Batu - Timeline Character

I was so excited to do the timeline assignment, I had this idea since last summer even before starting school. I always wanted to do a mongolian pig for a few reasons:

1. Mongolian clothing is absolutely beautiful. For example their deel. The smorgasbord of colours, the designs, the patterns, the shapes (especially their boots!), everything about their attire is just gorgeous.

2. I wanted to attempt to design a character based on a culture rather than just a profession. I loved doing so much visual research as well as cultural research when doing this project. 

3. Pigs can have such a variety of looks especially when they get fat, so I wanted to work with that.

Anyway enough chitchat, meet Batu the mongolian ruler:

This was so much fun to do! The main theme behind this was "literally power hungry". 

The baby one is my favourite, getting that chubby asian baby look was actually pretty difficult and went through several iterations. The most difficult to design was the teenager, sometimes he looked too young and sometimes too old. At one point my teacher told me to try out and design him as the typical lanky awkwardly proportioned teenager but it ruined his silhouette and the gaining fat look. 

For his design I made made sure there were some consistent visual motifs that still managed to change such as the shape of his nose and the design of his belt and shoes. I also intentionally avoided some typical imagery associated with each stage such as diapers and pacifiers for the baby and a cane for the senior so that I relied on the design of the character to tell his age rather than props.

Here are some roughs and other doodads:

Mongolian script is written vertically and looks beautiful. I did attempt to make the name look like it was in mongolian script but it proved too difficult and somewhat hard to read. I based the border on a recurring pattern I saw while researching their culture and clothing.

Here's some patterns that I used. The top is for the hat and the one under it is the belt design for the adult. I don't know why blogger decided to make this dark when uploading, no matter what settings I change before saving.

Rough sketches:

Yes, the teen did have a dirt 'stache but I was told to get rid of it because it made him look older.

A tilted head version that I ended up using.

There's about 5 poses in this drawing.

And here are some very early research and design concepts:

La Mer

A silly little short film I made for an extremely simple project that was just supposed to use 10 camera moves in after effects, but I love after effects and I've been wanting to create the dream animation I had in mind for my jellyfish animation... so I finally delivered:

Flash Character Rig

We had to make a cut out character and rig it on Flash then animate it. The main idea behind it was "Space boy's first day at school." 

His name is Slick.

I cheated a lot with the rig so that I didn't have to align joints that much, so I gave him gloves that end at the elbows, an epaulet, and plain black legs. I found designing and rigging the character to be pretty fun! It was the animating part that I struggled with the most, it was very clunky.

Regardless of quality, I still had fun making this silly little animation. Credit to Sarah Kieley for giving me the idea for the ending.

Hyena Walk

Gah, could be better, but there really wasn't enough time to do a good job on this. But look it walks!

From this I learned that hyena's are related to felines instead of canines and that they walk pretty differently than other 4 legged animals. One side moves at the same rather than the typical front feet alternating with the back feet. Its body also has a bit of follow through action and even my teacher had some difficulty figuring out when certain parts go up and down. It was also kind of easy since the head and tail barely move at all.

Here it is:

Genie Head Turn

I disliked this assignment, it was too technical. I also didn't like the fact that we had to use an existing character and base it off their model sheets when in reality 2D CHARACTERS ARE ALWAYS VISUALLY CHEATING. So essentially, we had to break the model and somewhat redesign it anyway so it can work for this aggravating assignment. 

Take Genie from Aladdin for example. Fun flexible character, Al Hirschfeld inspired design (reason why I chose it), loosely drawn, easy right?

Not quite, I restarted this head turn 3 times. Genie, had some cheats that made it really difficult, the most obvious one being he rarely has a neck area. Giving him one like in Kingdom Hearts makes him look really awkward. I reverted back to how he's normally drawn without a neck during the "meow" part. I was able to keep the cheat they use with the nose always overlapping the lip though. The other difficult part of this assignment was that Genie is rarely shown in any other view other than 3/4 front, so I had to figure out and make up a few of the views.

Here's the rotation:

In the end, although I disliked this assignment, I think the rotation turned out decently. Shoulders are wonky and I admit I just made sure they were "okay" enough, I started to get tired of this assignment the longer I worked on it. Heck the majority of my reading week was spent on this...I had no break during break week.

Hula Hippo

For character design we had to create keyframes for a scene with a character interacting with something.

Here are the roughs that I captured to see if it worked. You can see how rough I drew and how some drawings were ruined by clean up. I really need to get better at clean up.

Here are are scans of a couple poses I liked.

To see how difficult it is for me clean up, behold how I normally draw an animated sequence:

This one was the most difficult because it just captured the gesture and shapes and proportions. I had to figure out the details of the hands, the hoop, the feet.

This one was also pretty rough, but I went back and clarified some parts of it before I went to clean up.

And below is the original page where I came up with the idea along with some hippo studies and early character design ideas.