Blocking/Splined animation seq 02 and 04

Here is a sample of some of the 3D animation work I have been doing for this film during the past week.

Even More Dove Tests

So I got busy learning how to use TVPaint for the dove animation and well, that didn't go very well. I wasn't happy with the selection of the brushes there, so I switched over to Photoshop and that worked pretty well (although, I really do miss my animation paper and light box 😔).

I experimented with trying to mimic the effect of drawing with the flat side of the pencil on paper but the limited texture pattern on the brush really gives the effect away.

Anyway, the crew and professor really like the solid drawing, but they said when doing the real one to make it more clear to the viewers that it is a dove, and not to turn it into a blob as much. We will see what a final shot will look like next week I believe, so stay tuned!

More Traditional Dove Tests

This was a very early test shot I did the day after I did all of the animation you saw in the last blog post, I spent a while studying real pigeons and I was trying to make it more of a blurry/quick moving bird, rather than a spirit bird. I got feedback from class to do 2 things:

1. Remove the eyes, abstract the bird more- should not be a real bird but is a ghost/spirit 
2. Try out doing the animation digitally, in TV paint and in Photoshop

This made me really sad, as I absolutely love traditional animation because it forces me to slow down and really think and understand the drawings and emotions that are driving the actions behind them.

But oh well, I guess because of how small the team is (now down to 5 people) we can't have me just doing the dove for the whole half of the quarter. :,(

Traditional Dove Tests

So our 2D animator flew the coop (no fowl play involved) so I was now in charge of the 2D dove for this film, hurrah! :)

I did the 4 key frames of a bird flying traditionally because I needed to understand how a bird flew before I started to abstract it and morph the image.  

I played around with a lot of different traditional materials, like these tests were done in china marker- I liked it because it did not smudge but the downside was that I could not erase it so it was was permanent.

These are composting tests to try to see what the final look could possibly look like. We wanted to try to push for more of a solid abstract shape next time.