Formative

Today we had formative with Jared in which we graded ourselves and evaluated our progress so far on the project. It was a good chance to find out what was lacking from our blogs so we can rectify it for when summative comes around. I did fairly well all in all, achieving goods in most areas except research - as I have rarely compared it to existing work of others. It's wierd because on the last project I did alot of that - posting up good reference images and films we should aspire to etc. However with this unit I have kind of forgotten all about that and just got on with documenting our production. As of today I will take more time to study other work and post any relevent information, designs, or films I come across that could help us or maybe even influence us. In fact here's a few inspirations I should have posted up weeks ago.......

Flushed Away

Aardman & Dreamworks collaborated to make this CG feature length film about a rats adventure down in the sewers. They attempted to re create the Wallace and Gromit style of animtion but using 3D software rather than plastercine. In my opinion they were successful in copying Aardmans character design styles i.e wide looped mouths, shiny black noses, square teeth etc. However the animation did not look stop motion enough. There was not enough jerks and fast movements to convince the audience it had been hand made and animated frame by frame. Because of this smooth animation it became simply another CG movie which had characters that happened to look similar to that of W&G. Another major flaw in their attempts to re create Aardmans stop mo style was their lack of texture! I don't think I saw one fingerprint, misplaced blob, or even a wrinkle smudge on the characters throughout the film. Everything was highly polished, vibrant in colour, and seemed to be imaculately smooth. It was as if no hand had ever touched the clay models! Oh but wait, their CG aren't they, of course. They should have put more effort into recreating what Aardman achieve by using their bare hand, slight subtle obscurities in the plastercine, pencil jabs, smudges, blotches of colour. Nothings perfect with stop mo. Unfortunately this let them down.

Notice the difference in clarity? For once we don't want the polished, sharp, completely smooth look. We want the finger pushed, wobbly edged, smudged look which makes claymation so unique. We hope to better Dreamworks in recreating this style!

Deadline
A short CG film produced by Aardman a while back using Maya. I love the humour in it, and the character designs. This is another example of an attempt to recreate of stop mo animation. In my opinion this one was slightly more successful in achieving that than flushed away. It had more jerky movements and flappy poses. The textures are slightly more drab and unsmooth aswell. It went on to become a series called "The Presentators" on Nickelodeon. Getting there....

According to the Aardman CG department who worked on the shorts, they were not simply mimicking the look of the company's traditional clay-model animation with "The Presentators." Rather, trying to apply digital techniques to enhance the appeal, timing, and strong design for which Aardman's claymation films are known.
An excuse maybe?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbm5HJ9cohY

Here is a short interesting article about the series..

http://www.cgw.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=CAAC173059C44AAA84B96E0FD53EA3E8C44AAA84B96E0FD53EA3E8

Creature Comforts

Of course other typical inspirations from the likes of Aardman would be Creature Comforts, which actually is very relevent to our film as it deals with animals. I was interested in how they portrayed a gorilla in claymation, was there an episode involving a Gorilla? Yep....

Very well made and simplistic. In fact the series was made using claymation techniques so they got the look spot on lol. Maybe we should just make ours with clay? Instead of using a computer!!!!