Officially: the showreel

It's been a while since I posted here anything, but I'm alive and busy with a looooot of stuff. It's mostly my MA degree (here is my course blog), but there's much more on top. Haha, remember myself saying about working hard last year - I'm dreaming about those "relaxed times" now.

Today I finally put together some of my animations and looks like I have my first official showreel. It's not perfect yet (of course) but at least gives an idea about "my style": overall hand-drawn look, my love to vivid colours and VFX, "liquid flow" movement, timing and particular character animation skills.

It took me almost a year to start, but in reality I spent much more time searching for music than actually to put it all together.

bearrrr walk

LIVE: Music Happening

Everybody is busy with Xmas right now. I’m super busy too, but there is nothing about holidays yet :) Here is one of the projects we’ve been working recently.

The ‘Happening project’ is another unique and exciting adventure BnB has recently embarked on in which word, image and music beat as one to create a rich mixed-media narrative, inviting their audience to enjoy an explosive ‘mix’ on both physical and metaphysical levels and interact freely with the artists’ and musicians’ works…on a dance floor. 

One of the stories for the collaborative music project. The main goal of the project is for the artists of the collective, along with the musicians involved, to produce an epic journey which takes the form of an animated audio-visual installation, or as the eponymous title of the project itself suggests: a ‘Happening’. Once the three different written narratives (inspired from the work of the three musicians involved) were turned into illustrations, they were then animated and merged together into one multi-faceted story in which the musicians would meet and perform to, for and with their public ‘live’.

Here is the first chapter in the story of Otto and Nome.
Story by Mohamed-El-Haddi
Characters by Karl Millet
Graphics and animation by me.

To give an understanding of the whole image I put music as a soundtrack, but the idea is to use this animation with anything similar. Even if the synchronization with the music is not perfect but it works with almost every kind of beat.

Based on created visuals I made a set of transitions to put in-between the stories.

a stripper mathematician

One of the recent briefs at uni was to create a character, work out his/her personality and show him(her) at three different stages of life.  Then I had to make her move, showing a change of mood through the walk.

So, please say hi to Ruby, a stripper mathematician from a small town in America.

 She’s smart and optimistic, but a bit impulsive.  She's not pretty but the way she moves and her voice make her very attractive.

She was very shy at school, but changed a lot after a while. She was always brilliant at math classes and went to college to study science.  After her parents died  she decided to go travel around the country, hitchhiking and working as a strip dancer. Now she has settled in another small city  working as a mathematician in a primary school (her brother is one of the sponsors of this school that’s why they took her here) - kids love her because she’s cool and kind, other teachers respect her but trying to convince to follow dress code Her dream is to make her own show in Las Vegas and go travel around the world. She can do that if she wins a pole-dance championship, but she needs to work hard, get some money for costumes and special effects.

When she got old, she's sort of "super-granny", having several grandchildren and cooking pancakes every weekend. She lives in countryside, has a vintage scooter and a lazy cat. Nobody knows about her stripper career as she tells everybody she was a ballet dancer.

Some concept sketches, emotions and body moves:

Character sheet for the animation:

Here she is, walking in the room

some more effort

Here’s one more exercise we’ve been doing recently. Not sure if I’m absolutely happy with the result, but let it be as it is (this is the third version of the same thing). Also, it’s meant to be a simple line test, so don’t want to clean it up either.

In addition to the ‘effort and weight brief’ I wanted to try some other movements (guess it’s fine, just need to plan in advance what exactly i want him to do),  black outlines (didn’t like it much, prefer solid shapes), liquid quality (hair and ‘rope’) and subtle sfx (dust, drops). And it’s a loop again, what adds me +10 points in my eyes 

Spiderman vs. brain

Keep telling everyone that I have a dream course  - could you imagine Monday starting from watching Monty Python's sketches with a teacher dressed up in anatomical costume and then continue the lesson riding office chairs?  It's hard work tho :)

The next day we had even more fun making  crazy stop motion shorts. Luckily we came with the idea quite quickly, shoot it and yesterday I just put it all together with sound.   (yep, you can notice some Monty Python's influence as well)

Enjoy!

weightlifting

Learning the weight and balance. Also I wanted to get some liquid quality of pure color but still have a believable motion.

I’m quite happy  with the result, it works well for this style, but for future I need to follow my key positions a bit too strictly instead of drawing all in one go – it’s so much fun to  draw in the flow, but too much time adjusting positions and sizes and everything else.

Also, next time I want to push  exaggeration even further to try kinda ‘Bill Plympton’s style of movement.

one more

More cats and more silly gifs :)

And guess what? - I have one more blog now (i know, it's mad, but i need it as a digital sketchbook for my new course). Here is it: tatianaalisova.myblog.arts.ac.uk, perhaps will do some cross posts here as well.

New course? I started MA Character Animation at Central St.Martins. Which is pretty cool, and i'm already excited about my first week there.

run baby run

Just a pencil test.

There is a HUGE amount of work and I love it! The only problem is I have to sleep sometimes.

the first 'serious' animation

One of the briefs of professional platform series at my course was to create a short animation. It should be  the loop for the LoopdeLoop website and the theme of the month was BANG. Sounds like a piece of cake, right? Especially having Matt Hawkins as the tutor and Rob Grieves as the visiting practitioner. But I had a particular idea in mind and only one week to make it. The idea was my old comics about curious old ladies. I did all the animation in time for the final crit in uni, got a feedback and had several days to add the sound. I've recorded some London street noise for it. As a result now I can't stand still when I hear the ambulance :)

So I've uploaded my loop right at the deadline night. It has passed judgement  and  been screened in Melbourne and also as part of BANG Short Film Festival. Now I'm in Australia writing it and feel a bit strange that my work came here before me.

What is more at the end of the month it was the committee favorite, had been featured on the website and went to the hall of fame. Whoa!

Falling old ladies (Вываливающиеся старушки) from tatianaalisova on Vimeo.

the best from 2012

The biggest and the most successful project from last year was definitely 100WORDPILGRIMAGE. It was a great pleasure to work with close minded people and a big opportunity to experiment with illustration, comics, animation, video and augmented reality.  We've managed to do almost everything we wanted and now have even more ideas for the future. Looking forward to the next year!

Meanwhile take a look at the video snapshot of the exhibition:

The #100WordPilgrimage at 4749 :: Beddow 'n' Battini Studios from Lorenzo Strappelli on Vimeo.

kitty

From an animation I've been doing since this Tuesday. It will be a cute little story for about 40 seconds. Considering that for each second I need about 10-12 frames it's not a surprise that I haven't got proper sleep since the beginning of the project. By now I have a rough version and clear vision what I need to do for to finish it.  Will do it asap, but now should go to sleep.

ps. See you tomorrow morning at COMIKET! 

la-la-la

Wanna dance?
Looks like his ears are dancing, not him. Weird

The Little Bang Theory

Another one! Now some experiment on colour and how simple the thing might be.
Today we had a group tutorial with Matt. Everybody came with theirs ideas of animation for the "Bang!" theme. Apparently this guy just popped up in my sketchbook. Nothing to do with my own idea but it would be unfair to leave him without life. So here he is.

crash

Can't stop making silly gifs))

walking bunny

It seems like I'm obsessed with animation right now. That was almost midnight when I started to draw. The idea was to study classical movement, but the sketch went bit further.
As I understand, there should be more frames in it to make it smooth, the movement of body  parts should be drawn more careful. And there are some problems with pacing as well. Anyway, it is what it is - next time I'll do it better.

first try

Yes!! We started an animation project! I've been waiting for it for so long.
Half a day of work and here is my first attempt to create a loop.