Today has been a rather hectic day, a lot of things have been done, but the first half of the day was unrelated to the animation-work. We are throwing a New years eve party tomorrow so there was a lot of shopping and preparation needed.
A bit stressed out at the moment, I feel like I should be working more since we have a lot of work to do in this module..
I managed to edit together the reference-video for the "sing & dance"-task today though..
That calmed me down a bit!

I had close to half an hour of reference shots to go through, but 10 of those had an unfortunate camrea-angle.. Or to be honest, I did not remember to stand at the same place while I shot it, so I had to do an additional shoot from another angle to get enough reference material to chose from. But now I know that I should mark a "acting-spot" for where I should stand, and hopefully I'll remember that for the next shoot! Hehe..

I edited together pieces from 4 different shots for this reference-video and I also kept the original 30mins in case I need to look at some more when I start animating. I usually en up doing my reference this way because I find small interesting details in different shots that are more appealing than I find in the shots where the whole thing is being acted out.

The way I do this is by looking through the original clip over and over and take notes where I find things I like. It tends to be quite a lot of sequences the first time around, so I need to watch it again to eliminate some of them.
Here's an image showing the process:



After the third "round" I had my favourite sequences and I took the footage into Premiere and edited tem together, added sound and frame count.

Here is my reference for the "sing & dance"-task:



I've also done some sketching over the last couple of days and here is an assembly of the ones I liked best:



These are inspired from some of the things I've seen on TV and so on lately.

I also saw a short film today called "The Gruffalo's child", based on a children's book by Julia Donaldson:



(Piture taken from; http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/dec/14/the-gruffalos-child)

It's a 3D animated short that aired on BBC1 on Christmas Day. A lovely little film that I just adored! Fantastic character-designs and beautiful environment and mood in the film.

The animation style was nice, it was subtle and realistic.
-no big cartoon-like motions.
Even though I usually prefer the "cartoony" animation style, this style was more suiting to the film.

It's presented almost like a fairytale and everything the narrator says rhymes. A really nice way to tell the story.

There was also a lot of emotional scenes, and especially a good sense of fear through good acting. They really made it clear that the main character, the Gruffalo's child was a indeed a child. She was curious and brave, but also scared of the things surrounding her in the forest.
I enjoyed it a lot - very inspirational!

Another interesting thing was that I saw Sabrina Schmid (my "Creative Animation"-tutor from last year) credited as the Production Manager for this project, and that was really fun too see!

Well, tomorrow is New years eve so I won't be blogging as I am hosting a party.
- Happy New Year everybody!