Blog Post and Work Log 11/14/2021

 Inspiration Page:

        One Artist that recently inspired me is the artist Casey McDonald who goes by Gothfrog on YouTube. This artist is a SVA graduate (School of Visual Arts), and she is .currently working freelance in NYC. She made this short film for her SVA Thesis as her final film.

        This short film inspired me in a few ways, the first one being the nature components shown throughout the film. The story is set inside of a forest, and it even includes the different seasons as the story progresses. What I specifically was inspired by was the leaves. I loved how she made the fall leaves bright and colorful, and I thought it showed good technique too; how she gave the leaves a simple design but did not over-detail them since they were not the main focus of the story. I hope I can balance the background detail and not overpower the actual focus of my animation.

        Another way this inspired me was by the overall cohesiveness of the setting. Above you can see an example of this and how all the colors mix well together. This color pallet is also very visually appealing. The overall brightness influences the mood of the story, and I hope that I can effectively find good lighting and textures that mesh well.

        The final way I was inspired was how the characters conveyed emotion, She was able to perfectly tell a story and capture the feelings of the characters without even using their voices. She did this by changing the expressions of the characters and also through body language. Because I am only planning on animating hands, I will not be able to use expressions to convey emotion, but I hope to use body language to make up for that in my animation.

Work Log:

Monday:

I continued to work on sculpting the experimental tree.

Tuesday:

I finished sculpting the experimental tree.

Wednesday:

I found an hdri image to use for lighting.

Thursday:

Started to follow a tutorial on how to texture paint with stencils in another file.

Friday:

I continued following this texture stencil tutorial for the tree, and tested the stencil on the bark of the tree.