Month: March 2024

As a person who naturally likes working in pre-production I have gone deep in storyboarding, sketching and exploring visually this term. Here is some of this:

I was assigned to work on Bob’s second year project. Communication between us was clear and productive and so were the roles I was given.

Actually I had the chance to choose what I wanted to work on of a few options given to me by Bob. His structured and detailed explanation was very appreciated.

I chose to do concept design with focus on characters. There were two main characters in the storyline: a robot cook and a kid. I worked on some more defined visual concepts of them, turnarounds, expression sheets and played around with poses and thumbnails.

I would say my task was definitely relevant to the industry.

Something that I could improve on would be working with color. I feel like my strong suit is structure and graphic looking art and so I will definitely benefit from more color studies.

I was given the freedom to make small changes and came up with these suggestions that I also shared with Bob:

“

• adding eyebrows to the robot character may make it easier to animate facial expressions
• if you choose to use the kid character with spiky pigtails I think it would be cool if they move as follow through as an extension of facial expressions
• similarly to the previous point I think adding forced perspective to robot may also be better read when making facial expressions or poses (if it fits the artstyle that you want to go for) “

I found the experience fun and enjoyable, yet educational. It was useful to take a peak at 2nd years process and learn from this.

Additionally, I am also quite happy I got to practice my perspective skills that we had just talked about in Vanessa’s class.

This task definitely had me thinking of my 2nd year project and what I could do. I will most definitely bring the organisation of files and folders with me for future tasks as I liked the way Bob had that structured.
Another thing I observed and learned from was attention to detail when it came to props which I imagine will be quite handy when progressing with the project. I got the impression that story-wise everything was well thought out.

I am attaching the work I did:

While doing research for my World Animation presentation I was introduced to many unique techniques and mediums to create animation with. The choice what or who to actually present about was not an easy one. I was well aware that i would have loved to talk about somebody whose practice has a personal value for me. After all I picked Theodore Ushev as my topic case. He is a Bulgarian born animator, residing and practicing in Canada in present times.

What left me compelled by his artistry was the creativity he seemed to show in choosing his materials and techniques, as well as the heartwarming fact that his pieces are often times a rendition of Bulgarian folklore tales.

Theo has had major commercial success in the animation and film industry as a whole. He is most known for his 2016 short film Blind Vaysha who was nominated for an Oscar. However, my true favourite production of his is Blood Manifesto. A less mainstream, yet incredibly powerful film that explores the self. Besides the deep motives, what also makes it stand out is the medium. Ushev uses his own blood as one would use paint/watercolor.