Weekly summary 1, week 22

Weekly summary 1, week 21.

📦 MYSTERY BOX  PROJECT  📦

During the Monday session, we were introduced into the new brief, the mystery box project. In which the final outcome will be a finished sequence of our character reacting to a box, with rules of;

1. Character must not touch box

2. The viewer must not see the boxes contents.

My design for my character so far is a ‘feminine’ lady, with a Hollywood glamour/ studio star 20’s look and theme. However, with a twist... Instead of a human head, she has a magical eight ball as a replacement. The design has both positives and negatives, by not having a face that shows expression, it enables me to focus mainly on the characters body performance, of poses and movement. A negative is the ball may be too heavy for her body, however I will research into lightweight materials. To get the head perfectly smooth however will be challenging, to create for my maquette. Not having much experience with model making, I will need to research into techniques that will help develop my skills.

So far as of Monday, we created a maquette of our characters; using wire, sculpey, wooden blocks, tinfoil (and masking tape).  After creating the Skelton, building and filling out the body with tinfoil, I decided to research into sculpting tips to improve my attempts. Videos such as artists who use sculpey to make statues, another artist who used sculpey to make life like dolls.

The tips I picked up was ways to use the tools, used to attach parts and press sides down, but also powerfully told is to use them freely and expressively. Watching one sculpture I saw them add on different parts ‘scruffily’ building up parts, once again expressively- in a way that I would draw a sketch or a painting.  With the doll maker, what I learned from him was the way he added the ‘skin’ to the doll, he added the skin in long stretch parts. Thin, stretched over layered the rough parts. Which was a very important tip that I learned, instead of my previous way of adding the parts in one. Overall what I learnt from my research was it okay to slowly build it up in parts and adding layers and the under layers are rough.

During some spare time on Wednesday I went into uni and finished my maquette, first I went by removing the layers of tin foil and tape and researching with the Skelton. I redid the head, and with the rest of the body I went straight with sculpey. I finished it, however it could be better, I know it take more practice.

On Monday, I also had a session on ‘acting for animators’ where we acted out the personalities and characteristics of our characters, representing the way they would move and behave, also their reaction to the mystery box. Recording a finalised version and representation of it, on a cannon camera. My idea was to have my character, ‘lady red’ walking the streets at night, all alone. Feeling vulnerable yet keeps herself composed as ‘together’, “like a lady should”. The box blocks off her path, curiously yet caustically. She walks towards the box and dares to look in. At first she is shocked what she sees, a young child left alone. She looks around to if their parents are anywhere to be seen, presuming the child has been abandoned she decides to take responsibility of it, looking lovingly into the box. This is not my final idea for the sequence, more of a concept idea. I am yet to experiment with different narrative ideas, although I do know I want the first reaction to be shocked. Wednesdays I worked on creating the drawing version of my sequence ready for Thursday session, I decided I wanted my character to walk down an alleyway. On Thursday, I had both a story board work shop and my last life drawing session. In the lift drawing session, we painted a dressed male model, on a3 cardboard with acrylic paint in a longer session than normal. I think this session, I was actually pleaded with painting as I saw an improvement from my previous painting of a naked female model. In the story board work shop, I learnt what it mean to be a storyboard artists in the animation (and film) industry “story board artists do everybody else’s jobs before they do it”, and the process. Such as using a beat board before creating the storyboard, which then gets reformed into an animatic by scanning in the drawings. Over the week end I will be developing my story board, with the new techniques I have learned and also creating a construction drawings for Monday’s session.