This is my motion studies showreel, for which I used Maya for everything. I find 3d animation very interesting and I think I’m getting better at capturing realism. The showreel includes the, 11-second club project, 3 different walks, a man throwing a ball and a man lifting a weight. The challenging, but interesting, part of these projects, for me, is to try and capture and make believable the weight of the ball/object. This strongly influences how the characters body moves and I like the challenge of trying to capture that realistically. 

Here is a selection of drawings from my sketchbook, I’ve done too many to include them all on this blog but here is some. I love the freedom of the sketchbook projects; we can draw almost whatever we want. 

Here are some life drawings, which I’ve done mainly in charcoal and pencil. As I’ve mentioned previously in my blog, since I come from an artistic background I’ve done quite a lot of life drawing before and I’ve always enjoyed it and learnt from the exercises we do.

Here are my 3 final backgrounds. I decided that the sunset one didn’t have enough colour contrast so I added in the dark grass in the foreground. Also I’m particularly pleased with the Photoshop colour editing on the interior background it really gives a sense of light.

Here are some of my supporting sketchbook works for the background project. I really enjoyed this project, taking a story and using it to create well composed beautiful backgrounds. I really enjoy using watercolours, I think you can get such brilliant colour blends and textures, which makes it perfect for the sunsets and landscapes I wanted to paint for this project. I learnt quite a lot about composition and colour contrast on this project and also I learnt how to enhance and slightly edit the final images on Photoshop. But I really liked the freedom of this project.

This is the Ident project, in which we had to create a short ident advertising our course. Like previous projects i enjoyed this one because it was a great chance to improve on my creative skill with a computer by learning how to use after effects. I find after effects very easy to use and i enjoyed playing with the effects.  

This is my experimental animation which i did using watercolour. The main problem i had on this project was time. Since i was away in China i couldn't start the project until a bit late. Unfortunately i had to slightly rush the project and this effects every element of the final piece. I chose this track because i thought it expressed quite natural imagery to me and i thought that watercolour would work for using bright abstract colours. The subject of the animation is quite abstract but it's to some extent my, abstract visual representation of the music. I should've enjoyed this project a lot more because it offers so much freedom for us to do what we want, but i was just so rushed that i had to go with often my first ideas.

This was the environment project in which we had to take a photo of a building and edit it into a different environment using whatever techniques we wanted. So i took this as an opportunity to practise photoshop. So i cut together a background out of a few different images and put the building in it. Again i enjoyed the modelling part of it in the same way as the face modelling project. The only thing i do regret in not digitally painting my own background; having seen the potential of what you can do with this project i think that i will do it again in my free time. I will do it again whilst learning how to use a Wacom tablet.

In my own time i had a go at face modelling. Since i come from an artistic background i'm not used to working on computers so much but i find it very interesting and i try to learn as much as i can. I really enjoyed this project, i found it quite difficult and time consuming, it requires a lot of intelligent observation and thought. I enjoyed shaping and sculpting the shape and i learnt a lot abut modelling by inserting edges and vertices and manipulating them. I will continue to work on this project in my own time and see how far i get with it.

Here are the slides from my presentation with Nick Turner about Kung fu Panda. It includes the visual slides and some notes which i used to read from.