Responsive:Orchard pig Development (2)

These are the rest of the posters that we decided to produce. Greta is going to place her character designs on the posters to make them look unify. I use google drive to exchange psd files and jpg which is extremely efficient when we are both at home working. I think these poster definitely are fusion of our styles and the texture layer look so great of them. One thing I would like to improve is the colour of the series which are not quite the same. Maybe they do not have to have the same tone of colour due to different environment but at least the texture bring them together as a series and audience might recognise because of it. Next to do is to produce the gif version of these posters and I am so excited to start animating!

Responsive: Orchard pig Research & development

Before sketching the roughs, I look up to see how to make cider. In the past, people used wooden barrels to store and heavy weight to squeeze and squash the apple to get the juices from them.

I like this photos. It is a nice proportion of the apple tree and the farmer.

How it's made:How to make apple cider. From the video, I know making apple cider today is very convenient and efficient. Factories can patch produce a lot of cider at one time and the taste and quality are in strict control. This is what make hand-craft cider so special because every single cider is different from each other and the taste might differ sightly as well. Orchard pig wants us to stress the crafty-ness of the cider and root-in-somerset therefore our group is introducing the traditional method in a pop and interesting way!

Here are the rough sketches of the illustration! I enjoy drawing from reference and I feel like this brief is tackling my weaknesses which are drawing backgrounds.(Greta is in charge of the characters and I am in charge of the backgrounds) I think this is a good opportunity to improve digital painting skills and to match greta's pig character design.

After a few days, Greta thought we can add some special texture to the illustration. Therefore I did some experiment on making tea-stained paper!

I creased a normal A4 paper and used a soaked tea bag to go through the whole paper. The tea bag broke half way and left with a lot of tea on the paper which produced an awesome effect when dried. I also make one on watercolour paper but it just look like brown water colour painting on it which is not so interesting.

Scanned it in when dried and edit the colour in order to enhance the visual impact.

I absolutely love the effect it makes in photoshop! using multiply on the tea-stained paper layer, place it on top of the illustration, lower the opacity a bit so it is not too intense.

With Greta's Amazing Drawing! Our funder's illustration is finished! I like the characters because they look like they have a story behind and so serious looking make them funny to look at. The surrounding is darken in order to make the character pop. The Orchard pig sign is not very obvious to see that allow the poster to be less commercial but friendly and fun. I want to introduce a bit more brush strokes at the background in the next poster so as to introduce more vintage style.

Responsive:Orchard Pig brief Research & Initial Ideas

Me and Greta are working together for responsive brief. I feel more comfortable working with someone I know and familiar with each others' style. Although responsive encourages collaboration between different courses, have a taste of the industry in reality, I missed the group meeting and to be honest it doesn't bother me to work with animator only. Anyway, we like this brief because it is very flexible in terms of end-product and media. The target audience is around our age so we are very suitable for this brief in order to produce a campaign to interest teenagers.

Information of the brief

The Creative Challenge

Your challenge is to tell, inspire and engage consumers and customers with our brand and what it stands for – Bold, Mischievous, Inclusive, Rooted in Somerset. We want this to be an integrated campaign, so we are keen to see how your ‘Pig Idea’ comes to life in more than one channel or medium.

Target Audience
Everybody and anybody that espouses the same values as Orchard Pig – Generation Z, no demographics apply.

Our Principles

• “Stay rooted” is what we say to the world.

• We appreciate simplicity…and cider.

• We like to poke fun at the world and ourselves…and each other.

• We are ALL about the cider…
(information from YCN website)

We started off with looking at other similar commercials and since the brief is too flexible, it is best to narrow down what we want to make. We thought to make a pop-up commercials on facebook or youtube/ 2D games/ posters/ bus stop adverts which people can interact with. We though the bus stop adverts ideas are good but considering the lack of diversity of end-products, it is changed into a more practical and experimental ideas where we can create creative gifs and posters for Orchard Pig and take some new challenge at the same time.

Greta suggests that we can do something that are pop, and very trendy in these days which is retro-style stuff. Therefore we thought it would be great to re-introduce the traditional cider-making process to the new generation with the trendy retro style and interesting pig characters that represents Orchard Pig. It is best to be a series so like from collecting apples to pulping apples and bottling, make gifs alongside these posters to make them looking visually appareling.

I think this ideas would be very interesting to produce. Instead of animating a long advert, making short gifs and poster practice basic illustrating skills are what me and Greta love to do. We think this could also be a break from the applied and Cop project where we need to animate continuously. It might not be very challenging compare with other groups but it is best to do what we feel happy with?or am I staying in my comfort zone for too long?

These are the styles that our illustration would look like. With the logo of Orchard pig and old-fashion pig characters who are making ciders!We should try to incorporate some fun elements in the posters so it is not just looking like a dull old photo.

Responsive:Onform tumblr challenge

I saw a lot of my classmates doing this Onform challenge but I could never found it. Surprisingly it is a weekly drawing game on Tumblr so that I made a tumblr just for this game. Onform is open-free for anyone who has a tumblr account and will renew weekly. It can be an illustration or animation.
There are a lot of amazing art work that from the country which introducing various styles and imagination when interpreting the shape. The use of colours are actually quite flexible and can use the colour of the shape as well.

We need to follow these rules:

- It’s not allowed to rotate, mirror or scale the shape(!)
- The shape have to be recognizable

- Don’t change the proportion (5:7) of the image(!) by using the crop tool 

- Don’t change the color of the shape

- Only use the colors BLACK and WHITE

I did not brainstorm any ideas but to draw straight away in photoshop. The shape was originally a liver but it was not looking pleasant so it changed into a jellyfish. I searched for beautifully jellyfish references, studying the colours and the light and also how it slows under water. The most difficult part is to paint in only black and white but to show the texture of the them and which I use different opacity of the brush and draw stroke by stroke so as to build up the texture and colour gradually.

I am happy with the final drawing. The jellyfishes are looking squishy and shiny while the contrast of light is introduced in the illustration. I would like to play around with different style in the next challenge and experiment with producing an animation as well. It could definitely be improved if I spend more time and patient in it so that the jellyfishes will have more details and look more realistic.

Lips Sync Induction

Lip sync is the move of lips silently in synchronization with a pre-recorded soundtrack. It is widely used in Stop-motion, documentaries, or any animation that requires characters to speak. There are different mouth shape for different vowels for example a smiley wide open mouth shape is for vowels A and I. Like the pictures show below. 

The mouth shapes has to be made before the audio because the shape makes the sounds so never delay the animation otherwise it will not look natural. We had a little task to lip sync a character. I chose 'You're a wizard, Harry' line from Harry Potter and the philosophy stone. Instead of following the letters, saying the line out would capture the mouth shape in accuracy and so I use U and E for You're; A for A; U, E,D for wizard; A and E for harry. It feels complicated at first but soon I found it's fun to do because it could change the emotion or exaggerate the expression according to how you want your character to be.

Do it Ten Research

The research I have done for the 'DoitTen' animation is studying a lot of cat walk cycle. There are a lot of references on google, some are useful but some aren't. At first I follow the gif below, produced a cat walked like it.

However, I noticed cat does not walk like how it walks in reality. The gif above walks with a wrong pattern that front leg and back leg step at the same time whereas real cat walks with four rhythmically different legs. Therefore I want more reference!

Reference above gives me a better understanding of how dogs and cats walk. All four legs have different timing and shapes when walking which enable them to walk further and to balance. The bone shows significantly when walking as well as the level of the head changes. Personally animal walk cycle is harder than human walk cycle... and I have spent quite a while to experiment with.

I think looking at the real cat will be more help but sadly I did not pet a cat and therefore youtube is a great media for looking at cute cats!(also study) There are a lot of video help constructing a walk cycle for example 3D cat walk animation and real footage. Some of them are student's work and some even have slow motion which are very useful and helpful.

I stop the video in every frame so that I could capture the pose of the cat. I was confused about which are the front legs and back legs since it is referencing a black cat but this allows a bit of thought, thinking logically about a walk cycle so I can really learn instead of just copying.