Category: work

Hello and welcome back to my TedTalk.

The theme today is my first experience as an animation director. I directed my first short film in a global pandemic (the last one was 100 years ago, so pretty impressive yeah).

After my small mental breakdown in march – hehe all my plans getting canceled and being unemployed with no clear direction for the future, I had little to no idea of what I would make a film about. So I promised myself that I will draw every morning with my morning coffee. Started with a page or two per day, and at one point, I was using every coffee/lunch break to fill my notebook with doodles.

Spending a month of animating around 8 hours per day on my Children Society project, I felt mentally exhausted, and coming up with a new idea for a film in just a couple of days, seemed impossible. Then I saw him:

Standing alone on the page with his glorious long armpit hair, waiting for me to notice him. I desperately needed to animate him. A couple of days later, I saw a medieval drawing of a man riding himself instead of a horse and thought that this could be the perfect story for my gentleman – him standing still on a horse that is not a horse but it is the same person eating grass. I loved the idea of him being alone with himself and started thinking in this direction. I came up with many different scenarios of group social activities that he can do alone with altered versions of himself.

When I was designing the background I asked myself what was the message of my film – I loved the character and the activities he was performing, but I still had no idea why I love it so much and what I want to say with that. I was listening to different episodes from a podcast by Sam Harris where the central theme was the human psyche and the pandemic. I started thinking about the way the whole situation made me feel – a timeless existence where there was no beginning and no end, just an endless stream of thought. Wanted to show that in my designs, so made a mood board:

After choosing my palette I started playing with the background:

• 

• 

• 

• 

The background visualizes the dreamy inner world of the character. The vast, empty horizon so far behind the character, emphasizes the idea of timelessness and isolation.

The prosaic main character is a metaphor for the common nature of the emotions he experiences. The simplicity and goofiness of his look provoke empathy in the viewer. We are all, in a way or another, products of our repetitive patterns that bring short-lived joy.

• 

Even though I loved the theme of endless suffering, I wanted it to build up and escalate at one point. Therefore, in the end, the camera zooms out and the viewer is invited onto the bigger picture – the character is just a little piece of a large system, a tiny dust particle in a galaxy where there are a thousand galaxies.

• 

Deep down, we all live with the knowledge that we will die and that the universe is so massive that we don’t matter. Routines are familiar, comforting, and self-defying. However, we still get up from bed every morning, play leapfrog, buy ice cream, and continue our patterns. Although just like the character, we are unhappy and insignificant, we live for the moment of finally getting the ice-cream, even when we know we will drop it the next second. And what a moment it is!

Bread and butter,

Nicole

For some unknown for me reason, it turns out that I am better at writing at night. Not that I am good at it, I still suck, don’t get me wrong, but my thought is flowing smoothly, and I better express my mind.

So tonight, I want to share more about my inspiration for the Children’s Society project and the work of artists I admire. 

As you already know, my film has a black background and contrasting, colorful main character and symbols.

Initially, I was inspired by Disney’s Dumbo, and more specifically, by the scene where Dumbo gets drunk. The scene is so different, compared to the rest of the film, that made a big impression on me. I loved the way, Disney portrayed the unconscious state of the character through the vast black space where huge, colorful elephants were dancing and coming closer and closer to the camera. I wanted to recreate a similar feeling with my animation. Therefore, I decided to look for more films, that had similar aesthetics – black background and contrast bright characters.

I found a music video on Vimeo, made by Sophie Koko Gate (I watched her Slug Life film and I absolutely love it, but will probably write about it in a different post) that fit the description perfectly. 

Here is a link to it:

https://vimeo.com/105585712

I used the meaning of colors to emphasize the inner change of the character. I started with blue color to show her isolation and the hostile environment, went through the green color of the cocoon to indicate her personal growth, and finished with pink, to set the environment for the positive message of the girl. 

As you can see from the illustrations and the character design sheet, I used a similar approach in my animation – first, I would draw the black outline of the character, and then I would color it.

Finally, I liked the roughness and sketchiness of Koko’s animation, and how she left some gaps while coloring to show the imperfections. I applied this sketchy look to my project, and I believe that it gives the film the authentic feeling of the strong emotional distress, discussed by the narrator. 

Here are my initial sketches. As you can see, the idea evolved in the process and I changed the beginning. Initially, I wanted to show the girl gazing through a car’s window, as a train passes by, and use it as a transition for the next scene. However, as I was sketching it, I felt that it would look like a teenage series where the main character is going through a crisis of identity, and there is dramatic music in the background. Therefore, I decided to show how uncomfortable she feels in the car, almost as if she is too big to fit in it, and she cannot breathe. Therefore, I started designing a character with a large body, that makes her almost clumsy but also adds softness to her personality.

Bread and Butter,

Nicole

It’s been quite a crazy month.

I went home for two weeks … now I am staying for at least two months.

UK’s incredible, breathtaking, never seen in history measures (because they were non-existent) to deal with the upcoming pandemic were the reason I had to stay in quarantine alone for two weeks.

My extroverted personality went from “I need time for myself anyway, I can do yoga and draw” to “Jesus Christ I need people I am physically ill without human interactions.” So this post is about my mood swings expressed in my sketches/doodles/illustrations.

I bought a new marker, and I am trying to push myself to experiment more with shape and style by drawing without an outline. It is addictive, and I had to buy more paper because I was running low on it. Luckily, the best art shop is still open – because art is a necessity ya all. Enjoy:

In the second week, I decided to turn some of the sketches into illustrations. I called them “Love in Time of C(holera)orona” – spread love, not germs.

• 

• 

• 

And finally, some random illustrations I made in the last days:

• 

Now I am home, living with my parents for the first time in 5 years. Not gonna lie, now I started appreciating my quarantine.

I am learning to animate on procreate, but it is harder than it seems. I still can’t make it smooth, and it takes me a long time to make the character’s movement. What is more, I can’t work on different layers, and it makes coloring and adding additional elements harder.

Salt and Peaches,

Nicole

I always thought that making a character design is one of the funniest jobs in animation. You give life to the characters, creating a whole image in the eyes of the audience. If you are lucky enough, and the story reaches more people, millions around the work will know your work: fans will want to have it on everything from their backpack to their toothbrush. Little did I know that actually, coming up with a design would be one of the most challenging and time-consuming exercises I would encounter during my first term.
Let me introduce you to Damon – a lovely demon, working in the family business of burning people in Hell. Unlike any other demonic creature, Damon has a gentle soul, and his aspirations in life are far more different than his family would wish to. In essence, Damon dreams of becoming a professional ice skater.
Since at the end of Unit 1, we submit only the final version of the project, I decided to share all stages my lovely demon went through. Even though I quite like the design I have at the moment, it is still work in progress, and I intend to improve it over the next couple of months.

I drew my initial inspiration from old medieval drawings of demons. I started researching the different types of demons in Hell and their hierarchy. I wanted my character to be someone with little to no power, whose job is tiring and endless. Then, I found the “Ukobach” demon. According to Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy in the Dictionnaire Infernal from 1818, Ukobach or Urobach is a “demon of an inferior order.” A creature with big eyes and flaming body, holding a hot pan full of coils. More information I found in Demonicpedia (yes, that’s super creepy). There the demon is described as “goofy” and “incredibly thin” with ample head and a huge nose. 

At first, I wanted to make Damon small and cute:

Then, I started thinking more about the personality of my character and how it could reflect in the way he looks. I decided to use the primary image from Dictionnaire Infernal as a reference. To show his unhealthy lifestyle – the man is burning people all night – after all, I decided to make him quite unfit with a belly and baggy butt, but at the same time with pointy elbows and knees. So after days of working on my character design; eventually, my project looked like that: 

Leaving the project aside for a couple of months game me a new perspective on it. I decided to improve the backgrounds as I redrew them and set on a new color palette, keeping only the initial concept. Looking at the turnaround, I saw that the 3/4 pose does not fit the others as it shows a different mood, and I can use it for character exploration in the future. I also added additional drawings, so I could animate the turnaround and make it look smooth.

The final version of my character design, which I will submit for Unit 1 looks like this:

What will happen to Damon next? Will he have the courage to follow his dreams and fight for what he loves? Tune in next week to find out.

Bread and butter (I should cut on carbs soon),

Nikol

Before coming to CSM, the closest experience to life drawing was watching YouTube videos and drawing in my room. After going regularly to the Thursday sessions for five months, I can say that drawing from reference is so much different from the real-life drawing sessions.

Looking at my first sketches and comparing them to what I create now, I can see the difference in the way I approach the whole process and the improvement in the quality of my drawings.

What I learned is that the most important aspect of these sessions is to capture the movement and ignore the unnecessary details. The easiest way to do so is by drawing simple shapes and using arcs instead of straight lines.
I still struggle with “minimalism” in my work, and I tend to go into details, thus having only a minute to draw a movement has proved to be the best amount of time for me.

Observing my three-minute drawings, I can already see the heaviness of unnecessary detail. Another habit of mine that I am trying to change is drawing really small figures, which frames the movement and I can see that these sketches lack fluidity and lightness.

Another aspect of the classes, which I found to be useful and interesting, was our last session with Maryclaire when we had to make 29 drawings of a man sitting on a chair. Even though we had a minute per drawing, I find the result quite satisfying ( as the images move fast and you cannot tell how bad my drawings are), so I decided to turn it into a gif.

• 

Bread and Butter,

Nicole