Leche Flan

To my surprise, there is actually a few videos that show you how to make leche flan. With this one and pretty much all the Leche Flan videos they talk you through all the necessary steps whereas mine is what i'd like to call self explanatory. The only problem with my video in comparison to video's like this is that obviously with me letting the video do the talking the amount of ingredients isn't exactly clear. I show that I've used but not quantities. So if I were to do this again, I would perhaps add text and list the ingredients as they pop up.

Leche Flan Storyboard

This is the rough storyboard I made for my Instructional video. I made it pretty simple and didn't really gone into much detail regarding the types of shots because I wanted to experiment with different things t get a feel for filming and making sense of what the eye and brain is use to seeing when putting things in sequence.

I was also in the video so I did a bit of directing with my sister s she was operating the camera. I quite liked having this kind of control so I might consider trying to lead the group when we pick our teams. 

Short Animated Films

Okay so, I've been having a look at various short animated films and I found two in particular that I really love and I really wanted to share them, so here they are~

This first film is called 'The Lady and The Reaper' and it was made by Javia Recio Gracia and was produced by a company called Kandor Graphics.

Hope you like it as I did~




The lady and the reaper from Hormoz Zamanpour Siahkal on Vimeo.

I really love this piece because it's just chuck full of comedy. There's some really nice shots in there too and I love the use of the silhouettes and the staircase on the chase scene. The music also goes really well with it and more than anything I absolutely adore the characters and the storyline. Despite the situation which appears to be quite sad and moving at first, it turns out to be a very comical bit of film and I think this idea was very well thought through. The characters just seem so fun and friendly which is great for capturing wide audiences.

Now moving onto my second short film.

This film is another comical animation which is actually part of a graduate student project from a college in France.

Enjoy~


Oktapodi by Gobelins from Feride Seferaj on Vimeo.

The storyline for this is a very cute but strange love story. Because they're creatures though, I think the way that they've been animated especially the facial expressions and the body movement. The emotions of the characters comes across really well and I like how they've thought about how an octopus moves out of the water. I think that idea was really clever and it all gels really well together.

I looked at quite a lot of short animations but the reason I chose these two animations in particular is because I want to get across how strongly I feel about stories and characterisation. This is something I hope will stand out in my future works.

Stopmotion

Okay so, the last couple of weeks i've been sitting through some seminars in which we explore the world of animation, the first being stopmotion.

I thought I knew most of the types of stopmotion but this presentation showed some styles that I'd never even heard of like, Strata Cut and Clay Painting.These were under the subheading of Claymation but there was many more as well.

Here are just a few of the styles and videos that took my interest starting with Dante's Inferno, which is a freeform claymation.

Sadly, this video isn't permitted to be played on here so here's the link instead: Dante's Inferno by Alexis Waller

I really like this piece because the style and aesthetic look to it is very striking. The movement in this animation is jerky at times but overall I think the animation is surprisingly fluid. I really like the transitions between all the scenery and figures  and the way that the clay has been modelled. One of my favourites being from 1:15 - 1:40.

Another great thing about this video is that Alexis really uses the clay to it's fullest by moulding it in such a way to create some really lovely textures especially when doing the rocks and the ocean. It shows such attention to detail and I think it deserves a lot of credit.

Now moving onto another really lovely piece by Joan Gratz called, 'Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase'.



This is one of the styles I didn't actually expect to be classed as a form of stopmotion but after watching it and reflecting on it a little more, for me, it kinda reminds me of J.Stuart Blackton's 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces'.

All these animations show a certain degree of talent which is undeniable but in this piece, what stood out to me more is the attention to all the transitions from one work of art to another. There's a really nice and subtle transition between every piece but just for an example, from 0:22 - 0:28 the details and the shadows are taken out leaving you with a flat image until it eventually fades away. And going a little further on from 0:28 - 0:35 the figure moves into position for the next image which really gives you that sense of continuity throughout.


So after looking at some of the videos I was briefly shown in the seminar I decided to search for some more videos that I found quite interesting.



Most documentaries, especially that of David Attenborough feature the time lapse, which is basically a stop motion that's done over a vast period of time.  I thought I'd find something a little more now, so I decided to take a clip out of BBC's Frozen Planet which has been on since last month and just ended recently. I really enjoyed this documentary. I'm a love of nature documentaries anyway but some of the shots in this and the time lapses are really amazing. What I also love about this particular series is that, at the end of an episode it will show you how they managed to record particular stuff, what equipment they use, and basically show the lengths they go to to give us this incredible footage.


Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

This is a really beautiful piece by Khoda. I was pointed in the direction of this video after taking an interest in the Mona Lisa piece above because this 5 minute video was animated using 6000 oil paintings. The detail in this is just stunning and like Joan Gratz's animation the transitions were well thought out but, I'd say that Khoda's approach to animating paintings has more of a cinematic view to it.

The music to this animation is really good.. The atmosphere and the suspension creating by the sounds really made my heart race. The impact it has on you as a member of the audience really is something and I think that it shows without a doubt the amount of effort that was put into this. Amazing.

Maya so far

Okay so over the last couple of weeks, I have been introduced to one of the top leading 3D softwares in industry, Autodesk Maya. Learning how to use this program comes hand in hand with my animation brief in which I am to produce a 2 minute animation using a simple looking toy, preferably a child's toy because of the basic geometric shapes.

These pictures will also serve as a source of reference and will be added to the front and side views on the Maya workspace.

At first, the program seemed so complicated and I got easily frustrated but I'm more or less getting the hang of it now. Here's some screens and short animations showing what I've been doing/learning.

This model of a truck is the finished product of a tutorial I followed in order to get use to the tools and my around the basics of the program. After learning the basic layout and tools, this was the first task given to me and I struggled a lot with this. There were some functions like the snapping function that I found really hard to understand even now so this is definitely an area in which I need to practice.

These two images (above) just show a bit of experimenting I did with the deformer tools which are Cine, Twist, Wave, Bend, Flare and Squash. In the bottom screenshot I used a combination of to different types of deformers to see what shapes I could create.

These three screens shots again show some experimentation but this time, for the hypershade tool and with this, I applied some basic colour to my objects. As you can see, I had a play around with the luminosity, transparency, light intensity among other things.