Graphics Collaboration

Right after the Easter Break we began with a  presentation that encourages new and interesting ideas from us. Just because we're animators doesn't mean we only communicate and work with animators during the course. We could possibly want the help of a 3D student to build a set, or get a Fashion student to design some costumes. Therefore we were to join with the Graphics students for a week and design and finish a project within the week.

After being mixed with the other class, we were into sort ourselves in groups of three to five. My group decided to start off by sharing our Final Major Project ideas with each other, hoping we could get something from that. Maybe incorporate them together and create a final project.

Our group of four had four very compatible ideas, such as; mental illness, people's view on beauty, transformation and comics. Two animators and two graphics students mixing ideas together seemed like quite a challenge because one is still image, while the other moves. However, it could also be perceived as animation is simply moving graphics.

We had a talk with a graphics tutor who suggested a few ideas. I found it to be quite interesting because he brought up our presentation. Would we just put it on a laptop screen and show it to everyone, or would we present it differently? He suggested making  a 3D house and have us place little screens like phones behind the windows for people to open and watch. However, having two animators in the group, we knew it isn't easy to just make a few animations. It takes a week to animate 30 seconds at our pace and because it's a only a week long project it would be impossible for us to make more than one.

Therefore, we decided we'd make an animation for week our project. "Just like two or three minutes of animation will be fine, right? Short and snappy" said the graphics students, causing two of us- animators - to laugh.

Okay, that's sorted, but how could comics get into this?

Anime exists and they usually contain many manga effects in them such as a huge sweat drop, angry veiny expression, lines on the face to express depression, anger ect. We could incorporate that in our work, it would match her theme and add some comical effect, which is something that is low in the other three FMP ideas of ours.

We also made a comic strip that shows the different scenes with speech bubbles and the infamous sweat drop and such featuring in it. The only difference is, that it's a slightly different version.

It wasn't very hard coming up with the characters in our animation. We had plenty of water bottles and sketchbooks on the table. Additionally, the Graphics students were told to bring in a list of equipment which turned out to be really hopeful as we constructed our characters.

I was very pleased with how our two peacocks turned out. Once they were groomed and given character and facial features, people seemed to completely look past the fact that these were water bottles and accepted them as two props for our film that were peacocks.