Month: January 2025

The second topic I am keen on talking about in this blog segment is one that I have been researching even before this assignment came around and it is fashion. It is more specifically the crossover and links between fashion and animation.
I have been aware of fashion animator in a studio environment as a role of possibility for quite some time, yet when going through job descriptions it seems that the expectation for the role is more technically focused, leaving the artistic side of it to other team members.
Based on that I have been thinking of potentially going the freelance route and directing, pre-producing and animating all together, which would allow more space for me to make artistic decisions as well as execute the animation in a smaller scale than a studio of course.

Since I would state the human form is my biggest inspiration, it feels instinctive for me to gravitate towards the art of fashion. I am fascinated by how a piece of clothing can complement, enhance, change or just highlight bodies.

In fact, I feel what I love about drawing, animation and fashion are all the same things – shape, flow, gesture, fluidity. All of which to me translates to dynamics, energy and liveliness build in (in my case 2D art and animation) a flat drawing that becomes alive and if done well shows the deep understanding and craftsmanship of the artist. I just love all of this, it brings me great joy to consume and create such content.

I am yet to find the exact technique of intertwining animation with fashion that actually fulfils my expectations of a satisfying final piece. I have tried animating designs of mine in the past in my usual 2D (advert style for example) and I always reach the same conclusion – that 3D animation would visually do much better justice to a project of this sort.

However, as I have been looking into trying stop motion as a way of preserving the realism of textures and colours of fabrics. I am looking forward to potentially exploring this in Unit 3 as well as after graduation.

I watched a dozen of videos and can definitely say I have improved my overall understanding of the role with certain aspects of it surprising me. For example, I did not realise how important an accurate reference for scale is in backgrounds and how difficult it is to determine the correct sizes of objects/characters when just eyeballing it, no matter how trained one’s visual library is.

Another thing I was happy to learn is that Layout Artists basically set up a clean, structured and precisely designed foundation for the animators to make the end shot will work in practice work the way the storyboard team and writers expect it to. I found out that Layout is a rather important connective role in studios that seems to go unnoticed and unappreciated as a lot of people are not aware of what it entails or that it even exists, me included before deciding to research it in depth.

My conclusion on whether or not it is a role I see myself in is that I would gladly try it as I am sure it will provide a lot of worthy experience and insight on artists who i would I probably find myself working closely to if I was to be in the role of a storyboard artist or animator (as these are the roles I have been interested in in the past). However, I am of the opinion that long term, it would not fulfil my desire to draw/animate characters which is truly my passion when it comes to this industry.

Nonetheless, I am more than happy to have become more competent in this topic as I am sure my character skills can only improve once having a better grasp of the environment around them.

This is my first blog post as part of Unit 2 of my UAL MACA degree and is meant to explore my findings and research evaluations on the Entertainment industry.

When thinking about where I want to go in my career after graduation it always starts with my core interests and passions. I got into animation in the first place as I loved drawing the human form in motion. Therefore, how expressive drawing could highlight beautiful nuances that go unnoticed in live action was what I wanted to focus on portraying.

Because of my fixation on characters, animating them felt as a natural progression. As I began my university studies I became acquainted with the many roles that go into the creation of an animated production.

The first role that I decided to research for this blog is 2D Layout Artist. I wanted to stray away from what I already knew a lot about and gain knowledge in an area of the industry that was foreign to me.

As I already know I enjoy the pre-production side of filmmaking, I figured learning more about environments, perspective and spacial dynamics would be useful for me whether or not I end up determining that Layout art is for me.

I first started by reading articles and watching videos of professional explaining their role.
One particular YouTube channel that I liked and felt provided a plethora of information was:

https://youtube.com/@dongchang?si=SMTFiQ4DYFF7o5iI