Fraiser Werp Studies

If I were to ask anyone to draw up a study of the way's of a Fraisr Werp's then I would employ the services of Monsieur Charles Darwin himself, so I did. Apparently this is a recently discovered page from Mr Darwin's infamous Red Notebook, courtesy of the British National History Museum Archives:

I believe they have some character elevations somewhere..........

What area of animation do I want to work in?

My problem at the moment is that I want to try and understand almost everything and while I know the reality of working on a large production means being employed as one of many cogs in a much larger animation process I can’t imagine ‘only designing characters’ or ‘only rigging characters’ or ‘only storyboarding’ etc. I want to leave this course and be reasonably confident that I have the basic knowledge to achieve most aspects of any animation.

What I do know is that I enjoy the entire animation process from the bashing around with ideas at the beginning through to the development, production and realisation of those ideas into visuals and sound.

What I’m perhaps least interested in at the moment would be storyboard visualisation, other than to illustrate my own ideas this to me is an illustrators role and I would be neither creating the ideas or getting my hands dirty within the animation itself.

For me, stop motion animation is such a self explanatory medium that there would be no reason for me to focus on this unless an idea calls out for it before the end of my course.

I enjoy the fact that there are no rules to say you can’t combine numerous techniques to get the results you want and therefore I loved working on my Esting animation and through that I discovered more about working and exporting in and out new programs than I would have in any one package alone.

The type of areas I personally would like to end up working in are likely combine life action footage with animation, whether this means hyper-realistic or super-stylistic I have no idea at this moment but it does flag obvious gaps in my knowledge which I want to fill before the end of the course.

During this course I have gained new knowledge in Cinema 4D, After Effects and Final Cut Pro, (and had prior full professional working knowledge of all Adobe graphic packages other than the revelation of being able to animate in Photoshop). Final Cut Pro is pretty self explanatory once you understand the controls and I’m now relatively happy in After Effects although would be interested to learn what more it has to offer. But it goes without saying Cinema 4D can be an enormous and immensely intricate tool of which I’ve only just scraped the surface so far, so anything else I can learn in this program will be gladly lapped up.

With all this in mind the areas I feel I am lacking knowledge in at the moment are the following skills:

Motion Tracking

I want to learn how to motion track footage which would mean developing a knowledge in packages like Boujour or SythEyes

Texture Mapping

I know the basics for texture mapping but I’m still unable to accurately control or understand the paint and texture of more complicated 3D meshes.

Flash

I feel I simply need to have basic understanding and experience this (from what I understand to be) very basic vector based program to use but that is the very reason I feel I should have at least an understanding of how it works.

Now there's an idea for an animation

San Diego-based artist Enomeks has created some rather bizarre scenes that are just calling out to be animated...

AD203 Character Design Continued

The Fraiser Werp

Back Story

The Fraiser Werp - cute, big eyed, vacant looking creature with whiskers and two useless arm/wing like flapping appendages, grows up to about a foot tall and similar in shape to a bouzouki.

The Fraiser Werp is a little known obscurity, in fact if you mentioned the name to any leading biologist or historian they would suggest that you had simply made the name up. This is due to a number of unbelievable and unique characteristics of the Fraiser Werp.

The first being the airborne hormone they excrete through their skin which has a curious numbing effect in the part of our brain that recognises the specific shape of a Fraiser Werp thus resulting in us quite simply refusing to believe their very existence even if one was sat on your lap at this very moment. It’s worth noting that ‘biologists’ have recently discovered that the appearance of a bad picture or signal on a TV screen is quite often our mind’s way of interpreting a Fraiser Werp jumping up and down on our lap and blocking our view without us knowing.

  

More often than not it’s only once you have been told of their existence that it becomes possible for the brain to acknowledge their existence. The interesting thing is that this applies both to its physical presence and to pictorial or photographic records. Resulting in whole pages of detailed studies and observations by leading biologists and historians to have been both read and immediately forgotten about.

For example if one looks at a picture of the Mona Lisa and then you are told a Fraiser Werp was sitting on her lap, it become apparent that even Leonardo Da Vinci himself painted a Fraiser Werp without realising it.

  

Leading biologists have yet to find a more convincing explanation for this than that of the renowned 18th century biologist Professor Armitige Shanks, the first person on record than we know of remembering to actually write it down, which in itself is quite a remarkable feat considering amongst all of the world’s species that have actually been described only less than 1% have been studied beyond simply even noting their existence.

Professor Shanks concluded that their unique physical attributes cleverly trick the human mind into perceiving the creatures in the ultra-violet band of the visible spectrum. As our eyes are unable to see ultra-violet light we therefore believe Fraiser Werps are not actually there.

Interestingly, during the early 1940’s scientists tried to simulate these effects with the intention of applying them to armored vehicles and war planes during the second world war but the confusion that ensued during the development and testing lead to the rather embarrassing effect of hundreds of leading scientists spending an unaccountably large amount of time and money on technology and prototypes that can neither be found or remembered to this very day.

Indeed there are no records that can explain how the Fraiser Werp arrived at its name, logic depicts that it involved someone or some place called Fraiser and it apparently took some great effort to remember what it looked like whilst exclaiming a werrrrrping sound.

  

As there are few direct records of Fraiser Werp in existence, or at least that we are aware of, we are left to deduce their first discovery and existence from unexplained events and rumors throughout history books that don’t actually describe the Fraiser Werp itself thus preventing our minds from ignoring the information by concluding what has not been said about them.

  

Scientists have deduced that the Fraiser Werp’s skin is effectively nothing more than one large ear drum and that they extract all the energy they need to grow and survive in a process similar to the way that plants use photosynthesis to convert carbon-dioxide from the air with the help of sunlight, only Fraiser Werps harvest the energy generated by sound waves within their skin.

Surely with such big ears you might assume these creatures are continuously deafened by sound but an in-built compressor channels only the sound it needs to comprehend the sound around while diverting the majority to its wave farm glands.

With humans being the largest generators of noise on the planet it becomes unsurprising to find that Fraiser Werps pay so much attention to human activity. It is said that each and every one of us has at least one Fraiser Werp following us around at any one time. Needless to say they are greatly attracted to human conflict it is often wondered just how much an influence a Fraiser Werp could have on the mind of someone hell bent on world domination.

  

Intensive research has recently lead to the conclusion that both the Battle of Trafalgar and the unorthodox winning tactics of Nelson were in-fact both orchestrated by the insatiable appetite of a group of Fraiser Werps desperate for a bit of nourishment during an otherwise long peaceful voyage by jumping up and down in-front of the direct line of site of man on lookout. 73 Fraiser Werps crowded on the bow of each ship was a more than big enough number to absorb the sound of approaching cannon fire and the British were completely unaware they were about to slice through the Spanish Armada until they could smell Tapas.

Of course the British public could never be expected to except this version of events and would lead to an immense amount of confusion with regards to what the pigeons were sitting on at the top of Nelsons column.

Further detailed development sketches of the Fraiser Werp, I've not quite decided how detailed the character should be but at least I can pull back once I'v drawn everything up.

animated documentary research...

The short film 'Alive in Joburg' isn't exact what I'm intending to do but all the same it puts a different slant on the mocumentary, not too much in the way of animation but intriguing all the same...

Alive In Joburg - Neill Blomkamp from Spy Films on Vimeo.

It then became clear that this was either a spoof version or test reel for the film 'District 9", this combines an unusual style of film making and some quite realistic graphics.




This animation "Faith" by someone called Tiddojr has elements of what I would like to do with regards to some of the cut-out techniques and the book/pop up style, but they seemed to have ripped off the front cover of the book from from Shaun Tan. I wonder if he knows.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy contains the right kind humour and potential for a descriptive diagrammatic animation, the commentary is precisely the kind of thing I have in mind at the moment.

AD203 Character Design

Righto
My idea so far:
The concept I was working on over the last month or two is to create a fictitious style documentary (mocumentary). I wanted to create a character that I could put into many situations and tackle many different types of animation including more diagrammatic animations (which is maybe due to the lure of my graphic design past). I certainly would also like to create a 3D character that I can interact with live footage.

So the above to me was the most important part of my brief to me. The 3 minute animation would then hopefully be a good show real on it's own showing a diverse range of animation techniques, although it will be important to make the whole animation gel as one piece of art.

Character design
What I have in mind for the main character is something akin to that of the mocumentary 'Doomed' which features a number of useless and bizarre looking characters. As I've generally produced slightly dark looking animations throughout year one, my aim in year two is to create something a little lighter and maybe something that could be considered 'commercial'. Yet still retaining a little bizarreness.

Below is my style board for my character design research, there are a number of intriguing characters by a collection of artists working for Imaginism Studios which are along the right lines, they have a way of combining a number of existing animals to create new creatures, i also want to place this character in real life situations similar to that of the 'Baboiles' animations.

Style of animation
The idea I had for the style of animation began with influences from the 'Doomed' animation that was shown at the Berlin Pictoplasma festival this year combined with the info animations in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy with regards to descriptive diagrammatic presentation and a short series of animated 'documentaries' featuring James May of all people called 'Things You Need Know...' which is kind of Gilliam-esq in it's use of cut out animation.

Initial sketches and ideas
It was difficult to know where to start with this, I have already created a long back story which is handy as I can use this to create the narrative for the narrator which will essentially be the basis for the script. Initial sketches were quite random, the character could literally be any shape or form the only restriction (set up by me) was to keep it relatively simple so that it would be easy to animate and create in several formats. I'm still working on and developing an animation which has progressed from last year with complex (for me) mouth and expression morphs which will match dialogue I've yet to record, so I've effectively ticked that box and would like to keep this one simple.

I quite loved the idea of a simple useless looking creature that was like a suction cup (the pointy hat looking thing middle right in the sketches above) that would struggle and struggle to pull itself free from the ground and eventually pop away from the ground only to get stuck on the ceiling and this would be the way it got around, very slowly. A bit like one of those toys you push down on a spring and wait to pop up.

After a series of weird experiments the result is somewhat like a elongated space hopper that lives by extracting sound through a series of ear holes around its body and using them to convert Carbon-dioxide
into matter in a similar way to plants. Well that's putting it simply.

I'm currently developing it further though and I want to give it some kind of stumpy arms or feelers which might be good for added expression and work out how the internal organs work and look as this is likely to be part of the narrative.

Pictoplasma Book

You can now order your very own hardback copy of 

my Pictoplasma Berlin 2011 book, should you like such things...

Pictoplasma by Paul Marshall | Make Your Own Book

Inkling

check out this crazy item from Wacom, you sketch on anything and it stores it for later use in vector format!!