The Garden Gang - An unexpected Visitor

Well, here it is!! The Garden Gangs gates can officially be opened, after a little trouble yesterday putting files together and rearranging the garden, we are ready to show what we (Me and Faye) have created, sit back, relax, pull up one of those white plastic garden chairs and tune into The Garden Gang - An Unexpected Visitor!

"Ah, the farmers been growing signposts again...wait."

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This was amazing to do, I've really enjoyed making this, and voicing a character (rather then being a narrator), and making this has taught me a few things, I think I've nailed down my secondary skills now at least, and I feel confident about my animation ability. :3 of course I'll always be learning, its one of those things you cant just finalise and say "yes, I can do this, bam." There will always be something new. To the future!!

Fayes Blog: -=LINK=-

Here at the Garden Gaaa-aaaaang...

(No Adam, The Flower Temple is done now) Oh right. Well I'd better talk about The Garden Gang then!! :3

With The Flower Temple done and dusted, its time both me and Faye focused our efforts on The Garden Gang, and focussed we have!! We feel like we can finish this animation of pretty soon and after spooling through it over the next week ironing out the creases, it should be up and running like The Flower Temple. :3

"I'm strong to the finich cause I eats me spinach..."

"...I'm Chip the sailor potato!!"

But does Chip succeed in uprooting the weed? o: (rhyme) we shall see...

You can also like the Garden Gang on Facebook :3 if you like. 

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Here at the FINISHED Temple!!

Friends, Romans, countrymen...Lend me your ears, eyes, and whatever other bits you need to watch a video. For I present unto you...

"Ooooooo!! Ahhhhhhhh!!"

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Quite possibly the greatest thing I've ever made to date. But I don't take full credit for this, This is a group project created by me, Faye Wombwell, Chloe Brown and Becky Burst for a friend of Faye's who is a musician and songwriter, Aaron Gywnaire. It's been a fantastic project and we've experimented well with completly different styles to our norm. It also really helped us learn about teamwork, and on top of all that I absolutely loved working with all the textures, I think I've found something fancy I like :3 Anyway!! I hope you all enjoy the video, and here are a few links to the wonderful people I collaborated with to make this.

(note, this will also be entered into the "Beat 100" Music competition. So I'll be posting a link here when thats up, get ready to vote!! )

Aaron: Facebook.com/aarongwynairemusic
Faye: phazeanimations.blogspot.co.uk
Becky: beckyburst.com
Chloe: Cjadebrown.blogspot.co.uk

Pie Arts, Finito!!

I've taken my time posting this, The eagle eyed among you will have noticed the video was up on Vimeo 2 days ago, I've just not had chance to blog about it because I've been working on my other projects. :3

"I may have left the keys at home..."

The Sky Arts sting is complete, whilst I feel this isnt really my bestest work, I'm still proud of it and I got a chance to try out some new ideas. :3 Best method of learning to animate is to play around with ideas and see what looks good. ^-^ anyway, here's a Link to the video, for those who didnt spot it before. :o

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Der Tempel von Blumen

(Multi-Lingual titles!! What a "good" idea!! :3 )

Anyway, Progress on The Flower Temple is wonderfully under-way  I've finished all my animation for the main video, all I need to do now is sort out a version of me in the style of The Flower Temple (Similar to the Cardboard Adam I made above, or the Lampshade Adam for "The Invention of the Book"), Then I can concentrate fully on The Garden Gang >:3 which is also coming along very nicely.

"And if you look to your left, you'll see a guy with a guitar, falling from the moon to the earth accompanied by a cascade of flow-...what?!"

I think we're on course to finish both projects on time, which I was a little panicked over this morning, but by this afternoon I'm happy to say I had done 6 out of 2 things on my to-do list, meaning in short, Happy Adam. :3 I'm confident we can manage both projects, but enough chatter, I owe you a video and here it is. The falling scene from "The Flower Temple". This isnt 100% finished (It's missing a certain celebrity unicorn call Elvis) But I made this version because I liked how calm and pretty it was without. :3 Enjoy.

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'ere @ de flwr tmpl init (Adam, seriously?)

I'm running out of punny/play on word titles. :I

Anyway! Multiple amounts of progress with The Flower Temple!! :3 It's all looking so beautiful!! Every scene we make looks so pretty, but all I can really show is screenshots right now (I don't want to give away anything just yet) here are two screenies. :3

"Good house, you've been very well behaved."

"Elvis, stop eating the set!! Can we get another flower on stage please?"

Its so darn beautifuls!! :3 (Good enough to eat according to our unicorn) I cant wait till this animation is done, its going to look so amazing. Its also taught me about working with textures and setting up the network so I can use special effects x: I plan to re-use these textures in future works :3 we'll just have to see what they are. ;)

Here at the Flour Temple...

"Gawsh, now thats purty!!"

The 2nd version of the Flower Temple is completed!! :3 After conformation from Aaron our client (basically making sure he likes this one), I cracked on with rigging up the temple and quickly animated a scene of how I wanted it too open, he also added he'd like to see some of the middle of the plant shoot off and explode, leaving seeds/pollen falling from the sky. :3 So I had a go at that too, just waiting to see what he thinks of that. Meanwhile, here is a link to what I've made. I'm jolly proud of it. X)

LINK

Button button who's got the button?

Decided to play around with the buttons we scanned in for the flower temple :3 Started with copying a few random shapes from the felt we scanned then added buttons.

These quickly ended up looking like houses, so I ran with that Idea and made some pretty looking houses from the nonsense I had. :3

At this point I started concentrating more on the angular house rarther then the round one. Probably because I was very happy with the roof i'd made in the above picture, but the way I'd arranged the roof made me do this :x

I made the designs on the roof look more like suns by using colourize, I didnt intend them to be suns but they just look so much better going from yellow to red. :3 looking at this again I also love how that window turned out, asif it just exploded out of the wall.

And finally, the entire colour scheme changed so that those suns really stuck out. X) I've no idea what I'll use either of these houses for, but they can certainly count as a good few hours experimenting with textures/buttons :3 I enjoyed it anyway.

I also made a prettyful sun in the same way as the roof suns, I keep getting ideas of it spinning, but with all the bits coming off it as secondaries, the sort of thing only I would bother to do, I'll animate that some day. X)

and so ends my to be honest, longwinded blog post. I guess I'm in that sort of mood :3

Olivia Yellow (Orange Adam, Orange)

Today has seen much progress, I finally managed to get the Mike Mushroom animation I lost re-animated again. Its taken longer due to random snow falling in March (ok...) But anyway, he's back now and he has another animation with him, introducing Olivia Orange!!

"No I don't have an itchy chin, I'm thinking!!"

This 1st animation is something I'm pretty happy with, though it's far from being finalised, the basics are there, and I even got to put in some secondary animation for her "hair" :3 (I do love secondries) anyway, here's a link to the piece.

LINK

Now I did say "1st animation" earlier...so here's a 2nd one...

LINK

This came about rather confusingly, initially I wanted to make Olivia jump, but I instead made her rotate backwards, a few more spins (and some random ideas from others) and this was created, Olivia floating off into deep space worrying about a weed, Oh dear. :3

Things are growing ahead nicely...

Progress!! Nearly every single character is fully rigged, and its finally time I did some tests animating them!! I've started small :3 namely, Mike Mushroom. I'm pretty happy with this scene, something feels incorrect but I cant think what, maybe someone else will spot it :3. Have a Link.

LINK
(Sadly, my USB is on its last legs, I'll have to re-animate this tomorrow, all of it is lost. :/ )

Sky Darts?

Another Sky Arts update!! Did huge amounts of actual animation on this today!! (Finally, no putting things together/rigging/drawing!!) It felt odd animating again after so long, but I got back into it :3 I might have a rough version of the piece ready on Wednesday. Until then though, here are a few images I took during the production of 3 of the 4 "characters" with there instruments. :3

"On the Guitar, The Amazing Ace!!"

"On the Rainbow Keyboard, Radical Rainbow Ronny!!"

"And on the Violin, Trevor, Just Trevor..."

Sky Parts (clouds?)

Another project!! This is another external brief project run by Sky Arts. We are to create a sting to advertise the channels Sky Arts 1 or 2. I finally started doing this project today and I'm happy with how far I got :3 I made an animatic!! and I did some designing on the side :3.

"AAARRRTTTSSS?" "no its Arts, three times..."

This is me trying to decide which colours each letter should have. :3 it looks pretty like that to be honest, looks abit pop arty, but I only want to use one set in the animation.

And here's a link to the animatic: LINK

Here at the-OH MY GOODNESS ITS BEAUTIFUL!!

The Flower Temple is lookin' mighty fine if I do say so myself, I'd crazy proud of this creation, and I'm not even finished with it yet!! I think I might have spent a little too much time on it though, got a bit carried away :x but its beautiful so that makes up for it. Anyway, here are a few shots of the temple in all its flowery-ness. :3

"Did the flowers sneeze?" "Eww no!!"

"Oooo now that looks fancy!!"

"Ohwww that looks amazing!!" (actual quote, yey!)

(The picture really doesn't give you the idea of the full prettiness of this thing, but I don't want to post up an exact copy of it, for fear of it being stolen, I'm that proud of it.)

I am too proud of this piece, its all so pretty!! and completely unlike anything else I've designed. Of course I cant take full credit, the individual flowers are both Mine and Faye's work, and I'm hoping to get some more from Becky to finish off the gaps I've left for them. My favourite flowers are hanging over the door, the flowers are made of multicoloured feathers and really turned out well. really tropical and trippy looking., which is what I wanted for a suitably trippy piece of music. Hooray for colour!! :3

Questions? Comments? Think it needs any more wibbly-wobbliness? :3

On the grow...

More Garden Gang things!! A few more characters got put together today :3 I might like to get some tests done soon with them too see how they look moving about.

"Now he IS appealing"

I personally think they're looking great!! The character itself is drawn by Faye, then I take the outlines, colour them in and piece them together. This way we wern't both drawing characters and ending up with 2 different styles by the end. :3 I also dont get bored of rigging, there's a little bit of joy in seeing the parts move how they should (and sometimes how they shouldnt! :3 )  I'd say we're about halfway through the characters now. Looking forward to animating all this.

Its "growing" on me...

(Adam that was a horrible pun, go away) No!! I need to tell you about things to do with The Garden Gang!! Today we officially put our 1st character together!! Infact, Mike Mushroom, Gary Grape and Alex Apple are all set to go, and with characters on there way everythings looking a lot better, its exciting seeing characters finally put together and able to move after all the planning. :3

"Oh no!! A terrible accident has occurred!!"

"There's not mush room in here..."

 We also got some feedback about Gary Grape, it turns out that everyone (including me initially) thinks he's a pea. To rectify this I quickly changed his base colours to be less pea-like and more grape-like, and I think its worked. :3

"I'm so a-pea-ling!!"

"That looks grape!!"

 Also, we should be getting some voices for The Garden Gang on thursday, hopefully we can play around with getting some characters talking after that!! If you cant tell, I'm excited. :3

Here at the Flower Temple...

Drawing time!! This is for a group project with Faye, Becky, Chloe and me called The Flower Temple. This is a song by a musical friend of Faye's called Aaron Gwynaire, and we're making a music video too go with it. This is just me posting two random pages of Flower Temple related stuff, trying to work out how we're going to make it look pretty and cute and such. :3 I love how the flower temple itself has turned out, but I think it needs one or two more things so I'm set to redesign it soon.

"Flower Power indeed."

"On reflection, I may have drawn the house like that because it was Valentines Day."

Oh! And here's a link to the animatic for this. :3

LINK

Gaaaaardnin'

I thought I'd draw up a few "pretty pictures" for The Garden Gang, just so I could see the layouts for certain scenes, concept art if you will. :3 anyway, these are what I came up with.

"Every garden has a miniature Gym, you just have to know where to look."

"Weed's a there!!"

Also, the story has changed slightly from the original. Running on feedback Faye got from Ed Hooks (and our own ideas.) We've moved the main aim of the story away from healthy eating (which kids of the age group we aimed for wouldn't really care about) and took it to gardening and general advice :3. We have a new animatic to go with this, which I shall provide a link for...now!!

LINK - Bonus points to Faye for uploading this. :3

Any pointers? A budding gardener yourself? Just plain hungry? :3 Drop me a comment.

Adam, more professional sign writer than last time (ish)

Update!! The previous sign was too creepy!! (which I agree with to be honest :3 ) But I can still use that style if I ever need a scary sign. So, in an effort to create a cuter sign I have came up with this!!

"Bzz Bzz Bzz Bzz..."

I think this is a much better look, much friendlier :3, and I'm so tempted to animate that bee!! I don't think its 100% finished but its getting there. Any pointers are welcome!!

Adam, Professional(ish) Sign writer

A quick mini-update on things Garden Gang related. We've sorted out posters and they should be dotted around the university somewhere (courtesy of Faye, thanks!) and I've spent a abit of time today making a sort of logo for The Garden Gang. I feel its far from finished but my ideas basically there. I wanted a badly painted sign, but for now it looks unrelated to The Garden Gang apart from the obvious writing. Hopefully I can discuss that on wednesday, for now, here's what I have so far.

"Be honest, you knew it'd be yellow"

Any pointers? Need more random signs? Give me a comment!! :3

But you're not a gardener Adam!!

New Semester, new projects, its almost like its a new year or something!! Anyway,  on with the next big thing, which for me and Faye is vegetables!! We're taking on a group of characters called "The Garden Gang", (which was a project to get kids eating healthier by Adsa in 1999) and making a little animation about life in the garden for them. :3 I'm really looking forward too it. Here are a few sketches I've done of some of the characters. (no I wont do captions for them all, I refuse, :3 )

Phew!! Well done for getting through them all, hopefully I can post up an animatic soon to go with this soon :3 until then, byes!!

LINK - Faye's Blog, as I'm doing this project with her, give it a look!!