E stings past competition winners

The E Stings competition is a competition to create a 10 second long sting, for the channel E4. They have to be energetic and fun, aimed at an audience of teenagers, but it also has to be able to be shown on daytime television. This means they are often using common themes in teenage culture, like cityscapes, music and postmodernism.

2009's winner: http://www.e4.com/video/jdFJb53RAuJ6UNgNTZcKdd/play.e4

2008's winner: http://www.e4.com/video/258xmMyRs8QAx3KlE5y8O8/play.e4

My Kingdom For a Horse (I can't stop watching it): http://www.e4.com/video/mkRyNWPf1Uwe2Xd7vSzotF/play.e4

Our next module in College is to pitch an idea for an entry to this competition to the rest of the class. My first idea is to use stopmotion to animate a shoe moving, then add on huge sparkly eyes. The second is to have some huge, arcane summoning ritual, which ends with E4's logo floating with rocks flying around it. My third idea is a modern dragonslayer, with earbuds and an E4 shirt underneath their armour.

Older works and works out of college.

I made an animation of a dragon for the first module of my Animation course. It is four seconds long, and was made with a pencil and paper. It is 96 frames long, and we used Dragon stopmotion to capture it. Sadly, when it came time to capture the final animation, the Dragon Stopmotion software stopped working, so, at the least currently, only the rough "mannequin" style animation exists.

I have done some work around my home as well, for my own entertainment, and the entertainment of my friends. Be quiet, I don't actually have a scanner as of yet. I could not have moved house at a worse time.

Queen Anne Veroneshka was supposed to be a character in a fantasy setting, a self-disowned daughter of the ruling family. When that family was killed off, of course, she inherited the title of queen but never came to claim it.

A better photograph of the drawing. In the first picture, I had noticed the writing on the picture was showing up mirrored, so I tried to hold it backwards and shine daylight through it, to combat this problem. As it turns out, Photoshop is a much simpler solution. I originally did this art when I first got my good pens, as a practice exercise, with a character I'd drawn before and knew was very simple.

This was done to illustrate a point I was making to a friend who is making a game. That he didn't need to think too hard on backstory for the characters, or give them any kind of real identity. The players would do that for him. This was drawn to illustrate how he could even avoid making his characters physically recognisable as any kind of person.

This is a design for a demonic monster for the horror video game of my dreams. Oddly, I'm not actually a fan of the horror genre overall, I'm something of a wimp. I do, however, like to watch other people playing them.

I remain quite proud of this picture. The proportions may be somewhat out, and it's quite blunt, but I like it. I am especially pleased with the cat's stripes, which were created with the smudge tool on GIMP, which was all I had at the time. I also like the idea of having a character who rides a giant cat rather than a horse.

This is my first attempt at drawing with a tablet. As you can see, no one is exempt from being terrible at something the first time they do it.

Octocat, Logorama, Gluko and Lennon, Tale of How and Tyger

Today, we watched a bunch of animated films, shorts, pilots and other animations like them.

Octocat: http://vimeo.com/1690174

Octocat was created entirely in Flash, by copying and pasting the frames, then rubbing out the pasted frame to create the next frame. It's style is very scribbly and childlike, with a seeming lack of understanding of angles and very little control of the "pen", until nearer the end, during the climax.

Logorama: http://vimeo.com/10149605

Logorama is set in a world where everything and everyone is the logo of a company of some sort, with police officers all being the Michilin Man, driving various car shaped logos. The zoo is populated by the MGM Lion, and Ronald McDonald is evidently the equivalent of the Joker. Right down to his apparent immunity to death.

Gluko and Lennon: http://vimeo.com/12339198

Gluko and Lennon is the pilot for a television show that never came to fruition. It follows a small purple creature called Jennon and a large pink shapeshifting creature called Gluko. It seems to set up a running gag about Lennon falling into Gluko's mouth, into the liquid inside of him, visible through his semi-transparent epidermus.

Tale of How: http://vimeo.com/1516019

Tale of How is a fanciful animation made by the Blackheart Gang, as a sort of set up into a larger world createdby the Blackheart Gang to set other animations in. It uses a somewhat weathered look to strengthen the feel of an old book of fairytales.

Tyger: http://vimeo.com/6787244

Tyger is an animation made with a multitude of different methods. First of all, there is the tiger itself, the focus of the whole animation, which is a puppet operated by three hardly concealed men. The city appears to either be a model, or, what I feel is more likely, photographs of a real city with the animated portions overlayed on top. The humans, who turn into animals, are two dimensional traditional animation, creating pseudo 3D. Finally, there are glowing plants that grow around the city that are clearly digital.

Competitions That Look Interesting

Illustration Friday
http://illustrationfriday.com/topic/imagination/

I like this one, because I find it's premise both familiar and interesting. In amateur art circles I've been in do a similar thing, where certain groups would have a week, annually, and would create art for a different prompt each day. I had never taken part in one myself, except for a large one themed towards cats, so I think I'd like to give this one a go.

Cheltenham Illustration Awards
http://www.cheltenham-illustration-awards.com/info_13.htm

This is also interesting. I have been told that it has much more focus on narrative, telling a story through the drawing, which is something that I am very interested in. I love narratives, wherever and whatever medium they may have came from. Stories are my thing. The problem with this competition, though, is that it involves sending things in the post, which I have a lot of trouble with.

Macmillan Prize
http://www.panmacmillan.com/macmillanprize

I'm sure I remember someone around me taking part in this, a science teacher or someone. I am interested in this also because I have a habit of making up full stories to go behind my drawings, and this encourages that. I also find it interesting because it seems more geared towards a real thing, illustrating children's book. I've said in the past that I really don't mind what career path I take, as long as I can tell stories, I even write stories as a hobby.

Student Awards
http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2013

This is a competition with much more specific briefs, pertaining to actual companies. This is another one that takes a less artistic approach, with realistic briefs that a freelance illustrator, designer or animator would be likely to get more than once.

Rigging Thomas

We are going to pretend like I was not sick for a couple of days, and busy or forgetful the rest.

I finished Thomas' character model, and then I set about rigging him.

This is a picture of Thomas with his completed skeleton, achieved by creating his arms, legs and spine. Then, I placed the structure of his legs and arms within the appropriate hierarchy of his spine.

Then, I made some controllers, by creating a spline and pinning the joints to them. I used circular splines for most of them, though I used a star shaped spline for the controller to move the whole puppet.

I also tried to create a foot roll, but that didn't quite work out. For one thing, it simply didn't work on my model, for another, when I tried to work out what was wrong at home, I discovered that I couldn't right click in the Xpresso tag on my own Macbook.