Mickey Mouse - Get A Horse

This is a part of the Disney animation "recently found" short 'Get A Horse'.
I went to see Disney's new animation Frozen last night (really worth a watch) but I actually enjoyed this more than the film itself. 
It started off as a typical classic Disney cartoon (I had no idea it was new, especially with them using clips of Walt Disney's voice for Mickey) with Mickey engaging in battle with Peg-Leg Pete. But in a twist that I definitely wasn't expecting (and I apologise for the spoilers) Mickey is forced through the cinema screen into the theater, emerging as colourised, CGI version of himself. He goes on to do battle with Pete on both sides of the screen with I thought looked absolutely amazing in 3D. 

I can't praise it enough. I would've been happy paying the extortionate £9.40 cinema price just to see this.

PPP1- Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want to learn?

Why did you choose to study on this programme?

- Animation is probably the only thing thats been a huge interest of mine throughout my life, I've always wanted to design my own characters and make them come to life. 

- Having already been in the institution for 3 years and enjoyed my learning experiences, I thought I might as well keep on with a good thing and continue my studies with LCA.

- It's a specialist animation program, and there's a lot of freedom to do your own thing within the course.

What do you want to learn during your time on the programme?

- To bring my ideas to life.

- To create interesting a loveable characters.

- How to go about getting into the industry.

What skills do you think are your strengths?

- I have a lot of weird and wonderful ideas that have potential.

- Character design

- Keeping to deadlines

What things that you want to improve?

- Time management.

- Animating in Photoshop

- Researching abilities

- Blogging & documentation

What ways you will evaluate your progress?

- Asking for feedback either from tutors, peers or on social networking sites. 

The importance of Twitter!

To get ourselves 'out there' and make us more aware of what's going on in the world of animation, we are advised to open up a Twitter account.

This is so we can follow people in the industry and learn about new and up and coming animations.
I have just set up my own animation orientated account so that I can still keep my personal one private.









I've gone on a bit of a following spree - all to do with the aspects of animation that interest me. It's also a good opportunity for me to follow my fellow course members to see what they're posting too.

Catbug

 

Words cannot describe the amount of love I have for Catbug. It's just a cheek-smushing, eye-watering ball of adorableness (is that even a word? If not, it totally should be to describe Catbug).

Since being a so-so fan of Adventure Time (still can't make my mind up whether or not I like it) I decided to have a look at Pendleton Ward's online mini series 'Bravest Warriors' as I really like the simple yet expressive design of his characters. That's where I came across the character of Catbug and it's had me hooked on Bravest Warriors. I literally just look for little snippets of Catbug. It sounds obsessive and it so is - 1,000,000 of the views on this video was probably me.

 

Kingdom Hearts concept art

This week I have been replaying an old childhood favourite of mine; Kingdom Hearts.
I've always loved the anime(ish) style of the heroes mixed with the classic Disney characters you come across in-game. I have a huge interest in concept art so I decided to look online to see if there was any about.

I found quite a bit on the game info website 'Neoseeker'.
This one for example, is an intitial design of the games main character Sora (like, why does he have a tail?!). I think it's really interesting how much they changed his design for the game.

If you didn't know the game was developed by Square Enix (formerly Squaresoft) you could probably tell from looking at these. You can clearly see the similarities of features between Sora and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII for example. 

I also came across many expression images. I enjoy tinkering with how characters may look in different situations in my own sketches so I find looking at these really interesting.

The Black Cat

I saw this animation while looking though the 'greatest' showcase on Skwigly and it's by student Jessica Lim.
It's an interpretation of 'The Black Cat' by Edgar Allan Poe and I think the dark, linear style of hand drawn frame-by-frame animation she has used has done the creepiness of the tale justice.  The part when the man is surrounded with thousands of 'accusing eyes' really stood out for me - it shows a lot of effort has gone into the drawing for the animation to do it on such a great scale.
I could really take inspiration from animations like this for my own as I too enjoy dabbling in creating frame-by-frame animations and then colouring them digitally.