Photography Induction!

Shutter Speed

Having a slow shutter speed makes photographs seem blurred as the shutter takes a longer time to open and close and catches more light. While the lens stays open the action still continues so this makes the photo blurred, this can be used on purpose for effect.

Having a fast shutter speed almost freezes the action and makes everything look static and not blurred. This is usually what is popularly used as this allows for more detail instead of the objects being lost in the blur.

ISO

The ISO of an image is basically how sensitive the camera is to light, the higher the ISO the more sensitive it is and the lower the ISO the less sensitive. I have played around with different ISOs in different lighting to get either a dark or correctly exposed images depending on what ISO I have used at the time.

Low ISO in natural light 

High ISO in natural light

Aperture (Depth of Field)

The aperture is how open or closed the lens it, and it is measured in f numbers. The higher the f number the smaller the lens is close and the lower the f number the more open the lens will be. Using aperture you can create depth of field as well as creating little depth of field depending on what type of effect you want to create. Below I have used aperture to create a depth of field by using a low f number and this focuses the lens on the nearest subject and puts the rest out of focus.

Effective Presentation Tips

We had a seminar about how our presentations should be and how they can be successful and I took some valuable notes I'm going to share! This was a really useful thing to think about and discuss mainly because as a student I have been made to give presentations to my classmates since high school and I feel like in this time you can actually pick up some bad habits and by going over this topic it can help this. I know for a fact that I have definitely given presentations where I used bullet points and clip art!!

• A presentation should be a communication of your story or journey and is a vehicle for sharing ideas, thoughts, concepts or a resolution of a project.
• It should convey meaningful information concisely.
• You need to know your audience!
• Assume that your audience knows nothing or very little about your work.
• Inform your audience about what you're doing.
• Explain who you are and be yourself.
• Explain your role and what you have done in your role.
• Explain how you got to where you are or how you plan to get there.
• Explain how you will move forward in your project or topic.
• It's not about you.
• Always know your subject and keep it simple!
• Don't use clip art - unprofessional.
• Use imagery so that you can get to your point easier.
• Avoid using bullet points (Unlike this blog post)
• Slides should be should be visible from 8ft.
• Be enthusiastic and keep the attention of your audience!

Antman - Animation in Film

In the new film Antman it's really clear how animation can be used in big blockbusters to create a scene that would never have been able to be brought to life without it. I found this article in a magazine about how they went through the process of animating lots of little ants, but they are made to look a similar size to Antman to give the illusion of him shrinking down to their size. I liked this example of animation in film as it shows how important animation can be in all mediums and how it is no restricted to one type of medium. I also liked it because I feel that the more out there the narrative the more the need for animation is needed in films today and this is a great example of how film and animation can work really well together to create quite a realistic narrative. 

Walter Peregoy

I found another concept artist that has previously worked for Disney called Walter Peregoy and I really loved his work, below is some of his paintings for 101 Dalmatians. I really love concept art for animations as they really establish the overall feel and colour palette that will be used. I particularly like Peregoy's works because his scenes are not only beautiful, but they create the meaning behind a scene and when watching 101 Dalmatians you can tell that the animators really took Peregoy's work into consideration and made it come to life. I also love his use of colour here as he uses lots of blues and greys to create a gloomy and dull meaning without the need for anything else.

Oculus - Technology

New technology is constantly coming out but I found this new piece of equipment that is soon to be released, which as someone who is studying animation this is something that can impact the industry. This piece of technology is something that is for video games and it is a controller that makes visual reality games feel even more real by making the player feel that the controller is actually their hand. I feel that this is a major step into the future as games will become more and more hands-on and this could possibly even catch on in other digital industries such as animation. What I like about this is that it's something that's different and an advancement in technology and it leaves new possibilities in the ways audiences consume products. Below is a video I found on the Oculus and I found it really interesting to see how the people are hands on with the equipment.

Introducing Oculus Story Studio from Story Studio on Vimeo.

Mary Blair

Mary Blair was a designer for Disney studios back in the 1950s and her work inspired many of the studio's productions due to her great use of colour. I really liked her work when looking at it and it really stood out to me while reading the book CartoonModern, I liked her as her work was well laid out and had a magical feel to it. The way Blair colours her work is one of the main reasons it stood out to me and se creates different lightings within the colour choices she uses. Below the painting of the horses and carriage picking up Cinderella is glowing in the painting and this is present in the final animation, her use of colour and design really have helped shape the famous animations produced at Disney.

When looking at her beautiful concept art for planning the different animations, it's clear that the final animations have taken a lot of inspiration from her visions and this is something that is very inspiring about her as an artist.

I feel that even though she did not directly animate at Disney, her works have still influenced the final animations and I haven't thought about this as a role in animation before so it really inspired me.

Video Camera Induction!

Below is the checklist to follow:

BOOKINGS

1. Check all items are present
2. Check for any damage
3. Make sure you know and record the return time

CAMERA SET-UP

1. Make sure the battery is charged!
2. Format the memory card
3. Set-up video setting to high quality ([1920[[25 ALLI)
4. Check the sound is on

CAMERA OPERATION

1. Set the iso to 100 (Highest quality)
2. Set the shutter speed to 50 (Using the wheel on top)
3. Set the iris aperture to wide open which is f.4.0 (Press the *)
4. Set white balance to (K) Kelvin and change the colour temperature
5. Check the focus and zoom in using the set button to double check this

Photoshop Lesson 4 - Animating in Photoshop

Today I learnt how to use a video timeline in Photoshop to animate my own drawings. I decide to start off by doing something very basic and animated a ball bouncing around the screen, it could do with some tweaking but it was my first attempt.

Next, I played around with smart objects and made this one which is really simple and used images off Google to make it. I find that using video timelines are better to use as they speed up the process and puts in the in-betweens for you.

Who am I?

Living in a seaside tourist town of Blackpool there wasn't really much opportunity for me, unless I wanted to work at the Pleasure Beach serving chips. This made me think about what I wanted to do with my life and how I was determined to leave that place behind, it could be fun if you went there for a couple of days but after living your whole life there it's novelty kind of wears off. I loved art and film and after thinking for a long time I squashed them both together and came up with the art of animation. So, I began researching the different courses of animation, after ignoring my tutors and mentors at college for 2 years, and decided myself that I was going to go for it. I found Leeds College of Art at complete random and I had, had a few friends who were older tell me how great the city of Leeds was but obviously again I just ignored what they said. I watched the video on the website for LCA and it all looked so fun and seemed to have an awesome environment so I just had to go and see it for myself. I got on a train and headed for Leeds and as soon as I saw the place I knew that I wanted to live here, similarly I stepped into LCA and loved how the place stood out. I loved it so much that I didn't even bother going to see any other universities and my heart was set, so I when I got my offer I was completely over the moon.

Never have I really animated in my whole life unless you count silly stop-motion that I did from a young age as just a bit of fun and the odd flip book without even knowing what one was. Although all that is true I have always had a passion for the animated world, drawing characters from it and collecting DVDs, so I hope to learn how to inspire people the way that it has inspired me, mainly because animation can do things nothing else can. I hope to be able to create worlds and characters that are completely out of this one and have lots of fun on the way. Learning stop-motion would be one of the main things I would love to learn as I find that it's one of my favourite forms, but I have never drawn digitally in my life and this would be something I would also love to learn, as it will help me to expand my skills. Finally, that is why I am here, to expand my skills and learn from everyone and everything here and to come out at the end as who I really am.

I think I am the illustrative type,  I draw everything by hand and get too engulfed in it to the point where I find hours have flown by. On the other hand, I am also an oil painter which is one of my newer skills that I have found out only in college. I had never tried to oil paint before as they're pretty expensive and I'd never thought to try it before, to see I could do it was a surprise that I found out in the second year of college. I also have the skill of storytelling, so everyone tells me, which I think I picked up from my mum when I was younger as she's the best storyteller I know and is too good at keeping people's attention when telling a story. Skills are sometimes very hard to recognise and I feel that I haven't actually found all of mine yet as I haven't had the opportunity to find them yet. Studying media production for 4 years really helped me develop cinematography skills such as thinking about camera movement editing, pacing, and the purpose behind the framing. It also taught me to consider sound and how I can use it my advantage, such as making the audience think and feel a certain way without the need for dialogue, all of this I feel is a strength as it will help a lot when it comes to making my own animations.

I want to improve everything, which may sound a bit silly but it's true. I want to improve myself, my drawing skills, my range of skills, my social skills and my knowledge! I feel that if I strive to improve everything, even though impossible, that some things will get better along the way and I realise that I will never be perfect and that there is always room for improvement.

Evaluating my progress is something that is very important as without doing so I will never know whether or not I am progressing. There are multiple ways I could evaluate my progress, I could have a list of goals and see where I'm up to with them every now and then. I could maybe ask my peers about how they think I've progressed to get an outsider's view, as sometimes your own view can be different. Constantly comparing my work by keeping a portfolio would be a good method to use to identify my weaknesses and be able to work on them. Progress could not only mean developing my artistic skills but also my progress in being able to handle deadlines and work effectively each time I sit down to work on a project. To evaluate how I get better at this I could write down what tasks I have achieved each time and record this so that I can see if my work speed is gradually getting faster and more efficient. Finally, I could evaluate my progress by keeping a diary about my thoughts and feelings about certain techniques and see if I start to gain confidence in the things that I do and practice.

Photoshop Lesson 3

Creating Animations - Photoshop

Today I learnt how to use Photoshop in a different kind of way, I used to think that it was only for altering images but there's actually a way of making them move! First you have to turn on the 'Timeline' window found in the menus which brings up a new toolbar that you can use to make either a frame animation or a video animation. My first gif I made using the frame animation and before doing so I had to make sure my new file had the right presets, as you can see below so that it could be a video. By using layers of just different colours I was able to make colours flash one by one but it was very static, so by using the 'Tween' tool found in the timeline bar I could make the colours blend into each other by adding extra frames between them and therefore making a gradient effect.

Next, I got to animate a more realistic thing which was a sample from a game with lots of different layers. I animated this very similar to the way I did with the colours, frame by frame, and made some of the layers move on top of the background layers which stayed static to give the desired effect. To get quick movements it was best to get two frames and move the second one to the last position you want, after doing this then I used 'Tween' again to make a smooth movement. Notice that I've added 22 frames to the existing 2 frames so that the final animation will be 24fps, which is a good number to have. I cropped the image but remembered to have 'Delete Cropped Pixels' unticked so that layers can come on a off the screen in the cropped image. Finally, I exported the animation as a gif and left it as it was apart from changing the percentage so that I was able to control how much of the frame can be seen on websites ect.

Photoshop Lesson 2

In our second Photoshop lesson today I learnt some things that I hadn't come across before. As a very casual photoshop user I didn't know how useful masking could be when editing images! We took an image of a character and was able to change and edit the way he looked without changing the background as well as blend layers to make them look like one.

The first tool we looked at was changing the levels of the image to easily change the contrast and clarity of the image as well as looking at the hue and saturation. Hue and saturation can change the whole look and colour in the image and this would be good for changing the colour of clothes on a character easily and seeing which worked best. Image > Adjustments > Levels and Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation is how you would find these.

Next, we looked at how to use the spot healing brush tool which blends things together to make them smooth but also can get rid of things that you don't want in the image. I took this image of a character with three heads that had been copied on and blended them to make the harsh lines are no longer visible. A tip to remember with this tool is that if you are blending layers then make sure that 'Sample all layers' is ticked in the toolbar at the top.

Finally, we looked at masks which are very useful so that you can edit a certain area without effecting the rest of the image, this could be the character but not the background behind them. Using the magic wand tool to select where you want the mask to go round is a great way to do this quickly and if you select the back first then select inverse can also be used. I've taken screenshots of the different processes you can use with masks like, adding images for texture, colouring the character and using overlay.

I feel like I've found out some really useful tips today that will help me when I go to design my own characters on Photoshop, which I may not have been as confident with before learning these new techniques. 

Before Levels & Hue

After Levels & Hue

Heads Without Healing Tool

Heads With Healing Tool

Different Masks for Different Layers