Unit 67 Completed...Yey!!

So unit 67 was a project where I was asked to create a storyboard in the form of a short comic strip that included at least one commercial cartoon character. And like usual I planned big so my original intentions where to create a 6 page graphic novel, even though the Unit only required me to create a 1 page comic strip. My character that I deiced to feature in my project would be Ulquiorra Cifer, a villain from the popular Japanese anime Bleach. I wanted something that no one else would pick and who didn't necessarily know the character so the first visual experience of that character would come from my comic strip and so I needed to capture the characters personalty, and to create an authentic comic I decided to base mine on a manga which basically is a Japanese style graphic novel which is read from right to left, I would adopt this style as the original graphic novel Bleach is a manga.

To the left is my original plans, I decided to create the manga beforehand on paper so I could, basically just scan it on to the computer, but because my plans were plans they were rough and I ended up creating everything by hand and only used my plans as a template.

This was the first time in my life that my plans look liked the finished product without any major alteration. The only things that changed was that I added a title page, and some things in the plan are more detailed on the computer, but that was to be expected.
When I had thought of a story I was unable to fit it onto 1 page so that's when I decided to go all out and spread the narrative over 6 pages. I figured that more is better, I tend to over do things...

My inspiration came from just a single image which I felt was humorous at the time, and above is that image along with my own which is completely redrawn, mine is the less professional looking one.

At the very beginning I was aiming for a older teenage audience, because the manga is in English I can only aim at an English reading audience and stereotypically this sort of content is liked by a male audience. So I didn't spare any expense and used some naughty swear words like Fuck and Bastards, but they were not there to offend anybody but there to create humour while introducing them to an informal conversation. The reason for an teenage audience was because the majority of Bleach's audience are teenagers and people who will read my manga will do so because the majority recognise the characters, the other character I'm using is Batman because Batman is almost iconography of the superhero world and therefore recognised not only by teenagers but at an international standard, so a wider audience is achieved by such a character.
The company I have decided to create this for would be Shonen Jump, a weekly anthology of manga publications which include Bleach, Naruto and One Piece.

I have stressed many times that I have an incapability of drawing, but I am rather good at tracing so a few characters are traces of already existing material. But because I had already visualised what I wanted, I had to edit the traced content to match my ideas.(See Below) Another problem that arose was the time it took me to create the 6 page manga, because I had to edit each character and create the scenery. But through determination it was completed on time more or less. I improved on a lot of existing techniques in Adobe Photoshop one of which was an outer glow effect to create the lighting of the background windows and lampposts. I also learnt how to use a Stroke effect on a box to create boarders for my panels of the manga. Bevel and Emboss was used frequently to give the scene a 3D look, for brickwork and other background objects. Speech bubbles where imported Photoshop brushes, as this gave me more variety than the default ones in auto shapes.

The drawing style was again Japanese themed, I used the Chibi style meaning small to give my characters a comedy element as well as cuteness as that's what Chibi is used for commonly.

But when I came to finally finish my manga I decided that it needed a title page so I used a completely original batman logo created from an oval liquidised in Photoshop.

I thought up the title at the end and thought is would be good to do it in Japanese again to give it an authentic manga look. 私がアメリカ人を憎むので「バットマン」は憎まれる, Wadashiga Amerikan-Jin O niku munode Batoman wa niku mareru, translated means, Because I hate Americans, batman is also hated. Even though it could be seen as anti American it doesn't matter because there too dumb too learn Japanese, but its all comedy.SO THere it is the final masterpiece just read it backwards, and it should make sense, if I were to do this again I will aim higher and do 12 pages just because I want to try my limits. I would try to brush up on my drawing skills to allow me to create a better and a completely original work. I would also need to manage time better as it took a lot of time to fully complete this project, but I believe with proper planning I can do it better.

Because I must compare my work to a professional piece I obviously decided to pick "Shōnen Jumps" Bleach, and there is a difference in profession standard, the overall drawing is in its own league because Tite Kubo the creator of Bleach is a very talented artist and I am not, plus the software used for a professional manga like this is a lot more practical than Adobe Photoshop. And mine is in colour but that's not a good thing because as a novel doesn't have coloured text, the reason for black and white manga apart from ink costs, is that people find it easier to read. and mine isn't that hard to read but it is only around 5 pages long. All in all I think there is a large difference between my work and the professionals, but if there weren't, it would show how bad the artists are these days.

See the full thing on this site as a cool flippy thing http://www.axmag.com/data/201006/bbcdfdfd-c201-42a1-8b8b-0f38ef799235/index.html

Evaluation U64+U65

First lets start by saying that this unit was the hardest to accomplished but definitely very entertaining. My original idea was to create a star ship that was similar in looks to the Naboo Star Fighter from Star Wars. (see below to view my efforts)

Even though I had created a perfectly good model for animating, I had already begun to create more 3D models from basic primitives. I felt I could do better so I tried to create something original rather than recycle used ideas.This was one of my first efforts on an original space ship, but I was really experimenting with bend modifiers which I used on the wings to give the space ship it's character. Once I had experimented I decided to use this knowledge to create a final model that I would use for the animation stage for this project. So my original intentions were constantly being changed and therefore are completely different from the my first idea.

This was the final model and below is the verifications I made to my model and how my model slowly but surely started to be something I was happy with. I insisted my ship would have a force field but I was unsure how it would look, I would achieve the force field by having a textured shape at low opacity to give the effect I wanted. The texture of the force field changed many times from textures found on the web to completely original ones made in Adobe Photoshop, to achieve the original concept that I was hoping for I decided to go with an original texture made with different varieties of Photoshop brushes.
I slowly began adding accessories to my models like guns, engines and internal dampeners

Then I went on creating a texture for the actual spaceship, I decided to use an inbuilt black gradient because of my complicated shape it was near impossible to texture using a UVW unwrap modifier.As you can see I have assigned a glass texture to faces using multi texturing, to create the window to the cockpit. To do this I had to set each face as a individual object and attach the texture using a material ID.
The final modifications to my spaceship where small, I created new guns and engines and changed the shape of the cockpit window to give the spaceship a more alien look.
Next I would have to create a environment for my space ship which I would also animate to add a more professional standard to my animation. I did experiment but quickly came up with a final idea, which was a hyperspace gate inspired by the Megagate from the American scifi show Stargate.
I created 3 rings to the hyperspace gate and animated each of the rings the move in the opposite directions to each other, I also created a centre to the gate using the same texture as my force field. For the effect I had a go at lens effects and trtied adding a glow effent to my spaceship, and twined with a bomb effect when the spaceship made contact with the bomb a flash of light appeared giving the effect of going through hyperspace. I finished the animation by having a camera follow my ship through the effects. (see below)


The problems with the finished animation was lighting, the effect I tried to gain with the glow backfired and distort the animation and after the space jump it becomes too dark too see the spaceship, and finally the spaceship is black so its hard to see it against the background. So I fixed these problems with my final render.

I fixed these problems by creating omni lights around my environment and I kept the bomb and got rid of all lens effects to keep the animation smooth and I changed the colour of the spaceship to a metallic purple so its easier to spot.

Comparing to a professional example of a 3D spaceship, I find that mine is better but to be honest I think that my spaceship is too simple as the profession example is more detailed which gives it a more realistic look, And the background makes the 3D model stand out while mine hides it. I do think that I've come a long way since my first days in 3Ds Max and believe in time I will be making 3D models just as good as that.




The target audience I'm trying to aim at, is the sci-fi fanatics basically because its a spaceship, the fans are usually male between the ages of 16 and 34. To appeal to my audience I used some originality with my spaceship and used the hyperspace gate to add some familiarity to the animation.

My weak points tend to be with the effects of 3D max, the modelling stage I think is my strongest point. If I were to do this unit again I would create a more detailed spaceship in parts and attach them later so I can spend time to detail each and every part of a spaceship, I would also use a brighter background to show off the model.

Unit 32 the boring bit

Before I start I may as well say that I want a distinction for the practical, and hope that the one who reads this will grade my work with the knowledge that I did my best, so give me a distinction, I just know it will make my sick mother proud.

For this unit I was put into a team and asked to create a stop motion animation, and after lots of thought and conflict our team decided to use Claymation for this project, the reason being was because of researching beforehand we were able to determine that by using Claymation we could appeal to a bigger audience.

During this project I came across countless problems, both as a team and individually, the main one being that the modelling clay used for the production would harden and become useless after a few hours. Forcing us to make a new character for each session, this was difficult but not only because of the time wasted but also because it was hard to make the model look exactly like the last one. So to overcome this problem I decide to just re-use the old hardened model, this meant I couldn't move the character how I would of liked too, and ended up with a stiff movement, but I decided that this gave my stop motion its own character, and would encourage Mark to see this as intentional where the production may look amateurish.

Another problem that I personally faced was that my sound was longer that my production, it was difficult to get past this one as it meant changing the whole production because I couldn't mess around with the sound as it would have sounded distorted if I speeded up its rate. So I looped certain parts to fit the sound in and froze frames to insert voiceovers. This made my part of the productions 5 seconds longer than it needed to be but as they say more is better than less.

A problem that we all faced was that our production was supposed to be parts of a bigger production so the end of stop motion needed to be in sync with the start of another stop motion and vice versa. This meant we needed to know what the last person did before us so we could start from that point, so we decide as a team that we would make the production in a order so that the next person would know how to start there production. The only problem was that the longer a individual took meant that the next person would have lesser time to complete there part. Luckily we all met our team’s deadlines and that was not a problem.

Our team met all deadlines because everything was planned beforehand; not everything was done as planned but was accomplished nevertheless. Time was split between the planning, making the models and photographing them and finally putting everything together. When in the process of an individual’s production the other team members helped out with other aspects to speed up the estimated time of completion.

Above is our plan and it shows the order of the production and who is responsible for that part, it also tells us what we are doing and how to manage our time.

The inspiration for this production came from classical stop motion Claymation like Wallace and Grommet. Because of how long it remained popular and the appeal to both the old and young because of the vivid colours and shapes that come from using Claymation. This also inspired we too add comedy aspects to the production.

The team worked well together and because of earlier planning the work was equally shared and therefore each individual contributed what was expected of them, our team was already acquainted outside of this production so we were comfortable working together. We also had outside help to use for voice over’s, and to add to the comedy aspect there were different voice over’s in each production with different accents. There were some differences from my original plan as at first I was planning on using a different sound from Start Wars but because the audio was too long I ended up using different bits of audio mostly used in the American cartoon series Tom and Jerry and a speeded up version of William Tell to exaggerate the chase, because of the fast tempo. Another change was the eye popping scene where my character’s eyes would pop out of the head in surprise, but to achieve this affect I had to use nails to pop the eyes out, this was different from what I had originally intended to use the strength of the modelling clay,.. Big mistake.

I believed that I worked to the best of my potential, and was able to learn new skills during this project, like modelling with clay and photography. As I was already familiar with the software Adobe Flash CS3 which was used to put all images together and combine sound, but I was also able to use and learn from other software such as “Audacity” and “Sound Forge” which is the software I used to speed the rate of sound cut and paste audio together and export it as WAV and MP3 format.

To see if my production was a success I created an online questionnaire and placed it at the bottom of my blog, I left it for 14 days and a total of 110 people answered the questions.

This proves that my animation was a success as over 95% of people enjoyed the animation, even though it wasn't biased as the majority of the voters were male. If I were to do this project again; I would practice modelling to allow me to create better models that would animate better.

Okay well below is the actual animation up on Youtube for all to see, some of the quality was lost during the uploading process.

This is a processional example of claymation and apart from the obvious differences like quality, as mine remains grainy in places of in the animation and the example above is all smooth, this is because professional claymation is done with special modelling clay which doesn't set so modifications can be done whenever, also when a model is used at different times the light and colours tend to differ, and the profession example looks smooth all the way through this may be because lighting is controlled unlike my animation in which the lighting is all natural. Because my frame rate is set at 10fps the affect of persistence of vision and flicker fusion threshold is lost and the brain can notice the frame rate moving, but the professional example is at 24 fps which makes the animation a lot smoother. To summarise compared to a professional example mine doesn't hold a candle to it, but if it was that easy everyone would be doing it.

Peace out..

Did I mention my sick mother...