Title Card Development

I was just going through several ideas on how to make an interesting title card, seeing as I recently made the change that it would be placed over a splat of blood. Originally, it was just gonna be a red basic font over a black background, with the text being distorted. It turns out my change completely turned the tables and now I'm basically designing a logo for the title card. I went through multiple designs and looked at how they would fit within this border:

I couldn't think of many ideas at the time because I was short on time, but I started by sketching four potential fonts for the title:

These were concept images, that I drew to show how the letters would look. The top-left one, that I referred to as "graffiti-style" was meant to represent the gritty/edgy tone of the series, as well as go with the dark music that would play as the title card appeared. It would also appeal to the young adult crowd, aged 18-25, that enjoy the sharper and demented feel of the imagery. The bottom-left one I referred to as "Funny Games-style" because it would be used in the same manner as the film Funny Games, which filled the entire screen with giant bold and basic red font. It would just be basic Helvetica but would be sharp, to the point, and, just like in Funny Games, shock/provoke the audience when shown alongside a thrash-metal song. The top-right font, I could "surrealist", which is maybe over-exaggerating, but the idea is that it is a basic font but is stretched and distorted, to establish the themes of body-horror (taking what should be normal but stretching it's form to unusual levels to disorientate the audience). I called the bottom-right one the "Ed Fella" font because it was inspired the artist/photographer, Ed Fella, who is fascinated by bizarre typography and would alter letters to extreme levels. And I designed this font with the same ideas as the previous style in mind, taking a basic font and altering it to the extreme. It would actually be designed to resemble the character in Parasyte, Migi, and how he changes Shinichi's arm.

I then adapted these designs into a canvas, that would resemble the border I mentioned earlier. These are just rough sketches to see how the fonts would fit the border so that I could get an idea of how they would fit the transition into a fullscreen title card.

The top one I wasn't really sure of, because while it did establish the themes, whether it actually fit in front of a blood-splatter was another story, plus would it actually transition well? And the bottom one, as much as I loved the style, it just wouldn't fit. I considered having it over a black background as opposed to in front of the blood splatter, but that would have just taken too much time and taken the audience a tad too far out of the sharp and dynamic art style. Maybe if it was more stylised or simplified?

I then tried seeing how the "Funny Games" style one looked. It might have just been because the sketch was too rough but something about it just didn't sit right. While the series the sequence is for would be a comedy as well as a horror, it felt as like this stretched too far towards the comedy aspect. I looked at the graffiti style and the results kind of surprised me. The graffiti look seemed to go well with the blood and after altering the shape of the 'y' it established the body-horror aspect very well. Plus it just looks cool. I began looking at the original font for the cover of the graffic novel here, which says the title in a basic font with the 'y' tail stretched to the left, sort of going with same idea I thought with the "surrealist" and the "Ed Fella" styles. I changed the graffiti look in faith of the original font, but the 'y's longer tail would work as an under-line for the title as well. That change wouldn't have worked with the "surrealist" and "Ed Fella" styles because they were already distorted and the latter worked as well as it could because the primary letter used, the 'p', was the only one that needed to be changed.

I then tried the original font (since it's just the "Funny Games" font with the change added) and looks like it might work.

Now lastly, I made the title cards and looked at which ones worked the most. While they do look nice, only one can make the cut! I picked a green font because it is a colour code for sci-fi, and it compliments the colour red.

I ended up picking the third one because the graffiti style is just more visually appealing and transitions the most effectively with the blood-splatter and the music.

Ceramics Documentation 2

Another thing to mention about my ceramics is the task I was given to shape 12 little plasticine balls in a sequence. I took the principles of animation into consideration as I was making this, as I wanted to give the illusion of a ball transforming, even when seen in picture format; I even used the pose-to-pose approach upon making this. This was the sequence of images:

You can kind of gather that it's Lumpy Space Princess there, just to quickly get that out of the way, but I think you can see where I applied the principles of animation. Again, I used pose-to-pose, and I also used squash and stretch, as well as a technique known as settling, in which a character, after a squash/stretch, would squash and stretch very slightly before regaining their original form.; in this case, LSP's slight change in height after morphing. I focused a lot on timing and spacing, because since it's 12 frames long then it would have to be a quick but smooth transformation.

When I was done took a sequence of photographs with them: 

I then converted these into an image sequence on Quicktime (12fps):

I'd say it works pretty well, considering I didn't use Dragonframe or any other stop-motion animation software, nor have I ever made a claymation animation.

Other Stop Motion Clay Animation

In terms of inspiration for my 3D model, I actually thought a lot about the work by Lee Hardcastle.

I believe I've mentioned him before, back in my first module. He's basically an indie animator who specialises mainly in stop-motion claymation. They are mostly very dark and gory comedic shorts (with an upcoming feature film, Spook Train) with very odd looking characters. The claymation really suits the awkward yet surreal style of the characters, as well as the contrasting tone of humour and gore.

This was the style I went with as I was making the model. The crudeness of the style is rather easy to implicate for first-timers like myself.

Ceramics Documentation 1

Something I've unfortunately neglected to mention throughout this month was the Ceramics workshop induction. This was the first time I've ever used ceramics and found it to be a fun, and challenging experience. I have always had a love for stop-motion, plasticine, and clay animation, so I was glad I had the opportunity to try this out. We were tasked with designing a human/humanoid character that would be made into a simple 6-7 inch 3D clay model. It was a rather complicated process, actually. Basically, I had to make some flexible wires in the shape of a body, it had to match the general shape of the character I designed, then add some molding clay to the limbs, hands, feet, torso, and head. It's much harder than it sounds, in fact I may have screwed this part up because I used too much mold, they almost stuck together, which would have affected the movement of the model (It sounds complicated, I know. Basically, imagine if your bones were molded together and you couldn't bend your arms. Yeah that's basically what would happen to the model). Then I added the plasticine, a mixture of red and black, some pure black and a red streak for the hair. At this point, a lot of attention to detail was necessary, it had to match the style of the design and have the little details added to the clothing, body structure and overall anatomy of the figure; unfortunately I don't have a camera so I couldn't really show the process, but I do have pictures of the final product: