Finished....(this is my rational)

In design practice 3 I chose to pick the fight scene in the dojo from The Matrix as the script I would work to. The reasoning for my choice was simple, action. My thinking was that, by following this script I would in turn get better animating skills as this is a very action based script. I tried to set out in the mindset that it was the animation and of two characters that I designed that would make this short film a worthy piece of work.

When designing my characters I wanted there to be a stark contrast between the 2 characters. One would be big and strong and the other would be small and seem to be weak, that standard kind of jokey set up. Instead of copying the script to the t, I interoperated in a different way. It is set up in a military base and the fight will between an alien trainer and his human trainee. From this I decided to base the man on a character from the TV show American Dad and the alien would be a run of the mill alien with green skin and antennas.

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*head shapes are kind of the same?

I was happy with the finished models of the characters but I soon found out when I started animating that I made a little mistake, the alien character was a little too short for the human guy to actually punch, for example, it would make more sense for the human to just to kick the alien, but either way they did have hand to hand combat in the end, just a lot of bent knees and jumping.

There are 2 scenes in my animation that I got inspiration from. The first one is in the dojo, the first part of the fight I tried to pan and both in animation/movement of the characters to the camera shots of the film to be as identical to the original film as possible, I just thought that this would be a nice way of showing the audience what interpretation I was coming from and then going onto my own choreographed fight scene. The second scene I chose to try to create a resemblance to be from the movie Scott Pilgrim. I chose to do this because I think they had very creative camera angles and very animated and clever shots.

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*again, he is so small, why would you need to jump into the air to try to kick him in the head? ha!

Animation takes a long, long time. It is very hard to keep the motivation up when doing a lot of fast paced animation, its slow work but in the end, depending on how well you do the outcome can be very rewarding. I did find that although towards the end of the animation I started to lose motivation for the animation of it, I found it kind of equalled out as I found the animation get a little easier. Patience is really a virtue to have and I gained it after a little while.

I found that working to a pre composed script makes the creation of characters, sets, animation the whole project go far more smoothly than having to come up with your own ideas. I believe that I really need to gain more inspiration for ideas as at the moment I definitely feel like I am not using 100% of my talents due to the fact of my lacking creativity. I have a lot of talent to give, I just need to wake up?

All in all, I really did enjoy this project, I’ve learnt many new things not only in 3DS Max but in After Effects. I wish I was a better editor and better at SFX but practice makes perfect. I am going to try to put some time away this summer to learn and home my skills better, more drawing, more reading, more modelling, more animating and more learning.

Thats all for now, shall keep you posted.