Bus Task...

I started drawing ideas and designs down for the Bus sequence over the Christmas holidays. At that point I had all my dialogue planned out and was about to start on it when I came back, so I thought it’d be a good idea to at least plan what I intended to do for the next exercise to save myself from a bad idea. So I began to think of an interesting situation where someone could be running for the bus. The idea of a bride running to or from her own wedding leapt out almost instantaneously, so I began to draw some ideas down. I really liked the idea the woman wearing a big, flouncy dress running down the street with bystanders looking on in bewilderment. I originally wanted her to be running TO the wedding, but this seemed unlikely (in a social aspect; i.e.: driving in a car with your family to the wedding is usually the norm for most Church weddings) So then, she will be running AWAY from the wedding service. I liked the fact that it was the woman running away, and not the man, as it is stereotypically the man who is more afraid and “most likely” to run away.



After I returned to Newport, I began designing more, to try and vary what the character could look like. Here are some more designs with ideas of storyboards and other background characters.



Some ink character practise designs:



Some Photoshop designs:





Some Background character designs:



During the later designs I was being influenced by early 20th century cartoons and illustrations from the New Yorker. I bought a book at the Uni book sale a few months ago. It was a huge book containing hundreds of illustrations featured from 1920-1950. There are some beautiful illustrations, as well as funny and political ones. A lot can be applied to life and society now, but it is so interesting to see just how different our ideals and social acceptance is today that it was not even a century ago. I tried to look up a few artists (as their signatures are featured on their illustrations) and I was surprised to see not a lot of information on them! One of the only artists I could find a fair amount of information on was Peter Arno. His illustrations (in the book I own) really stand out. They were always very large illustrations, and he used very bold and confident strokes in a very simple form, but beautifully done. It is obvious that he was one of the favourites for the New Yorker. Here are a few examples of his work:







After I was happy with the designs, I drew a storyboard in Photoshop to show an idea of the story behind the lead up to the woman running away from her wedding.



I decided for this exercise that I would use Adobe Flash to animate in for this and the next exercise for time purposes. It would be a chance to experiment, which I was looking forward to in Flash. I learnt the basics of how to animate in it from my friend, Bry. I looked at some video reference on the internet, I did not have time to video reference fro myself, as our other deadline for the sound scape project was also taking up a lot of time at this point too. So, I found reference in Disney’s 2007 film “Enchanted”. The character ‘Giselle’ (in live-action) wears a huge white dress near the beginning of the film when she finds herself in the middle of New York city. I watched these scenes over a few times, but found that, when she was running, it wasn’t a very fast one, and not appropriate for the intentions of my character, who would be trying to run as fast as possible. So I had a hard time trying to find exactly what I wanted. In the end, I found a music video to Shakespeare’s Sister’s “Heroine”, in which it features a ‘Bride’ running in slow-motion and real-time throughout the film. So I referenced the placement of the hands holding the front part of the dress for my own animation. But due to the very quick jump cuts in the video, it was hard to focus on the woman running. So in the end, the whole of the bus sequence, which you will see, was not referenced at all. I was trying to experiment and push myself in this new medium (Flash) and I really enjoyed it. Not only was it brilliant for its ease of erasing and instant playback, but it was really fast! I was able to spend a good few hours on each part of the sequence, not a few days on each! So I definitely want to explore the boundaries I can push in Flash.

*Again…All animations will be present on the CD handed in at the end of this project if not embedded in this post…*

Also, after the week 11 critique with Matt, I started to clean-up the last scene of my Bus exercise. I wanted to keep the black and white feel of the New Yorker illustration inspirations. However, I started to draw everything in Photoshop, and when I came to bring everything into Flash, nothing seemed to work or go together. This is due to my lack of knowledge in the programme, but I knew I couldn’t waste any more time trying to sort something out that I couldn’t understand. Therefore, I went back to cleaning up and colouring my past two exercises instead.

Here is an example of what the clean-up would hopefully look like:




---jkl