Transitions

So I've been thinking about ideas for my Transitions piece, and I've decided to move away from the utter insanity of Cyriak's animation style and into a more subdued but still intriguing approach.

One idea I've had was to follow the Transition of a person coming into the world and growing up through animated signage. I'm thinking the first scene will probably feature the male and female signs of public toilets, perhaps animating the two figures walking out of their individual frames and into each others' arms or something.

The animation inside the signs for the figures might look something like this:



Of course, the "stepping out" of the figures from their signs will require techniques like masking, but I think the real difficulty will be to try and make believable motion for the characters.

One of my favourite internet animators

The next brief is "Transitions", an After Effects orientated project. I was going to look around for videos made with After Effects for inspiration when I remembered I already knew one artist who works almost exclusively with Photoshop and After Effects - Cyriak Harris.

Cyriak is an animator in the UK that produces some very strange, Gilliam-esque animations. They're often extremely funny and extremely irreverent. He plays around with British celebrities, animals and often makes monstrous concoctions by combining the two (often with machinery as well). A brilliant example of this can be seen in his "Moo" animation:



Hilarious, bizarre and very well animated. Cyriak's work is a combination of clean photoshop compositing and After Effects compositions. But not all of his animations have been as lengthy as Moo. Cyriak initially used After Effects and Photoshop to create short, loopable GIF animations, often posting them on forums online.
In this video, Cyriak has compiled a whole lot of these GIF animations into a magnificently odd 3 minute video (with music composed by Cyriak himself):

More visual fictions.

My visual fictions piece is coming along reasonably. I've decided what disaster(s) will be occurring in the background: gargantuan hands. Hands of different "gods", if you will, crashing down on the earth, destroying the landscape or creating something new.

The foreground will be made up of humans and animals. The humans will have their backs to the "camera" or audience, watching these events take place, seemingly nonplussed. The animals of the foreground will be facing the audience, frightened or alarmed (perhaps they are the sensible ones).



(Surreal Scene by Reyes Designs on DeviantArt)

This image has a very nice mood to it. It is lit with rich yellows and purples and contrasted heavily - but not damagingly so. In terms of composition, the moon is amazingly large which almost makes me want to portray the moon falling in my brief (though I might restrain myself on that) and the Eiffel Tower sprouting out of the clouds is quite a nice touch.

Mostly I just enjoy the feel and atmosphere of this image and would like to give my Visual Fictions piece a distinct mood to it to keep it from being bland. I am thinking overlays of light and dark "blotch" layers might achieve this. I shall have to do some experimentation.

I have been using the 3-dimensional sculpting and painting program ZBrush (http://www.pixologic.com/home.php) to pick holes, cavities and create icy and firy materials for my god-like hands in my brief:




This allows me to get the exact style I want for these devastating limbs without having to rely on somebody else's photographs and textures.

I will be further manipulating these renders in photoshop and seamlessly compositing them in the background.