One of my modules is 'Drawing for Animation' – it alternates
between a life drawing class with a model and character design every few weeks.
My tutor for this class constantly urges us to experiment with mark making and
the mediums we use, especially when we do life drawing. I know some of the
people without an art background in my course sometimes struggle with the
experimentation side of things, running out of ideas quickly, but I feel that
because of TRC I was much more prepared for it.
Naturally because of Drawing of Animation I have pages of A2
pieces of paper filled with life drawing sketches of our models, but in the
character design we've done a lot of exercises to help us come up with great
character designs – one of the assignments we have to do. There's a lot of time
given to feedback from tutors as well and also we're encouraged to give
feedback to other students as well – the more you get the better!
This week we've also been doing models of our characters –
to see how they would the drawings translate into a 3D shape and also to have a
reference point if we draw from different angles as sometimes characters are
made up of difficult shapes that may be hard to imagine at ¾ view and such. I
made one of my characters, a square shaped cat, which I'm developing for an
assignment and also a rather strange looking creature when my tutor told us to
experiment with what we can do with the plasticine.
Another module I have is simply 'Animation', which so far
was working in Photoshop. We've learnt how to use Photoshop CS6 to animate 2D –
we did morphing animations (ones where one object turns into another), walk and
run cycles as well as how to show weight in animation. With this class, we've
also been told how important it is to have a reference to draw from,
particularly a live action one as going by imagination or using someone else's
animation as reference will not produce an animation as good as it could be. At
TRC I've learnt that a reference to draw from is key and I hardly do it anyway,
so this was something I was rather used to.
I have two more classes, one of which is all about animation
theory – researching it will make us better practitioners. I'm quite happy with
this class, I'm already used to researching artists and such thanks to having
to fill pages about them for Fine Art, so I just had to translate that skill to
animators! It's also supported by a mandatory movie screening every Tuesday, to
show us movies that we might not have seen before, but certainly could inspire
us. I'm not complaining, I'm being “forced” to have a movie night every
Tuesday? Bring it on!
The other is Practice Skills, which basically gets us used
to any cameras or equipment we might need to use for animating stop motion or
recording audio. Probably my least favourite class, but it is rather important
– and I think it will make my horrid photography skills improve!
The approach that Fine Art takes at TRC (thank you Sarah and
Bev!) certainly prepared me more for independent work and made me a much more
creative person and I felt more confident starting my course having that
experience with me.
I'm hoping that one day I might be working for Aardman
animations or Dreamworks (or perhaps start my own animation company and make a
name for myself?), which this course is great for as they have links to Aardman
and even Nick Park (creator of Wallace and Gromit) picks his favourite
animation from third-year work so I may have some sort of a chance.
I've started a blog that will document my progress through
this course, although it's in desperate need of updating with some more work
which I really should do soon: http://animarta.wordpress.com/
Some of my work, ranging from animations to some character
stuff from Drawing for Animation:
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