Term 2: Week 8 – Mentors, Artist “Analysis” and an Eyecatch

As part of the course, each student gets assigned a mentor – someone who currently works in the industry, and is an alumni on the course, so we can chat about our experiences of the course and have foreknowledge of what the industry is like.

I was assigned a character designer called Paul Nicholson – a charming guy who I enjoyed chatting with, and will continue to learn from for the next two years. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how this mentorship would start off, because I’m more interested in the animation-front of the industry rather than pre-development or character designing. But I’m happy to say that Paul is probably the kind of mentor I need at this present stage.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to improve on is adaptability. For the last two years, I’ve been confining myself to certain art styles (Miyazaki/Ōtsuka, Nishio for e.g.) and have found it a little hard to adapt to other designs and styles. To address this, Paul has set me some exercises to work on some of the fundamentals of art and animation, including an exercise of artist analysis. As you can see below, I’ve looked at a list (and chosen some of the art styles I fall back on) that Paul has sent, and scribbled all over them. Adding notes, looking at lines of action, breaking shapework down in order to understand the intent of other artists. I’m looking at designers and artist who I’ve never seen before, as well as some that are outside of my comfort zone, understanding the boundaries of each art style.

One of the things in my discussion with my mentor was that my approach to the exercises in Unit 1 involved me taking a character and building a short narrative in just a couple of seconds of animation. So after looking at the Miyazaki Ōtsuka style above, to round off my first unit, I created this short 5 second animated eyecatch whilst staying in line with the backgrounds of the Part 5 eyecatches.

I won’t be submitting it as part of my exercises (simply because the previous Lupin animation inspired by Miyazaki is being submitted), but like my previous Lupin facial acting exercise, I set the animation to 30 frames a second to mimic the timing of Miyazaki’s early work. Again, I had little to no shading and reduced the lineart to minimal to keep it nice and loose. With the line art as well, I chose to us a pencil brush to simulate the conventional pencil-and-paper approach used in traditional anime and just give it a little texture that I haven’t used before. I’m sure the timing could be adjusted slightly, the volume control could be improved and maybe the colour choices altered slightly, but I’m particularly happy with how this short animation turned out in 3 days.