

so in no particular order:




This is all older stuff, but I will update the blog from time to time with newer stuff. I do work digitally more often than not, but I will scan in some sketchbook work along the way as well

Another WIP-Ink and Volume and Experimental Update

,lI have started with the final inking process, working with one character at a time I am keeping an eye out for volume issues as the characters in the previous line tests loose allot of their natural shape in places and change size.

wip3 from Anima Films on Vimeo.



An update on the experimental project:

Yesterday I bleached most of the 35 mm film I am going to use. I will be working in black and white for some of the film as I couldn't bleach all of it but since it is an experimental project I am going to just go with flow and see how things turn out.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Lip Sync Line Test

For some reason I can not upload any more files onto moodle, this isn't due to size issues but because it just doesn't give me an option to upload anything. However this is an updated line test focusing on mouth and lip sync, there are still a few tweaks but I will get to that during the process of finishing the in between poses, hopefully this will help smooth out the final animation.

line test lip sync from Anima Films on Vimeo.



I have a tutorial with Derek tomorrow as he was kind enough to send me an email about bleaching the film I will be using for the experimental project. Thanks to him I may be able to use colour after all.

11 second club update Line test 2

Here is an update on the animation process focusing on the eye expressions for the characters. It is still rough but I am currently working on the mouths and then I will focus on the smoothness with the inbetweens.

line test 2 from Anima Films on Vimeo.

Monday 22 November 2010

Catch-up-date

The following is a recap on everything that has been going on in and out of my right brain through the last few weeks. It seems I am just not "getting" this whole blog thing. The truth is I am finding it very difficult to stay focused on producing posts as often as I should and for that I apologise. As after speaking to people in the studio I have noticed that I am receiving the benefits of their updates but not the other way around. So here is a chronological post explaining the process from pre-production of the 11 second club and where things have gone with the experimental project.

Dope Sheets.

This was a process I had done digitally in photoshop. I managed to finish the Experimental Dope sheet before the 11 second club (which was also finished in the same week which started the 8th of November)

Experiment A Dope Sheets Alberto Montana

11 Second Club Dope Sheets Alberto Montana

At this point I had finalised the idea I wanted to work with for the experimental project and the medium which I had chose; 35 mm film. At this point I could not work on the experimental physically as there was no film to use, instead this led me to work on my 11 second club animation.

Character Designs

I began listening to clip over and over acting it out and thinking of characters that would suit the voices. I had a vague image of a short fat guy yelling at a skinny man. Once I had listened to the clip I began sketching in my sketch book. I then moved into working digitally. Recently I have found myself more comfortable with my tablet than my sketchbook.


Once the characters were being worked on I started working on expressions simultaneously, while listening to the clip over and over focusing on each individual words and how the characters body language could be expressed in conjunction with it. The picture of how the characters were turning out started to become more vivid in my mind and eventually through this process the characters of a "Sensei" and a "Student" were finalised.

11 Second Club Expressions and Planning Alberto Montana






With no material to work with for the Experimental project, I moved straight onto the storyboards and animatic. In the last seminar before the teachers went to Bradford with the 1st years Derek had talked about the previous animation process I had been using for the assignment prior to this, which was using footage for reference. Derek had advised me to challenge myself by animating the 11second club using as less reference footage as possible. For this reason I have decided not to film myself for the 11 second club project. This is because I felt that if I filmed myself I would have jumped into old habits of relying on it for pose's which could have left the characters movements dull and unexaggerated. I focused allot of attention this aspect of the animation as I thought it was the most important thing. Using my expression thumbnails as reference I created the storyboard and then moved onto the timing for the animatic.

11 Second Club Storyboards Alberto Montana

11 second club animatic from Anima Films on Vimeo.



I would just like to point out that the timing is a bit off on this version of the animatic however i will hand in an uncompressed version to be marked which will show that the timing is actually correct.

This animatic was shown to Derek in the last lecture and he expressed the importance of a third character and an object or situation to help the audience understand what exactly the sensei is talking about. Unfortunately I had spent all my time thinking of the poses rather than the concept. After the lecture I began to panic alittle as I could not think of something to add into the scene. I did come up with the idea of the Sensei's Sake (Japeniese alcholic drink) was stolen from the student however nothing else popped up, weapons scrolls just didn't fit.



However with less than a week to go with the hand in date, I have come to the conclusion that I am not going to change the idea I have. Also Derek understood I was too far in to throw it all away, but suggested that the Sensei's expression towards the end looks to much like hes talking to someone off screen. For this reason I have changed the last 3 poses of the sensei to having his back turned, looking upwards. Hopefully this will give more of an impression of the character speaking to himself.

11 second club line test from Anima Films on Vimeo.



I decided to work on the animation of the 11 second club as quick as possible so I worked rough at first getting the poses in and now I am currently adding facial expressions and the inbetweens to make it smoother.

At this point I was talking to Derek and asking him whether or not i would be able to use film as a medium (as I was running short of time because I needed to practice the medium as I had never used it before)I am very grateful to Derek Hayes, the other teachers for picking up the projector and film all the way from Bristol and the students who pulled through and helped bring the equipment into the studio in time for me to use this week. I have managed to have a quick play with it however at this point I can only work on black scratching into the film. I may bleach parts for colour, but I can not paint onto the black as I found out through trial and error as the light from the projector can not pass through the black even if I had painted on top of the black. This will change my overall idea of the experimental project. Instead of having a small narrative my sole aim will be to work to get the timing on the music right.

I hope that has clarified things for the people who are interested. I have also been doing 3d work as well as some personal projects, including some drawing that I will post up (hopefully) at another date.