Stuttgart, Germany

Back in Deutchland but there's no rest 'round these parts....


Self Negotiated Project
Been sketching and painting bits and pieces for 'The Very Old man With Enormous Wings' (which from now on I shall refer to as 'Old Man') very confused as to how I shall actually 'do' it. There are so many characters pertinent to the story that it may be too much to create if I am building upwards of 10 puppets. Ideally I would like to keep my initial aim that it's a puppet animation as I would like to see the visual of the wings in motion so-to-speak. I'm not sure if it would work visually if I could build a puppet for the central character and draw the rest. I have also been story boarding and have achieved around an eigth of the tale. I am researching the place in which G.G.Marquez was born - Aracataca, a small town in Columbia for ideas for the backgrounds and settings (also with a colour palette in mind). Yesterday afternoon was spent walking around a cemetary in Wagen, Stuttgart taking photos of angels, in particular their wings for visual references. Alot of work to be done and I hope I don't have to shorten the story to achive my goals within the time set.

Sound Design
So far no good luck with finding a suitable example to analyse or the presentation on Thursday. so far looked at 'Nightmare Before Christmas' which I remember (although being beautifuly animated) drives me 'round the bend with it's musical aspect. So I've ruled that out and had a look at Watership Down (this being one of my favourite films) but no suitable scenes so far. I have the Quay brothers collection at home and will have a look at those too (even though an example we were shown was from this particular collection).

Web design
Checking out many many websites for research - particular standouts for ease, functionality and interactivity (in a band/art and design context) are -
www.lodger.tv (great!)
www.thetoydolls.com (simple, easy, packed FULL of info)
www.guillemots.com (nice flash interaction - BUT annoying as it's not obvious enough to get around)
www.rosinenburg.de (artists website, nice feel and interaction)
www.indenemy.de (nice design,simple)
www.deep-roots.de (good interaction)
www.gestaltbar.de (bit daft but good)
www.fatwreck.com (label website, simple, much info)

In the past week designed a home page (see above), compressed photos and flyers to a smaller image size for a website I'd like to put together. First thoughts are ideally I'd like to have the band website as html and my personal website in flash for interaction and design purposes. Have to keep them simple too!

Also written out a set timetable for all 3 current projects with realistic guidelines (?) now, just have to stick to it and not go off on tangents all over the place. It's all about the focus!

The New Term Begins.....

So, a little over a week into the new term and it's already a bit panic stations 'round these parts! Handed in my storyboard, animatic and time lapse experiments for the collaborative project; which I was quite pleased about the outcomes (apologies if the previous blog sounded grumpy) The reason for the panic is that on last count it's a full 55 days and a bit until the deadline for 3 different projects. One is the self negotiated project, a web design project and also a Sound design project, details of which to follow. Until then a little feedback info from a tutorial earlier today from Suzie concerning 'The Fox's tail'. It seems I covered the collaborative aspect successfully particularly with Paul's evaluation of the project, so I passed as far as she's concerned. She liked the drawings, animatic and the time lapse experiments. Criticisms were that the storyboard was too literal and too much of it, when a smaller chunk of the story would do. Also my personal evaluation was a bit threadbare. I kind of expected this kind of feedback but was glad to get it handed in so I can think about my self negotiated project which I have neglected all Christmas due to the time consuming aspect of storyboarding 'The Fox's tail'. During the tail end of the tutorial Suzie mentioned an upcoming project where will (in her words) "actually animate something"....between then and now this has played on my mind a bit as I actually haven't animated anything in particular (certainly not of any worth) My initial aims and goals for undertaking this course was to learn how to animate nicely have a solidly constructed sound track, working in conjunction with the animation to produce something superior to my last attempt at having a go at it. So, with her words and the previous incredibly long sentence in mind it's time to bloody animate something...anything...to see if it's actually at all still possible, or, if not time to cut my losses and stop putting it off and return to jolly old Colmans Mustard Factory. All of his brings to mind a 'graffiti in the toilet tale' from a friend; in a U.E.A. toilet he saw these words scrawled 'This is the only place I know what I'm doing!' I know the feeling. Anyway, I'll (literally) dig out an old puppet I made from my BA days and see what I can animate. If it's o.k. I may post the outcome on here, but if it's crap I won't (like my experiments with animating on a white board)

Self Negotiated project
The plan for this is to storyboard 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings' to build a puppet (with enormous wings) and to animate the puppet as tests for the final project. as mentioned earlier this project has been somewhat neglected, but recently I have started making a little headway. I've storyboarded the first third of the tale and through this it's made me panic a bit. My initial plan was to use puppets for the characters and as I overlooked quite stupidly at the very beginning is that there's quite a number of characters in the tale. Fot the time span as it is I shall adapt the tale into a shorter version, yet even with this in mind the characters are still plentiful! The opening scenes see large numbers of crabs as the focal point ( a solution to this is to maybe make 2 differently designed crabs, animate them separately and many times against a blue screen, then merge them together to increase their numbers on screen. I could try to create the whole thing in a 3d package, but I'm not so familiar with that method and if I didn't get the hang of it, I would have wasted valuable time. Also a first big problem and I'm sure a total nightmare, is that the weather is torrential rain in the opening scenes...that's going to be quite problematic to animate! I've also been thinking about the sound design of the tale, ideally I'd like to have some incidental music (opening and ending, also with an association with the main character) The tale is set in South America, so it would help if I had some traditional music from this area to sonically place the setting to the future viewers - I would like to collaborate with a couple of my musician friends to compose a soundtrack reminiscent of the traditional yet with a contemporary feel (like I mentioned earlier in an ideal world) If I could make a bit of a move with that I think it would be highly enjoyable as much as it is a challenge. I should get my time management down too. After all there's 55 WHOLE days until the deadline!

Sound Design
Was very eager to get this part of the course started and the first session was very enlightening and very enjoyable. Our task for next week is present for 15 minutes an analysis of a soundtrack from an animation. So, in time honoured fashion I got the wrong end of the stick - this evening I hit upon the best piece of sound design (in my eyes) that is, from the 1975 classic 'Jaws' I wrote a whole load of initial notes, a little bit of Internet research, then realised upon reading the course notes, that we should analyse the sound design from an animated film (which makes sense given the name of the course). Gonna check a few film out later (along with the animation, storyboarding and website building)

Web Design Elective
Very chuffed to be doing this part of the course -for years I've wanted to know how to ACTUALLY build a website that you see so many of nowadays. Previous attempts have involved opening Dream weaver many times and looking at the labyrinth of absolute and total confusion, then shutting it down quite promptly and pretending that it never existed in the first place. Well, it's amazing how beneficial it is to actually sit down and be walked through the intricacies of this particular piece of software! The goal is to have actually designed and get together a live website for assessment. I'd like (again ideally) to design and produce a personal website and also a Goober Patrol (band) website that I've been wanting to get together or ages. With the latter in mind I constructed 3 pages for our 'homework' criteria to look at in our session today. We didn't actually have a 'show and tell' with our pages, in fact they weren't shown at all - but got to grips a bit more with the software in the process. I like Dream weaver, yet it seems a bit 'blocky' and websites which use Flash seem more interactive and as 'organic' as is possible on a computer screen. From the research over the last week I have concluded this. The 2 websites I'd like to design are quite different in who they are aimed for, so therefore how they will be designed. One is for Animation and Graphic design so obviously the design should reflect that i'm actually any good at what I'm trying to promote; the second is for a punk band and we all know how discerning music fans are, so the design for this should be in keeping with the band aesthetics and hopefully for people not familiar with the band, draw them in to investigate further. All the staple aspects will be intact, yet I aim to try to make these areas different. I'd like to incorporate interactive areas, but for the main parts (music, video, news) keep it simple. It needs to load up in an instant and hopefully encourage the viewer to spend some time on the site. I have bought the domain names which was quite lucky, so at least that's sorted.

Christmas Holidays drawing

.....was spent mostly drawing and storyboarding 'The Fox's tail' due to time restrictions I had to chop a few bits and pieces from the text,which I feel doesn't affect the narration too much I hope. Had another meeting with the author to show my intial sketches and ideas, I recieved more research material of a woodcut kind to aid with the design and look the story. My time management hasn't been too good, leaving the biggest bits of this project to last- and the usual huge jobs coming from an idea seemingly simple. Nearly every day of the break has required a few hours of drawing. A few technology problems with computer freezes and other joys helped the process! Spent the last day scanning in the images and editing together an animatic of the tale, with a rough soundtrack. Previously before the Christmas break, author Paul Knight recorded the narration for the story which turned out pretty well. Animatic to follow once I've compressed it.