Okay, year two semester one is over, which means I’m officially at the halfway point of my animation education.  And since finals are finally over, it’s time to show the world some highlights of my recent work.  To start with, below you’ll find my final design assignment.  No special gimmick to this one, it’s simply a pan background, with lots of detail and effort put into it.

This is technically only a rough, and they’ve told us that a possible future assignment might allow us to produce a clean version.  Even so I’m quite pleased with how it turned out given the time pressure I was under.  There’s a lot of variety in this one; industrial buildings, futuristic buildings, cliff faces, winding railroad tracks.  It was a good way to end my first term of second year.

My second to last layout assignment for design class this term was a repeat pan, which is one of those backgrounds typically used in TV shows that repeat over and over e.g. while a character is walking.  There was quite a bit of technical work behind this, in order to ensure that the right and left edges match up properly in order for the scene to repeat forever.  This was supposedly also going to be used as the background for our animation midterm, or something, but that didn’t end up happening.  It doesn’t matter though, because I ended up with a very nice stand-alone layout that I’m quite proud of.

It’s supposed to be a mad science lab.  Lots of nifty lasers and robots and uh… Erlenmeyer flasks!

It’s a brand new school year, with new projects to post.  I’ve already got a bit of a backlog, but I’ll get things rolling with this background I just finished off for design class.

Here we have a futuristic city, with famous world landmarks floating in the sky, featuring a three-point perspective upshot.  The surreal subject matter wasn’t my idea, sorry to say, and I wasn’t in love with it at first, but now it’s grown on me and I’m pleased with how it turned out.  Stay tuned for some actual animation shortly!

Aaaah, my first term layout final!  This one was tough, especially towards the end when I had to juggle it with my animation final.  Considering how few hours of sleep I was running on when I did the cleanup, I’m rather proud of it.  The idea behind this one was to create a “room with a personality”, i.e. a room that you could easily imagine the character who lives there.

I had a couple of initial ideas rejected by my teacher (including a big game hunter’s living room in which every object was made from an animal, and a sadistic child’s bedroom with mutilated toys everywhere).  The “ninja bedroom” was actually my third and initially least favourite idea, but after I basically had that one chosen for me I grew quite fond of it.  Behold the result:

The bonsai tree is by far my favourite element in the piece, it really makes the picture for me.  And I had to be shown how to draw trees like that; if it had all been up to me I would have drawn blobby circles attached to noodly sticks and called it a plant.  But now I have something I can actually be somewhat proud of to close out a productive first semester!

Sooo this was a pretty big one for my layout class (a.k.a. animation design).  I probably enjoyed that class in general more than most people did; the work is very precise and they really demand perfection.  It’s all about getting every singly tiny little line to angle towards the right vanishing point.  We did a kitchen in one-point perspective before this, but for the two-point version we were allowed to put in knick-knacks and appliances, which adds a lot of interest but also presents its own challenges.

I’m happy with how this turned out and I got a great mark; the main thing that marred it was my teacher circling Venus de Milo’s chest in red pen and asking for better structure there :S