A heavy influence to my concepts is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, specifically the floating islands of Skyloft. I really like the bright and colourful feel of the entire game, it is something that I would like to emulate for my own floating Island.
All of the textures in Skyward Sword are cartoon-y and painterly, I will have to make sure I choose similar textures for my own enviroment.
I wanted to try and find some animators which worked with a more traditional style, I remembered an animator which both works almost exclusively in hand drawn animation and I am a big fan of: BarfQuesiton
BarfQuestion's animation use almost childlike drawings drawn with pencil crayon, every frame is redrawn to have a constant wobble to it, even the backgrounds. I can only imagine how long each animation takes to draw out, especially since there are no layers to help with individual character animation and background animation.
I really like BarfQuestion's animation, combining simple drawings with a weird creations, all animated by hand. It shows his skill as an animator that all his animations are smooth and enjoyable to watch.
I should remember that any animation can be high quality and doesn't require computer equipment to reach its full potential.
When I think of stop motion, I immediately think of clay animation, however there are in fact many forms of stop motion animation and all of them differ quite a lot.
Strata cut animation for example involves taking cuts from a block of clay and talking an image of each one, producing an animation. It produces a very unique look and is something that is rarely seen these days.
Pixilation is where a stop motion animation is created using photographs, this can allow the movement of inanimate objects and make things seem a lot faster than they are, such as in the brilliant Wizard of Speed and Time.
Pinscreen animation is something that is rarely seen. Animation is created by altering the points of tiny pins, creating an image. This must take an incredible amount of time to do and gives the animation a surreal quality about it.
Graphic animation uses cut outs and hand drawn images moved around by hand to create an animation. Obvious examples are the animations of Terry Gilliam from Monty Python and South Park. While the animation is very simple, it still offers appealing characters.
Object animation uses things such as action figures, lego or any object to animate something. The best example is The White Stripes music video 'Fell in Love with a Girl', which is one of my favorite music videos of all time.
All of these animations are stop motion and all of them offer a unique style. I will have to make sure I look into more into these other methods of stop motion and not just clay animation.
Recently we attended a talk by the animator Cyriak, which I found as an excellent opportunity to look into his work.
Cyriak is a 2-D animator who primarily uses aftereffects and photos for his animations. Almost all of his animations involve manipulated photos and grotesque transformations. I personally think that Cyriak's animation is brilliantly bizarre and fantastically produced.
One of the main themes of Cyriak's animations is cycles, often his animations involve large complex movements that loop seamlessly together. This must take excellent timing to keep in sync, especially when combined with other cycles, like in the video above.
will not be producing something so complicated as this, but I will make sure to take into consideration the timings of my scenes and how they play out with over movements.
Don Bluth is a famous animator and character designer, best known for working on films such as Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986),The Land Before Time (1988), and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989). He also worked on the video game Dragon's lair.
As a child I really enjoyed the movies that Don Bluth helped to create, the characters he created were always memorable an fun to watch. I really like how through simple poses and 2 sentences, he has fully explained the character above.
I also really like the style of drawing that Don Bluth did; very simple and cartoony figures but with a lot of range for poses and emotion. It is quite close the to the style of drawing that I am doing for my character.
Don Bluth was excelent at producing storyboards and character sheets, I hope to be able to make something like this for my own character.
Raita Honjo Is a character concept artist most notably known for his work on Valkyria Chronicles.
I am personally not a huge fan of the anime style, no doubt because I have seen it so many times and can look bad when done over the top. However I really like Honjo's work in the Valkyria Chronicles games.
I really like the use of watercolours (and how they kept this in the games) as well as the variety of character archetypes on portrayal for each character. The style is quite similar to my own cartoony stlye, though with superior colouring and more realistic proportions.
I wanted to look into some artists that were working round the time my character is set (WWI and before), as before now I have only looked at contemporary artists and would like to see some more historic art. While looking into artists, my Brother suggested I look into the art of Mucha.
Mucha was an Czech Art Nouveau artist who worked during the late 1800's and early 1900's. He produced a lot of posters and designs, mainly featuring women. One of his most famous pieces of work is a poster featuring four women representing the four seasons (shown above).
I really like the style that Mucha draws; it is realistic but at the same, stylised, using large outlines and swirling patterns for hair and plants. I feel that the style shares similarities with classic fantasy, with the women pictured reminding me of elves form Lord of The Rings.
The large outlines and flat colours remind me of my own character designs, albeit on a much lesser extent, I would love to be able to produce some character designs in this style but I am not skilled enough to even imitate it.
Ben Balistreri is a Character Designer and Storyboard Artist working for Dreamworks. He has done various designs on films and animaitons, including Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and How to Train Your Dragon.
I really like the simple, 'cartoony' drawings that he does, which is very faithful to the films and programmes that they are based on.
I particularly like how expressive a lot of the characters he designs are, despite being relatively simple. You can understand what the characters are like just from the drawings.
I would really like to do some character boards like this, demonstrating who the character is by simply showing them in a variety of poses. with no other information.
