Cinema 4D - Composition Tutorial - 27/11/2015

Lighting and perspective planes

animated spheres

Reflective cone and colored spheres

WBL - Push Puzzle Records - Work Placement

Alongside my college course I am on a work placement in my free time as a photographer at the College's record label Push Puzzle Records, based in the Performance Academy.

This has involved shooting live performances, promotional shoots and shooting at the recording studios at West End Campus. The most challenging task I have had to date was when I had to personally interview my assigned act Rach Lumb when tasked with arranging a PR shoot at her choice of location, which was a steep learning curve as I had to rely on myself to make decisions and take charge directing a shoot which helped my confidence as I had never done something like that before.

I have included a couple examples of my photographs below -

Rach Lumb - Plessy Woods - promotional shoot.

Rach Lumb - Plessy Woods - promotional shoot.

Montclare - Behind the scenes filming of music video.

Montclare - Behind the scenes filming of music video.

WBL Artist Research TASK 1 -

CHARLES BURNS -

His work is reminiscent of a graphic novel, pop art style which works well with his choice of line work. His simple use of lines for shading gives the work a dark, dramatic look and allows for intricate detail where required, for example the hair. He works in realism and fantasy with his concepts and his work appears to be ink or digitally produced as it is very clean. His work is recognisable as his and he has managed to achieve a balance between realism and simplicity.

LUKE DIXON - 

His style is similar to Burn's in his use of line work but his use of colour and patterns help differentiate the styles. Dixon works with traditional methods such as ink pens but he also sometimes digitally adds colour to his work. His concepts are mostly animal related and based on universal favourites such as wolves and bears which he produces for commercial use as well as fan art of his favourite people or commissions. Again he manages to balance abstract with realism to achieve a unique style which appeals to me.

ANDREA WAN -

Her concepts nearly all revolve around a human figure and her style is consistent throughout all her work. her style of drawing humans is abstract but retains the basic anatomy structure to lend it a touch of realism. Her work is very abstract and she uses desaturated, soft earthy tones which give her work the feel of a children's fairytale book illustration.

HELL 'O' MONSTERS -

This site is mainly a collection of artists work and I selected examples that I liked the look of for inspiration.

JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE -

This is an art and culture magazine that features artists. I selected these works because I liked them.

ARTIST - JOE FENTON

Fenton's work is of great detail and realism and the above example is done in graphite.

ARTIST - CARLIN DIAZ

 Diaz uses geomerty and shapes in his work along with bold blocks of colour.  His style is very abstract but while it isn't personally to my taste I did find it interesting.

ARTIST - MARIO MAPLE

Maple's work I quite liked as he works in pencil and ink which gives him a sketchy feel to these works. He is inspired by accidents and mutations which he puts together in his art to create a character or story.

END OF YEAR EVALUATION

I came to this course with an interest in animation and illustration and the desire to learn and experiment with new things. My main experience was in illustration and over the course of the year I have learnt new skills and improved my existing ones. I have enjoyed learning about animation and feel I have picked up the basics with key frame animation in Cinema 4D but my skills in creating 3D models are not as strong. I have also discovered new artists through research tasks such as Jeff Soto and Fons Scheidon who I find inspiring. This year has pushed me out of my comfort zone and given me confidence to try new techniques in my work, which is what I was hoping to achieve and these new skills will also hopefully benefit me in the future.

My projects I feel where the final piece was successful were the walk cycle, my storyboard, character design, the three illustrations and my animation short. Typically these were projects centred around illustration which I find myself gravitating towards but I have picked up basic animation skills which I have been practicing outside of college but it just doesn’t come naturally to me which makes it less appealing compared to 2D. Following this my weakest project was the 3D model creation in Cinema 4D as I found it fairly difficult to build the model but I learnt a lot creating it with the rigging and sculpting. My time management is also a sticking point for me as I have a tendency to push the research out of the way as soon as I can and spend more time on my final product thus forgetting to update my development which I realise weakens my projects.

To address my weaknesses in future projects I will –

Come up with multiple concepts and discuss them in depth with others more before picking one.

Spend more time on my research/development and look at new things out of my comfort zone for inspiration.

Plan my projects out and stick to the timetable.

My targets for over the summer are to –

Improve on my human drawing skills and try to settle on a style that works for me.

Look at more new artists to gain inspiration. I will mainly do this by browsing instagram and following artists I like.

Last Illustration Project Update before Deadline

I am still working on adding the finishing touches to my illustrations but they are very near completion. I am currently also in the process of checking my development work and adding to it if I need too.

My main strength this project would be trying something new as I am comfortable with drawing digitally so the actual making of wasn't too much of a challenge even if human anatomy isn't my strongest point. This did slow me down a little as I spent more time considering the layout and rendering before applying the colour to my line-art.

My weaknesses this project would have to be my blog updating, research skills and time management.

Works In Progress Shots -

UV Mapping & Texture in Cinema 4D

This task I learnt how to 'cut' a polygon object and apply an edge selection tool to separate the sections out. This is a finicky task that requires careful thought when applying the cuts.

Rainbow texture for sphere.

Rainbow Texture applied on the Sphere.

Cutting the sections on the human model.

Segmented Character - Walk to Run Task.

I was given the task of adapting a 40 frame walk cycle into a run cycle on cinema 4D using whatever method I felt was best.

Walk cycle - Original 40 frame timeline.

The starting timeframe is shown above. In order to change the frames I had to firstly delete the existing key frames and shorten the 40 frames down to 20. I decided to halve it because a run cycle is faster than a walk and twenty gives you an even halfway point of ten frames which makes calculating poses easier.

Final 20 frames timeline for my run cycle.

This is an example of a 'successful' run cycle for comparison.

To animate the character I used the wrist and ankle goals to stretch the legs out and change the walking 'contact' point to the suspended motion of running where both feet are off the ground halfway. As well as bending the arms upwards so they support the running motion. I have never really attempted a human run cycle before so this was a fun challenge and I'm happy with how it came out for a first try.

Wrist and ankle goals highlighted.

(I included these  poses to show the animation changes.)

Pose 1 - Run.

Pose 2 - Run.

Pose 3 - Walk.

Pose 4 - Walk.

Illustration Project Update (research) 20/04/15

So far in this project, I have completed my proposal and treatment, looked at artists such as Charles Burns and collected various images via Google to help inspire my idea concepts and took my own reference photos, using my dad as a model, to aid me in drawing my final pieces.

Currently I am still working on my final illustrations and I aim to have all three completed by next Monday. 

Examples of my Work - Photography

I enjoy photography as a hobby with my favorite subjects being wildlife, my dogs and concert/music photography. I have included some of my personal favorites below.