3D Interests

Kung Fu Panda

What i liked about the Kung Fu Panda animation is when it comes to the fighting scenes it is captured as it is extremely fast paced, making some of the movements resemble human Martial arts. I also think its clever idea how the character designers have created the actual animal species and used their everyday body movements to symbolize their own fighting style.

Maya Evaluation

Maya Evaluation

Twitchy the Squirrel

What really makes Hoodwinked funny is the squirrel, twitchy. Whats makes this individual so hilarious are the 3D effects used to stretch and squash his original face and body out of proportion creating the massive hyperactive moments. The sound also plays a great part to this character it as the fast paced high pitched voice fitting extremely well with the movements. Without this certain personality in the film i think Hoodwinked's ratings would not be as great.

penguin animation

The interesting thing about this short cartoon is that i think the designers have created the whole thing from using a 3D animation program but have also added a colours filter over the top of it all. This use of the overlay style gives of the idea that the whole thing has been drawn by hand and animated that way like a stop motion.

Digital Art-The Reaper

The artist who produced this is a digital design is called Jason Mitsios as a more recent piece of digital design, the effects of this image are very impressive and from the first glance of this i actually thought it was a real photo. The scale of it all is perfect and the dark colours of the reaper character blend very well with the background giving of a superb gloomy Gothic look to it. I think it works well because it is a dark picture the white from the hand, scythe and the clouds stands out more to the human eye.

Help Island

When exploring the world of second life i came across the help island for beginners. Here i could meet other new starters and talk to them. what i also found quite amusing is that i could visit a free items store and collect features like cars, wings, dances, martial arts and other different movements. By adding them to my inventory i could customise my character a lot more.

Table experiment

Learning how to create simple objects using the tools table i created a table and a flag post. Here i have twisted and shaped the legs of the table and experimented with the textures in the inventory to find the different patternings. Afterwards i linked all of the different parts together and added them to my menu as an object.

Virtual Environments

Our new brief is based mainly in the 3D world of second life. For the first day of the project we explored some of the different islands what people have created like The Collective, Space station island, etc.

Space Station view 1

Space Station view 2

The New Charcters

When it came to the movement of the worm, instead using my storyboard idea of arching the back and sliding forwards, i have kept the technique more simple. Similar to the movements in the game WORMS 3D.

My new idea

Keeping this design more simple and to cut any major movements out i decided to completely change my characters completely. for this idea the only animation used will be based mainly on the the worm as it slides across the floor. Also both characters eyes and eyelids will be a big feature in the story.

Second storyboard idea

First storyboards

After drawing the first two storyboard ideas i realised that when it came to actually animating them in maya they would be too complicated as they both included walking movements, so i will have to make my next idea a bit more basic.

First maya creation

This fat guy creation is the first idea i thought while first practicing on maya.

Smirnoff Advert

What i like about this advert is the way the creators have showed purity in their own way. Dragging all of the junk and waste out of the sea, giving of the effect that without it all in the polluting the water would be see through clean and perfect. They have used this idea to symbolize how that Smirnoff vodka has been filtered and drained to only make the purist drink.

Transformers effects

What really makes the Transformers films so enjoyable to watch is obviously the massive use of special effects. The parts i think are completly mind blowing and are most impressive are the transforming scenes, changing from a car, transform to the actual robot. The team of people who create this effect most have an amazing imagination as they must have to think about each fold and rotation to make one form become another.

Roy Lichtenstein

Sweet Dreams Baby


As never really been a big fan of fine art ive always liked the pop art era. one artist i especilly like is the canvas painter Roy Lichtenstein as a lot of his work is based around random shots of storyboard comics. When he creates his graphical pieces he blows them up, still including the same features like speech bubbles and noise effects showing impact in the story. What i really clever is that he uses the Ben-day dots to alter the dark and lighter tones of colours. By using this technique he still keeps the colours bold and attractive.

Bombardier beer Ad

I saw these two posters quite recently at bus stops advertising the bombardier beer and found them to be a complete piss take but yet quite a clever idea. looking at England stereotypically from a foreign perspective this poster is like a massive caricature capturing many of the features of what really makes England. Starting with the main qualities such as the queen Victoria cartoon, the British bulldog, the tea pot and cricket uniform i think its great that the posters advertise the beer as if it is part of England's identity too and is something else to be proud of.

Back Tattoo

While looking for a tattoo for myself i came across this back piece. Similar to the yakuza gang style, i find this tat to be apsoulutly superb as the design of it all is so compact and filled in with a great amount of detail. Its like the image itself can tell a story just by looking at it.

Spawn Animated Series

While searching through YouTube i just started watching the animated series of Spawn. At first i thought of it was just going to being a low budget cartoon as I could only find it for sale as region 1 DVD, and never really heard about before but after seeing more of it i found it to be fantastic and quite addictive. Like the film, the ideas and characters come from the comic book strips and the cartoon brings them to life extremely well as it still keeps the dark evil style to it. it reminds me of the old batman cartoons with a lot more adult material featued in it as there is a greater amount swearing included in it and the volence scenes are much more graphic and gorry.

Fundamentals of Interactive Media Evaluation

When given the brief for the interactive media unit we were given a choice to pick a fairy tale story from either Hans Christen Anderson or Bothers Grimm tales to base it on. My first idea was to base my project on the classic tale Rumpelstiltskin as I have heard the story many times when I was a child. For the few weeks after starting the unit leading up to Christmas we were given lessons in how to create scripting on Flash. As I felt little more confident using Flash from the animation unit I was quite interested in learning how to create simple buttons and games. This soon changed as the coding became much more complicated. I hated the fact that how one miner scripting error could alter everything you had typed in and to make one simple control or movement an absolute nightmare to create. As always what I did enjoy about the beginning of the unit is designing the characters for the Rumpelstiltskin story as I could hand draw them and just imagine them as what I thought them when I was younger. Instead of drawing up a storyboard I just wrote down my ideas for what I would of liked to include in my interactive tale. After looking at a few examples of games on the Internet such as crappy cat I decided to keep my thoughts simple, as I wanted to design the game mainly for a younger audience. These would just be easy multiple choices and click on buttons so that the story could be followed and understood.
After Christmas break I soon forgot a lot of the experimental scripting work and at times I tended to avoid working on this unit and focused on the others. When it came to continuing I separated the body parts of my characters into layers so I could create movement. Overall I do feel that I had spent too much time on this process, making to many parts complicated and really were not needed. I feel I should of focused more on the interactive side than the animation.
As I seriously struggled with the scripting I tried to create the backgrounds and animation work first to get out of the way. After getting the idea from the TV series Phone Jacker to keep things basic I decided that I would just use writing in speech bubbles and flapping mouths to tell the story. Instead of having voice sounds I would just half a medieval tune in the background repeating itself. When it eventually came to the coding I found it extremely confusing and became frustrated just over miner problems. At numerous times I needed help and felt like I was going nowhere with it. A huge difficulty was when creating a movement symbol and then afterwards trying to figure out how to make it into an interactive button. Although I encountered many problems, eventually I did learn how to create certain buttons and script them to go to different scenes. However I wouldn’t really like to continue interactive media in the near future as I found it very testing and lost interest to quickly.