Hunters & Gatherers {Peter Lowey}

This week for H&G, Jin and I teamed up* to introduce our guest speaker Peter Lowey. He is an AIM alumini, and animator + director of Piepants Animation studios. He was greatly influenced by Disney's work very early in his life and has since then journeyed through the world of art and animation, first with the foundational tutoring of artist Noela Patone, and later on with the teaching and exploration opportunities at RMIT. He did his Advanced Diploma of Multimedia before going further into his Masters in AIM. He is an artist dedicated to his craft who has an obvious love for movement and unusual perspectives. He is not afraid to explore and experiment.

Work that I find particularly interesting:

Dreaming (Student Work)

The Blue Bird on My Shoulder (Student Work)

Polo's Robot (Recently Completed)

You can find more of his work here on:

YOUTUBE

BLOGSPOT

It was good to have him share his work and his experiences doing his Minor and Major projects. Time is such a huge factor in the production process... And it was something we were warned to watch out for.

*when I say teamed-up, I really mean she did all the research and I went and bought/prepared lunch with a few helpers XD

Storytelling {Movement Case Study}

I did a 12 minute presentation for Storytelling class about "Movement", which is a fascinating and incredibly important aspect of animation... after all, animation is all about images in motion.

The piece of art I looked at was from Nasser Samman's "George & the Dragon" (AIM 2009). It was a lovely little stop motion film about George the brave yet bumbling knight's face-off with a dastardly Dragon.

When analysing the film, I concentrated a lot on Character Movement: How the movement of a character should be motivated by the internal processes of the character so it would be perceived to be a living and thinking person/creature. And how movement allows the audience to understand the character's personality and thought process.

I unfortunately touched little on Camera Movement: The cinematic quality of a shot. How the arrangement, framing, timing and moving of shots is used to bring across important concepts/ideas/moods/feelings in an animation to the audience.

I'm rather sorry I didn't go deeper into Camera Movement in the film >n<" After all that time spent reading about it on the weekend. The presentation may have come out a little one sided. Still, in the limited time I had, I did learn much about how important it was for animators to create characters that move with thought and not just for the sake of moving or filling up time. And that thought helped me to think about a related concept development assignment we had about 'Agents and Behaviour' (Character Animation).

In the presentation, I referenced the beautifully creepy award winning stop-motion animation "The Sandman" created by Paul Berry in 1991. He continued to work on more stop motion films such as the Nightmare Before Christmas, James & the Giant Peach and Monkey Bone until his passing in June 2001. Am sad that he is no longer around. He was a brilliant animator and really understood how to bring his characters to life.

The Sandman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU

{MINOR: more thoughts}

Hadn't had much drawing done because of other school projects. Becoming very concerned with how things aren't really moving for my Minor. Had a talk with Kate and she helped very much, and encouraged me to look outside of the known relationship that the "Monster under the bed" idea portrays. Did a bit more thinking... but other homework is taking over TT__TT Wish I was better at multitasking...