City Sketchbook Best Examples

These are some key moments of my city sketchbook, I used a range of different mediums e.g. pencil colours to pastels.

First, I created a title page when I made a collage of different things that I have collected from/around the city, e.g. travelling tickets.

This is meant to use negative space, the scene is a building, the white being the building and black being outside and windows. I then added coloured trees to contrast. I used watercolours here.

These are sketches of birds I saw around Manchester, I used a sharpie.

While waiting at a tram station I sketched this scene, it is a street performer playing a guitar in the mid ground and there was two businessmen in the foreground talking, then in the background people continued on.

This was a boat just outside Media City, it looked to be some kind of tour boat as it had many chairs on the roof.

This is the inside of Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, this is the seating area. I used only pencil but I think that helps with the feeling when sat there for hours, it makes it seem dull and static.

I did this picture as it a sight that everyone has seen, the lit up sign of McDonald in the dark. The recognisable arches which nearly everyone knows.

This is from a picture of a street lamp behind a tree, I used oil pastels to create this and I think it is my favourite drawing out of the sketchbook

This is from a picture that I took at a tram station early in the morning, the light was just starting to come, changing the sky from black to a light blue in the distance, again I used oil pastels.

City Brief Outcome and Exhibition

When we were given the brief of the city my initial thoughts were what? The city is a massive topic, there are many things we could have focused on. There was also the question of how, how would we present, the availability to explore a new area and techniques we haven’t used before. I joined a group that wanted to make a 2D animation of the city, a slideshow of areas around the city. To start with this brief we assigned roles, I was given the role of an animator as I have had previous experience animating in 2D but to push myself I worked in Toon Boom Harmony as I haven’t had experience with it but knew it was industry standard application. Once we had an outline of the story and what was going to happen, I felt confident that we could produce a suitable animation. We knew that we needed two characters so I made concepts of them, using feedback from peers and others in the group to decide on colour schemes. We wanted the characters to be in two different styles, one is my own style which is a more realistic and the other being more cartoon-like. When I had my character- dubbed ‘Lizzy’- I refined the other character designed by another member of the group. After the characters where designed I started practicing with Toon Boom, creating walk cycles which I then used the walk cycle to create a first draft animatic of the animation. As soon as it was finished and reviewed by the group I continued, adding in-betweens and cleaning up the sketches so that I could colour them later. After clean-up was completed, I used palettes from the character concepts to colour the animation, adding a green background so that we could then use After Effects to add the background images scrolling in the backdrop. I felt confident at first but as the deadline got closer I started to feel stressed, there were delays which made starting the animation later than I wanted, making it more of a challenge to finish an animation on time.  I feel that when assigning the group roles, we did it well, roles were quickly assigned based on our own skill sets so that we could manage the work. We knew each other’s skills so we could distribute work and know who was managing what. At one point, there was some confusion but it was handled Another challenge was learning Toon Boom, I found it hard to start but once I had a general idea and continued to work with it I found myself learning new tricks and ways to animate. Overall, it was a good experience in both working in a group and learning and using new techniques.

During this brief we mainly used workshop skill the green screen, it was very useful for placing the background on the animation.

I wasn’t present for the City Brief exhibition as I was moving house, but I was told that feedback given by a lecturer liked that we had ambition and that we have shown to really push ourselves by throwing ourselves in the deep end. This is our finished animation. There several things I would change if I had more times, I would change the background scrolling pace so that it matched with the walking speed. Another thing I would change it the volume of the sound effects, they are too loud and drown out the voice over. I would also add a visual rain effect to clearly show that it is raining.

Full Colour City Animation

I have finished my part of the city brief, I have completed the animation and colouring of the animation.

I will now hand over this video to my group, where they will add the final things. The backgrounds and the sound effects. The background will be done in After Effects using the ‘keying’ effect to add them into the green screen. Then animate it to be scrolling in the background on the animation. They could also put in the sound effects in the timeline. The one other thing that needs to be done is the rain, there is a rain effect in After Effect as well so I expect that will be used

City Animation Update

I have now completed a sketched version for our group city animation, I plan to now clean up the animation and add colour, we are then going to add the audio and backgrounds using after effects on Monday and Tuesday which gives us time then to make any alterations before the hand in on Thursday.

‘Jack’ Character and Walk Cycle Progress

There has been a rearrange in our group, the other animator has become the art director so I have took on the sole role of animator, I have finished off the character design for ‘Jack’ and I’m working on the walk cycles for him.

The main character design, ‘Jack’.

Sketched out walking

Walking with character and colours.

Group Meeting

Today we had a proper meeting in our group about the city brief, we went through all the details and dates we should do and have done by. Several questions where cleared up and now I now know what I should be focusing on. At the moment we have the script, storyboard and one out of two character designs. I have created a character design for a minor character. To create her, I already had a idea on what she would look like but made several versions of hair so that the group could choose the one that they liked the most.

The long wavy hair was most liked so I then proceeded to create 3 different colour schemes for the clothes and woman. I first posted these as 3 on our animation group page so that we could get feedback on which colours they liked. One that was popular was

But the colour of the dress was disliked and more people liked a red dress, so this became the choosen colour scheme. I then made the front, side and back of the character.

 

This is the design of ‘Lizzy’. We are still waiting for the main character design which is in process. To start with some animation I used reference I had took and made a very rough walk cycle.

 

Group City

Today we went though the idea we have in our group for the city brief, the plan is to make a 2D animation in Toon Boom of a character walking through the city, as he walks their are encounters, such as catching a ball and a quick dance, which will relate to the area he is currently in. The leader of the group wasn’t in, so we where at a disadvantage as she said she had the script and storyboard done. So to move forward we worked on the character designs.

Foley Sound

Foley sound, named after a sound effect artist Jack Foley, is the recreation of sounds for animation and films. These sounds can be made from everyday physical objects to make media more realistic and interesting. There are many needs for sound effects in animation and film, but Foley sound is for sound effect artists which create very specific sounds, like footsteps or flicking a switch. These small details let the audience be more immersed and affect the overall success of the media. Without sound effects, it’s distracting, for example, if a character claps but there is no sound of clapping the immersion is broken the audience recognises the lack of realness and are more focused on why there wasn’t any sound then the media. John Roesch is a Foley sound effect artist who has 40 years of experience, and worked in films such as E.T. , Raiders of the Lost Ark, Interstellar, and Frozen. Creating sound effects using a warehouse and lots of props. He has stated the ‘being a Foley artist takes creativity, a discerning ear, and the ability to mentally separate sounds from images.’, and this must hold true as he was nominated a Emmy in outstanding sound editing.

Psychogeography

I wasn’t present to create a map but from research I know that Psychogeography was termed in 1955 by Guy Debord. He was influenced by a French poet and writer, Charles Baudelaire and his concept of an urban wanderer. It is the recording of the psychological effects of the environment we see, the thoughts and feelings of a place in map form. As it relates to the study of the human psyche as it records the effects of different physical surroundings and different environments. This has lead to several books studying this.

“The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”.

-Guy Debord

A famous example by Guy Debord himself called ‘The Naked City’. Looking at this is reminiscent of mind maps, the way of showing idea generation. Using Psychogeography in the way of creating a mind map of a certain area or environment could help with the creating ideas of feelings to places, the ideas the spawn from looking at the surroundings that could then be translated into a piece of media.

I did create a map for the area surrounding my house.

I don’t know exactly if this is right idea but I went round and drew what landmarks and iconic things I saw.

Pixilation Animation

We did pixilation animation today, we split into teams of about 5 and got a camera to try to create our own pixilation animation, the captain of our group already had a plan. The basic idea of the plan was to have people crawl into a box and the box would be like a portal to the outside. This process reminds me of stop motion animation as you take frames to create an animation.

Here is some of the process images:

I had the job to record the processes of animation, here are some clips of the making.

This is the final outcome.

Overall I found this experience enjoyable as it has a level of humour and creativeness to it that makes it fun to do and watch. I have found other examples of pixilation animation. Here is one that is an advert for Amazon Kindle (Ithyle Griffiths, 2010).

Ithyle Griffiths (2010) Amazon Kindle Commercial 3 (official) . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wWy9DwgPQ [accessed 26th October].