On Monday we looked into backgrounds and layout. We explored industry jobs in this field which are very interesting to me. I feel like one of the only people who leans much further towards environment design over character design and I am definitely interested in background painting and layout design. Big points of reference for me are Devin Elle Kurtz, Nicolas Saltos and Patrick O’Keefe.
We specifically reviewed color theory and tried our hands at creating our own value paintings.
We were then told to create our own backgrounds at home for our animation. I managed to do the line art for all 3 before sharing on Wednesday.
Wednesday’s lesson was a peer review. We got into small groups and shared our work. I feel like people are a little hesitant to give constructive feedback but I prepared questions for specific areas I wanted input on and I got some good advice. My group helped me decide which composition to use from my two storyboards as well as adjusting the order of the clips I wanted in my animation. I also got to enjoy seeing classmates’ work and in giving others advice I got to think about my own work and implementing my own advice. At home I continued to work on my turnarounds on Thursday.
On Friday we looked at sound breakdowns and x-sheets. This was my first time preparing an x-sheet, but MAN does it make animating seem much less intimidating. Knowing in advance what is going to happen during each frame and for how long makes the process of drawing keys much easier and streamlined. During the lesson I finished the sheet for one character and the others were done in the following weeks. I didn’t write out the frames where characters weren’t speaking because they either won’t be on screen, or won’t have big movements to pull focus off of the speaker. I struggled a little with the overlapping speech, but I made my best guess and will fix it if needed later.