Cookies... In space!

Yet again my weird imagination has been allowed to thrive, being given the freedom to work on whatever task I wanted to. I chose to animate a science fiction short story of my own. However, that wasn't enough, I also wanted, well, needed a poster to go with it and act as publicity and promotional material for said animation. Unfortunately the animation is taking a lot longer to create than the poster (as you'd expect) so it turns out that the poster is actually a teaser more than anything.

Here is the first of what will possibly be a series of posters advertising my animation shorts. 'Gdar' are the alien race I created, which, if you hadn't already guessed, look exactly like chocolate chip cookies!

Not long ago somewhere in Leicester...

I'm alive people! Merely taking an extended holiday it would appear from doing anything blog-related. However, the time has not been poorly wasted.

To start of yet another academic years worth of doodles and image-making I start with a comic based around the Disney buy-out of Lucasfilm.

Hopefully this short will also be appearing in the DeMontfort University newspaper although that is yet to be confirmed.

I quite like this piece, which is new for me and comic strips I create. Think I'm going to be making more comic strips and seeing how they turn out, any thoughts?

Louder Now

Upcoming journalist Hayley Smith  - whose publications often, but not always, spreads across the music genre, covering music news, band reviews, musical events and more - has decided it is time to revamp, renew and rebrand the image of LouderNow, a self-titled blog in which all of her publications can be viewed. She approached me for several of the images she wanted doing and after discussions and refinement I have created an array of new logos and images of LouderNow (as shown). To view Hayley's publications yourself, head to http://loudernowreview.blogspot.co.uk/

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a book of short, sensual stories from fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots and more.
I was given the task of designing title pages for a selection of these stories. I read through the stories, picking out what I saw as key aspects of the stories and came up with the designs below:

Alphabet

As a fun little homage to the past and all the fun it provided, I have created an alphabet out of a number of different methods and created a short animation to a soundtrack fitting for a retro dedication: Tetris.

A Slight Change From Animations

Anyone would think all I do is animate these days looking at my blog, to change yours (and theirs) minds here is a look at some other stuff I have been doing recently;

With these fish-based images I have tried to used simple methods of black line and gradient colours at first and then progressed into adding filtered photographs into the imagery as with the image of the fishmonger.

This image is a logo I have designed for my University's Graphic Design Society. The "F" standing for Fletcher (the name in which Graphic Design is taught) and the "10" for the floor of the building Graphic Design is primarily on. A reference likely only known to those that would be in the society which is why I think it is a good name for the society. I also think this is a good logo, it is a relatively simple design that is easy to read and could be identified easily from a farther distance. It also opens itself up well for changes of context as the block colours could be easily changed if necessary as well as having imagery included either within the triangles of the logo or within the white space of the "F" itself.

SELECT

The scenario I was given was a TV channel called "Select" that needed some idents for it's parent channel as well as it's themed counterparts (Arts, Movies, History etc). I came up with a few initial ideas and then ended up focusing on a spherical idea that is present throughout all of my animations. With the themed idents though I added a twist to each one, making them all unique to the channel they are for and I feel they all work for the intended channels.

   As you can see here with the Movies ident I have added a countdown at the start of the animation, one that is often seen at the start of movies (especially older movies).
   With Arts I wanted to keep it simple, and what better way to simplify Arts than to show a paint splat which is what I have done at the end of the rotations in the animation.
   There are numerous ways I could have chosen to portray History, however, I ended up following something that has come along more so than a lot of other things, weapons. Thanks to this I was able to turn the sphere into a target and fire some arrows into it, a weapon that is stuck in History and not used anymore.
   When the word Fantasy is mentioned most people think of either Dragons, Fairies, Flying Horses and other such mythical creatures. I'm no different, and as such proceeded to turn the Fantasy sphere into a Dragons' eye.

Flash

AHHHHHH! I must admit, I'm struggling a little with Flash animations having now used After Effects. Although, slowly but surely I'm getting the hang of the basics. Taking both the previous character development image as well as a random bird image I have added a few movements to them. I think they turned out well considering I only half an hour on the first animation (below)...

... The second took me a little longer but only for the reason that I painted the bird in Flash as well rather than using an imported image. Not to mention there being more movement in the second animation (below).

More Animations

I can't see my love of animating die any time soon. With each passing week I can do more and more which in turn makes me love animating more and more. After starting the alphabet animation last week I have learnt a few more effects and methods. There are still a few things I need to sort out on the video such as timing for some of the effects I've added although I'll soon get them sorted. For now though, the second installment of my letterform animation.

Character Design

Second term of university for me spells out one thing; Animation. For animations I need characters, content, something to animate so here we have the first image of what will be the main focus of one of my animations later on this year. Quite happy with how the character has turned out, I just need to see how well he can be animated, which will follow soon.

New Love

Okay, haven't posted anything for a while, so I apologize. However, recently I have discovered a love for Animation. Particularly using Adobe After Effects (I haven't got round to trying anything else yet, I'm sure they will follow soon). So far I have only done a short animation which I thought would take much longer than it did. I cannot wait to learn the software more and find out exactly what I can do. I'm sure there will be many more clips, but for now, my first animation...

Nostalgia

Okay, so it's a New Year and for a change, as most people are looking forwards, I'm going to look back, I'm choosing to look at some of the work I have done in the past that I am particularly pleased in, even if it's only aspects of a piece of work. The first will have to be my final A-level piece:

You're probably thinking it's a very dark piece, and not just for the reasons of it being all black and white. So here's the back story, it's actually a poster advertising a short movie that my friend had filmed under the name "Life's A Bitch".

I will grant you it has faded somewhat since I painted it, although I must say, I had lots of fun doing it and am still rather proud of some of the shading on this piece.




Why not continue along the education theme, aye? Okay then, here we are with my final from art foundation. Well, one of. Overall I think I produced around 7-8 of variants of the original image, all with different colours and line work, must say that these are my favourites out of the collection though.