Industry Indent: Blue Zoo

Blue zoo is a multi-BAFTA winning animation company, who produce:

• Commercials
• series
• Idents
• Development trailers
• and many other types of animation (Check out their styles here)

I first became interested in Blue Zoo when they visited the USW in 2013, however my interest spiked with the Blue Zoo Christmas short, Xmas 2013.

Their use of warm-cool colour contrast and arcs for character movement fascinated me; especially the squirrel character (who I do believe is a Jackalope?!?!), who floated believably. More on this short in a bit... Blue Zoo has won 2 British Animation awards for their series 'Those Scurvy Rascals' and won a BAFTA in 2012 for 'Best independent Production Company'. The different style used within the studio is what makes Blue Zoo so appealing to me, from 'Lessons in the force' to their animal planet stings, their range of styles shows their adaptability in their work. I personally love their pieces for stings and commercials the most, mainly because of this diversity. Most of these feature a hand made look, rather like the Xmas 2013 short, in which you can feel the artist's influence and hand in the pieces. Even shiny pieces like the Rugby League World Cup 2013, stings, you can see the thought behind the style used, and the simplistic shapes used for the characters only highlights their animation teams' ability.

Their diversity in animation styles, not just textual, is my main pull to this company. As a student now working to diversify my showreel for multiple styles, studying Blue Zoo's studio pieces is proving integral for my studies.

Looking forward to seeing way more from them soon!
See you later,
Claire

Background textures and scene setup - Office

So you guys do not know about my projects for university as of yet, however I want to show you some of my render tests I have been making for my personal project... As well as texutres... Turns out I'm going down a generalist route, I only need to add modelling to the CV!

Following images copyright details:

Morpheus rig, suit,

Following came with no textures: Darts and Dart board, Clock, Chair, Desk, iMac, Desk Caddy.

Room Texture

City texture

Textures made in photoshop for this project include the 2D textures on the walls (inspired by 101 dalmatians backgrounds), and the background cityscape. The city was deliberately coloured to contrast the blue cool colours inside the office. Blue being the character's colour scheme, as he is a very calm, collected character.

Glass test render

Final room render

I also installed large areas of glass into the walls of the room to allow better lighting of the character.

CG assets, like the dart board, originally came in untextured, texturing selected faces of the object quickly rectified this problem. Tacks and paper were made and textured by myself as well.

Final Desk render, came out better than I thought, the 2D city image being reflected nicely in the table surface added to the texture of the background I think!

Now to progress to animation!!!

See you soon,

Claire

Lecture notes v01

Most of my lectures are taken by creatives... They strike fun poses... Here's today's!

Production Pipeline : Pre-Production

A third year university collaboration project, working with Modeller Beks Rootes (link for her work to come), we were tasked to make a short sting for a TV studio. This involved making the characters, background, story, basically the whole sha-bang of production from scratch.

As the animator/TD (technical director) of this project, for preproduction I created character concepts, ideas for poses, but most importantly the story itself. 

We originally looked towards an E4 sting, as most projects worked to the E4 criteria, but as the look evolved we aimed for a company where we could explore cute more. We kept in mind the modeller's sculpting criteria for her brief, so the simplistic designs were scrapped.

 If I am honest here, maybe one of these poses originated from a deer? Most came from pouncing cats and dogs, hence why in some pictures I am struggling with proportions... although back flexibility (or lack of) was kept in mind while making anatomy adaptations.

However thumbnails above did come from deers...

This sequence was turned into an animatic.

As a TD I was in charge of creating a rig for this project as well. This was a basic rig diagram I created for reference in production.

Soon to come - The sting itself!
The process of production as well....

Update on that Gallop animation from yesterday... Getting there... I think.

Whooops! Better update you guys!

Hi All,

Been a mad time as of late with so much going on, preproduction, dissertation, production.... The list goes on. However what remains the same is I did not update the blog.

This does mean there is a back log of things to post however!

So to begin with, take a peak at my Work In Progress animation of a horse, for one of my major production projects.

See you soon,

CartoonClaire

Form wars WIP

Turn: 180 – 248 (Turn stops at 234)
Idle (trait): 36-136
Idle: 137-180
Walk: 0-36
Model made by
Paul Slap Tsihhotski
Rig By:
conor moloney

A piece for my major project.  This is proving a lot of fun. Have to make the arm with staff an IK! But focusing on animation first.