André's comic Blog

 Today I decided to make an animation test for my final project, I did one of the parts for my animation to see how it would go.  The animation is 720p and is 12fps. It's a scene where the main character is relaxing on the couch before receiving the bad news about covid. It's a 4-second animation to see feedback about the animation so far.  In my next post, I will do more movement animation for my project to train. I like the animation I did, but it's still short. I will be working on more animations in the future to receive more feedback. Unfortunately, I won't have much time to work with it, but this animation didn't take a long time, so I still think I can finish it before that time. This was the background used, using the dark tones from expressionism and distorted elements with no perfect proportion. It's a simple background that works well with the simple characters. We can also notice where the character is, that is because the character is see-through, I...

 This week I got a better look at my characters and I decided to see what I liked about them. The main character was already well worked on, so the only thing I wanted to do was to focus on the side characters in the story. With that, I will have a look at the character: Mom, Dad, Brother (or brothers), and Grandmother. After I had drawn the characters, I had some thoughts about them: I will choose the first one for a few reasons. The first is that she has a more unique look to her and the dark glasses make her have some expressionism aspects. Second, the second drawing is not that appealing and probably difficult to draw in the animation (example: walking). The father already has what I wanted from him. Because he's a businessman, I gave him a tired look and a thin body for the lack of walking or do any exercise. The brother is already ok in my opinion. It's a simple character that has an annoying look (a feature that some brothers have). I'm still choosing if I want 1 or ...

 This week I got to do a summary of my plan for my main project this term.  The first things I thought of writing down were that I had to finish the storyboard and complete all the animation for these last weeks. I decided to put these thoughts in this image down to have a better understanding of my plan. The final thoughts from this are: Finish all the storyboards for my animation; Start to do major detailed backgrounds and finalize all the characters; Start doing the animation dividing it into parts according to my storyboards and planning; After animating everything, edit the video with final touches; Post everything on my website and organize everything for the presentation of my work. Number 1 is very straightforward, only finished the storyboards that I have to do and think about if they are good or not. Number 2 is to do with the intro of the animation because that's where I will start my animation. The intro is important because everything will be shown in the intro. N...

(photo for the blog image) This week, in the art portfolio we had to do collaborative artwork with a partner that our tutor chose. The group consisted of two people: André and Zorana. We were asked to do an art project with a theme of our choosing. The theme we chose was a poster that consisted of 2 art styles. We decided that the story of the poster would cover the meeting of people from different backgrounds. The characters would be either scary or cute to differentiate the “different people’’ and the different backgrounds that they came from. So the poster would have: Characters meet each other from different worlds Poster- scary characters meeting nice friendly characters A4 format will be colored. The cute and nice characters will be made by André and the scary ones made by Zorana. And it's digital. With that we did our first sketch: With this first sketch, we thought of changing some of the characters. On André's side, we wanted the characters to look cuter, use, for exam...

Recently I did a post about music and sound effects that I would be using in my animation.  In my animation introduction, I want to show the public where the animation will be in. For that, I just need to draw some backgrounds of the place the main character would live in.  My first thoughts were to make the place where the characters live really dirty and disorganized, that would give the impression that the place isn't healthy and that would be why the virus was dangerous.  So I created some scenes for that: (finishing more drawings) These drawings would show the public how the city is. With all the research I did about expressionism, I knew that it would be suitable if the city would also have distorted backgrounds and disorganized buildings. In the animation, I would put the buildings moving in a "parallax" effect. What this means is that objects that are closer move faster, and objects that are far away moving slower. This effect can be done with simple editing, we j...

(it's just here to appear on the image of  the blog) To make an animation it is important to think about the sound that will be used. My animation won't have any voices or main dialog, but sounds are always fundamental to make the animation come to life. For this, I will use music and sound effects to do it. Sound in animation is important to explain to the public what's going on, for example, if the music goes very low and scary, it's because something scary or paranormal is about to happen, if the music is relaxing and calm, it means everything is well. Before I show the songs and soundtrack that I’ve got, I need to explain in a more complete way how sound works in the animation. We can look at a famous movie called Wall-E, a movie from 2008 directed by Ben Burtt. He explains that one of the 5 senses that humans have is hearing, and most of the time that sense is not well used in movies, this is an issue because humans are incredibly good at interpreting sound and can...

  This program was one of the programs that I used the most. This software is a drawing/animation program that is very easy to use and if you, at any time, worked at any animation program, this will feel mostly like a quick way to do animation if you aren't worried about details. I've used this program for animation only and a small bit for drawing. It has its own features compared to the other programs because it was mainly made for Ipad tablets and notebooks. The program was later available on the computer as it was starting to get common people having devices to draw on it. I will go for the features that I think are very important: 1- Very easy to use compared to most programs; 2- Options for smooth drawing (a feature that was only on a tablet, but now on the computer); 3- It's not a busy program, meaning that all the options aren't on a screen distracting you from drawing. But it has its one disadvantages: 1- It's very limited one the animation part; 2- In the ...

  In this post, I tried to use different materials to get more results. I tried to use acrylic to get a more interesting result of my characters. I tried with one of the characters on my animation to see what I could improve on the last sketches. The image above shows the result of my sketches and I got some good results with it.  On this part of the drawing, I got 3 drawings that were useful for me. The one on the top right was a test to see who the character "mom" would look with glasses, and it turned out to work well. The one on the bottom right in red was a version of "mom" as a nightmare, which was good for my next storyboard called "Nightmare". But the one that was very interesting for me was the 2 figures on the bottom representing a child and an adult. They had me think if in the "nightmare" there would be faceless figures that would represent family members from the main character. So I draw some sketches on my computer. In these sketch...

  The trailer of the movie The movie called “Nosferatu” from 1922, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (directeur) and Henrik Galeen (screenwriter),  was the first movie about vampires. This movie is part of German expressionism and it was one the best movies at the time. (a gibelwho production, n.d.) For more context about the life of this artist, we need to also have some context about what his movie was related to, and that was german expressionism. For this, we need to go back to 1920 to talk about the mood and mental health of the German artists that worked on cinema. Germany was the country that had lost WWI, and for that, they had to pay for what they had done as a punishment. The majority of the products were banished from importing and exporting from Germany, including the movies. All German citizens saw their economies rapidly lose value and they had to do something, including the ones that worked on cinema. They knew that a company called Hollywood was starting to form in t...

  Today I decided to make a storyboard of one of the parts in my animation, and for that, I choose this part of the animation called "Dream". In this part of the animation, the main character would be very stressed before sleeping because of covid 19, but eventually, he will fall asleep and this is when this part of the storyboard comes in. So, I will say what's happening in each square: 1- The main character is sleeping after a long day of stress; 2- He wakes up scared in a dream; 3- We have a good look at his dream and where he is; 4- He's confused about the dream; 5- He walks around the dream and we get another view from the dream; 6- Another view of him walking, but this view has a purpose for the following squares; 7- A shadow starts to rise in front of the main character but he doesn't notice; 8- The shadow rises more and he finally looks at what's rising from the ground; 9- He sees a giant toilet paper (related to Covid 19); 10- The toilet paper falls o...

Today in class we started to see how to draw a Human character. We begin by addressing the basic principles that allow us to draw the human character correctly. We started by looking at a technique that measures the human body in "heads". For this, we use a scale in which we convert the size of a person's head and get the size of the rest of the body. We have as an example: - Adult Male is between 7.5 / 8 heads; - Adult Female is between 7 / 7.5 heads; - Child is between 4/5 heads. With this, we started to see how to do the human body with these measurements, calculating the spaces where we will place each part of the body. Thus, we have the human figure divided into several parts, namely: (i) headspace - we draw the head; (ii) we draw the chin and chest, and it ends on the nipples; (iii) we draw the chest to the navel (belly bottom); (iv) we draw the navel to the bottom of the hips pr crotch; (v) we draw the bottom of hips to mid hips (and the tip of your fingers); (vi)...

Today in class we got to talk about what we know about our own subject area. I will be answering 4 questions regarding this theme: What should I be doing in my subject area? First, I should research more about artists and animations to get a better understanding of what has been done over time and what I can learn from these artists. I also need to learn more about what is positive or negative, what was a success or failure in the area of animation, to understand what attracts the audience and how it should guide my path. Second, I should be training how to do a series of drawings or photos (in case of stop-motion) and put them all together to form a fluid video that tells a story or shows an Idea to the target public. When we can do this successfully, we can have good animation. I have to be able to make different characters and draw other figures and scenarios to understand what I can and cannot do.  What skills and knowledge do I need for my subject area? In my case, I need to k...

I've already done research about this artist before for term 1 work in another context, but I followed the suggestion to review Muybridge related to my project. This artist is the father of movies and animation because of one simple invention. In the twentieth century, people were starting to understand how to capture motion because of the invention of the camera. Eadweard Muybridge was born in 1830 in England. Muybridge's name is associated with the photography of movement. He emigrated to the United States. It was in 1868 that his photographs became known worldwide. (Britannica, s.d.). Bellis (2019) claims that Muybridge is the "father of cinema" because he was innovative in managing to make a moving sequence from photography. He developed the zoopraxiscope. I went to research how the zoopraxiscope worked, and I share this video that shows us what this invention was and also how Muybridge's experiences in motion photography were: (20) Muybridge's Zoopraxisco...

In class, we heard a talk about Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Based on the lecture, I did research on the two artists. Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Wisconsin, United States. She was an influential painter in modernism and became known for her paintings of flowers and bones. She also has representations of buildings and skyscrapers in New York and unique New Mexico landscapes. (Lynes, s.d) In the 1900s, Georgia O'Keeffe studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the Art Students League in New York. But she dropped out of school because her instructions in her artwork limited her a lot because she wanted to paint according to her interpretation. The teachers didn't like her job. O'Keeffe taught for several years while refining her artistic style. (History Daily, 2018) In 1915, O'Keeffe sent some drawings to a former colleague at Teachers College, who took them to an avant-garde gallery in New York that belonged to Stiegli...