Introducing: The Scouse Dock-Rat

After a bit of silly discussion with the lads who live upstairs (“Scouse” John, Alex, Sean and Callum) during one evening of chilling out, we decided that we should create our own character – if not an entire comic book series. Say hello to “The Scouse Dock-Rat” – a dodgy smack-head similar to the character “Super Hans” from “Peep Show”.

Mister Dock-Rat spends his time drug-addled on the docks around Hull, begging for money, getting into fights and biting peoples ankles – with a few obvious resulting trips to the doctors afterwards. He has lost most of his original teeth, is blind in one eye, has a tendency to incessantly scratch himself, and is missing half an ear. His hair is patchy, his tracksuit is incredibly shiny (probably smells a fair bit too!) and he wears bling stolen from the purses and pockets of students and old ladies. He will stop at nothing to get a fix of “the good stuff”.

He was already a pre-existing concept / inside joke amongst the guys upstairs. They “invented” the character, so to speak, one night after seeing a very sizeable rat run across the car park near our flats. It was at that moment, that “Scouse” John decided to imagine what his voice would be like, and thus did a damn good impression of a drug-addicted anthropomorphic rat. Ever since then, he has become a reoccurring topic in their day to day conversation.

The idea to draw him, came from us all being sat around, watching a movie with our sketchbooks in hand. The lads were looking at my work, and having previously mentioned the Dock-Rat, suggested that I should try and draw him. They did not really have a definite pre-conceived idea of what he should look like, but nontheless I managed to draw something up. This is the first little concept doodle I did whilst everyone present was churning out ideas:

Once I had drawn this (and when we had polished off all of the Budweisers that were left) I started to sketch the lines for a much more polished looking piece of concept artwork. I used my usual tools-of-the-trade to create it: Mechanical pencil, Stabilo outliner, and Copic Markers. I thought that using highly constrasting shades of colours (light and dark grey, dark purple and lilac, etc) would make this a really visually interesting piece of artwork.

I think my choice of colours really accentuate his disheveled demeanor – the bland grays showing the state of his health, and the bright purples of his jacket representing the outlandish behaviour of his from time-to-time. My favorite part of this piece is without a doubt his bulbous eyeball. I’m pleased witht he “pearl” effect I’ve managed to achieve. I created an accompanying colour guide to go with it in my sketchbook.

I must say, drawing in this gritty style, with loud colours and plenty of detail makes a nice change to my day-to-day artwork. I love drawing animals, questionable characters and bad guys – they’re so much more fun to play with! I will have to endeavour to get a recording of “Scouse” John voice acting for this character, and animate a short sequence to it, just so you can all see how amusing this little monster really is!

I’m thinking right now, that the animations will only be very short self-contained narratives, which I will update every so often. Once I’ve drawn up a few storyboards, and come up with some half-decent idea, then I’ll make a start on them. realistically, I’m thining of starting on these ideas more towards the Summer break. I have plenty of ideas for various other ideas – yet again based on some inside jokes that I’ve had with people this semester at university.

Please tell me what you think of this character, and if you can think of any funny situations that he could get involved in! Peace out for now! See you next post!

AbbieSTABBY [ Ident ]

Well, here is my fully completed, very first “Ident”! We were given the task during our Craft & Media Tech. seminars to create one which represented one (or all) of three points:

• (A) Our “brand name” which we have given ourselves
• (B) Our field of study
• (C) The career which we hope to aspire to after further education.

I chose to go for “brand name”, because I felt I could have the most fun with that brief – through wordplay, and some experimentation with various styles and aspects of my animations thus far. I adopted aspects of the other options into my ideas too – particularly the “Fat Norman” design (because I hopefully want to use him as a childrens book character in the future).

With all of this in mind and taken into account, I started off my drawing up a few rough storyboards in my sketchbook with a biro pen. This was so that I could get a feel for what I was doing, and to show my tutors what my ideas were at the time. I originally came up with three very different concepts – each of which showed a different aspect of my artistic style. I tried out humor, alternate styles, and original characters. Here are some animatic examples of what was drawn:

After deliberating between the three, I chose to go for the second one: The one which displayed an alternate style to that which I usually use. A silhouette effect was the intention for this ident, with the colours being inverted so that the background would be black, and the figure in the foreground being white. This not only gives off an interesting, ghostly effect, but it also goes together with the “alternative/gothic” choice of narrative and style, and general perception of things which I have from time to time. Let it be known, I have an admiration and adoration for all things creepy and spooky.

The suggestion for this experimental change in style came from one of my tutors, who after a quick discussion, mentioned that I could opt more towards my general username “AbbieSTABBY”. We both thought of what we could associate with “stabby”, and threw out several ideas. The notion of Jack the Ripper came to mind, and I immediately thought of an eerie, silhouetted, ominous figure.

Once I started the animation itself, I was very wary of the fact that this was all going to be freehand, and that I didn’t really have a clue about how I was going to make the movement into each pose fluid. Granted, some of the movements leave a lot to be desired consistency-wise, but in all, with all the frames put together in sequence, I believe it looks quite good. It consists of thirty frames, put into a frame-by-frame sequence, with a little bit of editing thrown in.

It is by no means as graceful as I originally intended, nor do the hand movements match up to my original expectations, but as a first attempt, I am very pleased. I can simply use this as a learning device / test of the water (for want of a better phrase) for creating future idents, and develop this idea further when the time comes to experiment some more!

From the storyboards, in the beginning, I wanted the knife to come closer to the screen, and the white fade edit to be quicker, so that it would give the viewer the impression of being slashed and whiting out. I will try to rectify this in a second attempt, but for now I shall leave this animation to serve as a reminder for all the changes which need to be made / must be done.

I intend to make the white segment transparent in one future edit, and play some footage in the background (obviously extending the length of the foreground animation and adding more action first). I’m thinking of something along the lines of footage of me working, or some “texture” elements such as running water, paint dripping, a fast rotation of the camera, etc. Just like “Mutant Enemy” did before me, I wish to create several variations of this ident, with different movements and themes, such as: Christmas, Film Themes, Extended Narrative…

This animation took a fair amount of planning, and some much needed after-thought to go with it. An entire evenings full concentration went into finishing this rendition off, and I was feeling incredibly happy with myself once it was completed. This venture has left me open ot all sorts of future ideas and experimentation plans, and I am looking forward to seeing what I create in the near future.

Komrade’s Comments – Ep. 1

This is only a pencil test for now, but I am planning on making future episodes in full colour, with an attatched narrative (not to mention a wide cast of characters!). Here we see Komrade Ushanka – an original character created specifically for a Sound Design assignment this semester. We were asked to create an inanimate object, and imagine: “What would said inanimate object have to say?”.

I decided to go for something easy, which I could have some creative fun and freedom with. It took a fair amount of design consideration and observation in order to create a convincing combination of movements. I needed to bear the shape of the generic object – in this case a hat – in mind, and choose which physical aspects I could transpose into a facial features. I turned the brim into a top lip, and took advantage of the fur on the hat in order to add a pair of material folds which could be seen as eyes. I think in future animations with this character, I’m going to try and adapt the ear-flaps of the hat into make-shift hands. I will be following up this animation with several pencil tests in order to get a better grasp of what else I want to do with this character.

My brother supplied the voice over for Komrade in this animated short. I know it’s a very generic sounding false accent, but it was good enough just for a test run. In future episodes, I’ll be using the vocal talents of my creative colleague and better-half: Alex Beiscak. This is for a number of reasons. For one, he can create a very grufty tone which I imagine would be perfect for Komrade Ushanka (and his mean, cynical attitude), and for another thing, he has had experience with relatives which have strong Eastern-European accents. He is also my ideal candidate for the voice of my other original character: Bearscak (who is also incidentally, Russian).

I drew up several phonetic templates to use for this animation. After researching how various animators – both professional and amateur – go about creating lip syncing pieces, I decided that making several mouth shapes which correspond to particular syllables. Examples of this would be “V,F / CH, Z, G / L, TH” which each share a particular shape. Once they had been scanned in, I edited the colours, contrasting the lighting on the images to make the sketch-lines darker. After all of that, it was time to get onto the editing process. After recording the various mini-segments of speech which I intended to use in the final piece, I imported them into the editing program I was using and matched each image to each syllable accordingly.

The subjects which he chose to speak about were generally all spontaneous / off the bat. At first, I suggested he say something to do with Russia, just to get a feel for the accent. All of the commentary about Justin Bieber and teen drinking were all his idea. The vodka comment may seem to be like a bit of stereotyping, but to be honest, it does actually contain some truth from Beiscak’s perspective (His grandmother’s cure-it-all was a dab of vodka back in the day). I really like the comment about Komrade was allegedly created by Putin. I will definitely keep that idea in mind, but I may very well extend it back to another famous Russian figure such as Stalin or one of the Tsars. That should make for some interesting back story!

Interesting fact: the opening ditty which I have used for this animation is performed by myself. I’ve played the keyboards for a number of years, and although I’m not the most skilled performer in the world (nor can I realy read sheet music) I’m quite good at picking up a general tune and playing about with it. The opening jingle is a simplified, light-hearted sounding rendition of the Soviet National Anthem. I opted for “light-hearted” because I felt that it creating a welcoming atmosphere for viewers, and gave the impression that the video would be a humorous one (which I hope people find it is!). Parody music generally tends to be seen as humorous anyway.

I watched a few videos of various people on Youtube performing the song – whether it be on piano or otherwise – and tried to pick up some inspiration. One particularly fascinating video featured a Chinese pianist playing an incredibly dramatic self-written score of the song. His skills were fantastic! After creating this musical contribution, I decided that I would take out some time when I next have access to a keyboard, and write opening jingles for my other original characters.

I hope you enjoy my efforts on this short animation. I hope you come to like Komrade Ushanka – as well as my other characters – as you follow my progress throughout this project and others in the future! Watch this space, people!

Wozzat Animation Test

I created this animation test, with the intention of coming to a general idea about: how many frames I would need to draw / positioning I would need to make / characters personality on screen and so on. This is all for my one-minute film piece that I am intending to create, adopting the rotoscope technique for its creation. This, is an original character “Wozzat” (created by A. Beiscak and myself) – a fluffy ball of incomprehensible evil. The name “Wozzat” is essentially the slurred equivalent of the term “What’s that?”, because it’s a widely used term amongst other characters of this “series”, because he is a nondescript creature, and people never find out what exactly he is within the frame of the story.

Anyway, this animation consists of 30 frames, all drawn in about half an hour one evening, and animated within roughly the same amount of time. I’m getting much quicker at drawing individual frames, thanks to the light-box I purchased just before Christmas. I included both ends of this character’s emotional spectrum: happy / adorable, and of course angry / evil / wicked. Because this is a rough test, I didn’t colour the character. When I get chance again, I will do a colour test animation for this character (once I have all of the raw film footage done and out of the way).

The photo background is my own hand. The reason that I chose to place the character here, for this animation, was so that I could get an idea of scale and size comparison between the fictional character and the actors I will be using. Obviously, getting a consistent, and realistic scale throughout the film will be hard to achieve, and there may be a few continuity errors…but overall I believe that it will all come together well, and create an enjoyable end product.

I chose to use the accompanying music: “Mind Heist” by Zack Hemsey (from the film Inception) because it has since gained connotations of the epic / the impending doom scenarios which made the film successful. The music has become a popular choice amongst amateur film editors across the internet, on sites such as Youtube. It manages to put across the idea of this character being horrendously evil, together with the expression and choice of camera movement (tilt and close-up). It brings focus to the character, and emphasizes the point that “Wozzat” is a threat, and not a cuddly little creature.

Komrade Ushanka – Lip Sync Test #01

In order to gain more of a grasp and understanding of lip syncing and how it works, I decided to create a very basic test with the phonetic frames I drew up to use for this assignment. I came up with several phrases which Komrade Ushanka would say, and animated to those accordingly. As you can see in the corner, there are various letters and syllables jotted down. I scanned in each sheet for the lip syncing at A4 size, so the memo notes I had written down are also included in the animation. I used several references from different sites on the internet in order to create a decent list of syllables and mouth shapes which I could apply to my work.

Rather than draw out mouth shapes for each letter of the alphabet – which would have taken far too long and been far too confusing – I chose syllables, because they were easier to group together (such as V,F / L,TH / CH, D, Z etc.). This of course did not come without its difficulties – many letters and sounds consisting of the same shape were used one after another in a sequence, so I had to use alternate mouth shapes from my list with similar corresponding ones. In all, this was definitely a helpful venture. I will apply the knowledge I have gained from this experiment in my final pencil test.