Funny Hat Man

A strange little gif I made for a competition for the animation festival 'Hifest' which will be held in Hastings in December. The theme for the competition is simply 'Hi'. I tried to think of lots of ways that people say hi, and then decided to use the classic english greeting of tipping your hat!

Jonathan Cape Graphic Novel

Our Summer project was to do a 4 page graphic novel as part of the Jonathan Cape competition.

I think my comic ended up looking a little bit mad, but I definitely enjoyed making it. I wanted to do my comic about dressing up, and I decided to have it be about the most inappropriate/awkward situation to be in fancy dress in.

My Final Project

For our final project for this year, we had to choose a project which we'd enjoyed or found interesting previously in the year, and then continue this project and take it in new directions. 

I decided to develop my collections project, as I enjoyed that one but felt it would benefit from being taken out of the brief we were given. 

I enjoyed using my Dad as the central character for the collections project, but this time wanted to make something which was less true to life, and use exaggeration to create a witty narrative. 

When my Dad goes into the cellar to work on a horn project, there is no way that he can be summoned back upstairs, as he becomes completely emersed in what he's doing. I wanted my animation to be about that, and also just the general feeling that everyone can relate to, of being so completely involved in something you love doing that you lose track of time and are almost unaware of the world around you.

I wanted to use stop motion animation for my film, but after having to do extensive storyboarding to fully work out my narrative, I found that it would be more productive to do an animatic instead as it would be incredibly time consuming to actually animate my film in the time we had. I might animate it properly over the Summer though!

I think I have exhausted the topic of using my family members in projects now.

No Ordinary Life Drawing

Here is a selection of life drawings. Our normal life drawing model was ill on this day, and so our tutor nobly stepped in to model. It was actually a lot more fun as our tutor is a very characterful man. He put a projected image on the back wall and sat in front of it. We had to combine him with the projected image in our drawings.

NEW YAWK

Drawings of the view from the top of the Rockefeller Centre.

Earlier this year I went on a trip to New York with my course! It was absolutely an unforgettable trip full of maple syrup, funny nice friends, larking around, very tall buildings and wide streets, touristy activities, grape jelly, looking at beautiful things and getting electric shocks from our possibly haunted hotel which resembled the one from the film 'The Shining'. I had never been to America before this trip and had only ever seen New York in films. I now realise that New York is an actual real place that exists outside of the TV! I'm so happy that I was able to go. 

A classic New York breakfast. If you are wondering what I am holding, it's a piece of bacon! All meals seemed to include bacon. IT WAS AMAZING.

Collections Book Project

We recently had a book design project project at uni. The focus of this project was collections, and we had to display our chosen collection in a way which reflected it, through the form of a book.
I decided to base my collections book on my Dad's extensive collection of French Horns. My Dad is truly obsessed by French Horns and currently has 12. He also makes and repairs them and has a makeshift workshop in our cellar.

Here are a few of the pages from my book. I wanted the book to feel like my Dad was giving a guided tour through his collection and I enjoyed using him as a central character to structure the pages around.  I found the page design element hard, and I think there are definitely flaws in the some of the layouts. I think I would like to experiment with page design more in other projects as I find it challenging but intriguing!

The cover of my book- a French Horn case!

The back page of my book was a model of a set of draws which my Dad has in his workshop, where he keeps his tools, pieces of pipe and crucial bits and bobs. In each draw was a miniature book with my Dad's explanation of the contents of each draw. 

I felt like my idea would work well as an interactive book, and wanted to include my dad's actual voice and explanation in the book as a voice over. I animated the pages and made my dad's mouth move and his finger point around. I'm definitely looking forward to next year when we learn how to properly do a smooth lip sync to speech with animation, as mine is extremely novice!

https://vimeo.com/92258051

The Fixed Image

For this project we had to choose between 4 disciplines, photography, print, collage and 3d.
Naturally I chose 3d. They told us to choose something which we felt pushed ourselves out of our comfort zone, which I feel a bit bad about as I didn't do that at all, although I have really enjoyed this project and it's nice to be able to explore something I love.
The theme of the project was us and them. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided I didn't want to do anything too heavy, and that something more lighthearted would suit me a lot better. I thought it would be interesting to create a conflict between 2 groups of people who are different, but where there isn't actually tension between the groups in the real world. I thought it would draw attention to the silliness of actual conflicts that are based on irrelevant differences.
I thought of lots of different bodily things which could separate groups of people where comical conflicts could arise. I thought of, detached and attached ears, eye colour, short and tall people and other things, but ended up settling on bearded and shaven/balding men!
I thought it would be an interesting thing to show visually and my imagination was running wild thinking of beards coming to life and the like!
I decided to create an action shot style battle scene of the hair based conflict, and I created relevant weapons for both groups.

The bearded men have hair growth serum as weapons and the hairless men have razors.
I was a bit disappointed that in the photos you can't easily read the text on the hair growth serum, although it's more obvious in real life.

Spontaneous Lush Illustration

I was shopping the other day with my lovely friend Jack, when we decided to stroll into Lush (Jack's favourite shop in the world). We were chatting to one of the people who worked there and she asked us what course we did. When we said Illustration, she said that she really wanted an illustration for the 'Lush White City' Facebook page, and she asked if we'd like to do one for them!
I did a little drawing and here it is...