sketchbook

the animatic

Here is the first draft of the animatic. There is a second one which has a slightly different ending, which i'll post soon. I learnt a lot from doing this. I'm quite new when it comes to character designs and storyboards so every mistake was a lesson.






Storyboard 1 from Daniel on Vimeo

life drawings

Before I started animating I did a little research and preparation. This included life drawing, watching real ballerinas, acting out some of the movements myself and doing rough sketches of movements. Oh yeah! and listening to a lot of classical music. Ha! Its funny but it helped me to get into the right frame of mind somehow:) being as they are closely related. Drawing from life prepared me for the difficult task of animating two caricatured women. I tried to picture in my mind scenes that I knew would be a challenge, like say raising the arm into a certain position, which may seem quite basic. But I wanted it to look believable whilst being funny at the same time. The fact that I chose to use 'cartoony' characters as opposed to realistic looking figures did make it a bit easier for me as I knew that I would be able to exaggerate a bit more. But that isn't to say that I was going to take liberties:) For this reason I knew that I would have to at least have a basic understanding of what actually happens when an arm bends or a foot takes off from the floor so that I could use it as a starting point in the animation. Phew! that was a bit long winded:)

Looking at it now, I can see that her left arm is a bit wobbly, maybe too long, I must have gotten carried away:)

This was drawn using pastel. It gives a soft, flowing line, which is very hard to control and cannot really be erased.

I tried to think 'line' and 'contour' whilst drawing this model, as I knew I'd have to be thinking like that whilst animating.

anatomy studies

The above drawing and the few below were all good reminders for me and may seem pretty basic, actually they all look very basic. But this was done for a good reason. I wanted to keep it simple and not get bogged down with the precise latin names of the muscles and bones or fancy drawings.

I sketched out a quick pose and then, from memory, drew out the underlying muscles on the left. Its probably not as detailed as it could be if I had used a reference book, but it helped nonetheless.

This still has to be cleaned up and coloured. Will do when I get time...

character designs: ballet student

I had a good idea of what I wanted the student to look like from the beginning after watching the original Fantasia and seeing the larger-than-life hippos performing ballet...

character designs: ballet teacher

The above image is the final model of the ballet teacher. Below are various other designs based on the same character. I tried to keep her as simple as possible whilst still being appealing.