AX1111 - Model making and introduction to life drawing, with Steve Dee

After my research was finished I started doing some initial designs for characters.

This was my first design that I did. It is a female kitchen brush, the bristles are meant to look like a skirt. This design was just practice for character design and making products look like people.

Once I had my research and a few ideas with the group we spoke about different story lines and came up with 3 main ideas. Once we had these Ideas we looked at which would be best and worked on that one the most.
We did design some characters for the other ideas just so we could look at which one would be the best. 

This ice skating ring idea. 
These ideas were for a Christmas themed idea, I like the reindeer made out of sausages. However, I think this idea would be hard to make, and not very interesting.

The superhero idea. 

For this idea I did a basic villain character, too look at what characters we would need for this idea. 

This was my villain "mr chop" I think it was pretty simple and I didn't think that the story would be very interesting because most cleaning products are portrayed as superheros. 

We decided not to do this idea.

The Halloween Idea.

This was our 3rd idea, we thought it would be a good idea to do kitchen safety instead of cleaning. We also wanted to do it for children, so we needed cute characters which the children would like. We decided to base it on Halloween because it's October and we thought it would be cute to have products wearing little Halloween costumes.
For this idea I made some character sheets. 

We might not use all of these characters, but I think we will definitely use Dr Frankinbrush.

 Once I had drawn my characters I developed them more to look at different ways I could make them look. This was the Bleach monster. I looked at what colours would look the most dangerous such as reds and yellows. I also looked at different eye shapes to decided which was the most menacing. I toyed with the idea of him having "goo" coming from his head. But I think it would have been hard to find the right material to use. |
This character was Designed and made by Frances Humphries

 This was my cheese grater character. I think he was the simplest to draw. However, it was quite difficult to develop him because he is such a simple character. I looked at different eye colours and shapes, and decided that the square shape would be the best, so it would be easier to make.
This character was designed by Frances Humphries and made by Matthew Harrison.

 Mr Frankin brush was my main character to develop. I had to think about the making quite a lot while developing this character because I had to use a real brush which meant I was quite restricted. I looked at different colours and hairs, which if I changed the hair colours I'd paint the bristles. I think the most important part about this character is his mouth. Even though I looked at the eyes a lot, I decided I would give him normal "googly" eyes to had a bit of cuteness in. Because of this I had to focus on his mouth so that his changing expressions where clear.
This character was designed and made by Frances Humphries

This was just a title page for the Halloween idea. It's got the first simple story board on it. We later developed this storyboard more in-depth.
Designed/Drawn by Frances Humphries
Storyboard written by Frances Humphries, Matthew Harrison and Gemma Rickers.

The first model I made was Dr Frankinbrush, We bought a normal dish brush, and then I glued gloogly eyes onto the top of it, and the sequin to create the made scientist look. We also made different shaped mouths out of felt which we could change so that we could lip sync it. I think this worked really well even though we only did 4 different mouth shapes I think it lip sync well and looked really good.

We used felt, pipe cleaners and googly eyes on a lot of the characters to give it a kind of theme. Only Dr Frankinbrush and Count Spatula had different mouth shapes.
We painted a large back bored as the set using normal paints. I designed and drew the image on the background using the original Frankenstein film sets as inspiration. Me and Gemma then painted all of the set in dark dingy and spooky colours.

Once the set was finished I made the monster Bleach. I used a normal bleach bottle and stuck on simple paper eyes. I then took the labels off and drew my own spooky labels with a stitched together theme. I also used green and red colours to show bright dangerous colours. I also used two drawing pins stuck into the neck to look like bolts. The last think we did to the Bleach was cut the mouth out so we could have him spewing bleach all over.

The other model I made was the spider sponge which is a small background character but is quite cute. I made him by cutting a washing up sponge in half and threading black pipe cleaners through it as legs. I then threaded string though so he would hang as if on a web, I think this was quite effective. The last thing I did was stick on googly eyes. I think it looks very cute.

The set we made was pretty simple, we just painted a back board and then made 2 electricity conductors out of card and ping pong balls. These were simple to make and looked quite effective. The only other prop we used is the red curtain which we just made out of cloth. 

All 3 of us worked together on the animating, Matthew Harrison set up the lighting and controlled the camera while me and Gemmer Rickers moved the characters, we decided that we would move certain characters each, I controlled the Bleach, Forks and Cheesegrator Ghost. This worked really well because we could keep track of what had been moved and what needed moving. 

Once the animating was done all of the pictures needed putting together and the whole film editing. Me and Gemma Rickers used Sony Vegas pro 10 and 12 to edit the animation. Gemma did the lip syncs for count spatula at the beginning and end. While I pieced the frames together in the middle adding effects and timings. Matthew Harrison found the background music and sounds effects which I then added in at the rigtht times. Gemma recorded and edited the voice audio and then added it to the film in the correct places and times to the lip sync. The last thing I did was mask the cheese grator at the end so he could pop on screen with count spatula. I think the masking looks quite good and runs smoothly.

I really liked working with Matthew Harrison and Gemma Rickers. I think we worked as a team really well and developed our ideas together in interesting ways and then helped each other with what ever we needed. I think the animation as turned out well because of the effort everyone in the team put in. I enjoy working in a team because you can discus ideas and opinions so the work can be made better though critical development. 

In conclusion. I think that this project has gone really well and the animation has turned out great, I'm very happy with it.