Animations

As I may have mentioned, from 2009-12 I studied computer animation and digital art at the University of the West of Scotland (paisley campus). I have been interested in animation since I was a child watching a lot of cartoons. A lot of them inspired my drawing well into high school.

It wasn't until college that I made my first ever piece of animation - an ident for a non-existing TV channel.

My first ever animation (2008)

(it didn't originally look like this, due to the issue of fonts)

The course (like most animation courses today) are CG heavy. This meant that a lot of my time was spent making computer models. I did a number of models using Lightwave and (later) Maya...

Model of 1950s American suburban bungalow (2011)

Fruit bowl (2009)

Poktron 87E car model (2012)

My car model show-reel from (2012)

But the truth is I found working in 3D very tedious. I'm a bit of perfectionist. I wasted a lot of time tweaking those polygons. And I found texturing models convincingly was an art in itself, which I only managed to scrape by. Either surfaces were too shiny or the UV map was out of alignment in some way. (I once modelled a rocket and the UV map somehow caused the paintwork to form a "drip." As a joke, I wrote next to it "My Bad," like the person who painted it made a mistake.)

Rocket and launchpad model (2010)

In my heart I knew well before I entered the campus that my passion was for 2D. I only made one 2D animation during my course (and it used a 3D environment). But because of the amount of time I wasted trying to make a 3D car, it ended up rushed and the final result was (to be honest) ruff. If I hadn't wasted that time, the final result would have been much better. This one-minute short was called The Demonstration and it involved someone exploring a cafe when time is frozen. It was a sound idea, but.... see for yourself....

The Demonstration (2011)

My final hand-in for third year 

In the end (after all that) I learned the true respect animators deserve. Creating animation is a big commitment. Although the tools have sped up the time making them, it still takes time to make even a one minute short (which I can testify).

Since then I have made some short animations.

Some of them feature on this blog. Here's a list of posts featuring them. 

For more, see my You Tube channel.

Tribute to Channel 4

Look Around You homage