May: Sketching Scriptwriting Reading (Distracted)

In May, I slightly moved away from procedural workflow but more towards hand-drawn workflow. Since the last rotoscoping mini-project, I managed to finally grasp a proper drawing tablet (previously using iPad with sidecar - lines being quite wobbly and needed a lot of sculpting and auto-smoothing..). Anyways - it was one of the best feelings in May - drawing on a drawing tablet (with a screen!!) I started to be able to grasp ideas from the back of my mind and quickly visualise them into storyboards. The boards were mostly sketches that had low granularity, but with main elements in the composition, and the essential part was animated frame by frame (extremes only). It is what they called "Blocking".

Blocking involves identifying:

It should be done without any interpolation between the frames. However stepped it'll look like, blocking done right can show the exact rhythm of the final output, and the in-betweens can be added later. As a beginner, I tended to animation without any plan. A plan means when the action will take place, what the character will do etc.

So May was the month that I used Grease Pencil only in blender. I tried to capture the ideas that popped up in my head while I was jogging, eating, doing nothing, reading, talking etc and visualise them in some way. In this process, the fact that I couldn't draw hands free-will made me want to draw hands only, at least practise more so that I can occasionally draw good hands. I came across this book by the 加々美高浩, and was mesmerised.

After rotoscoping the my liberation notes scene, and somehow wanted to utilise the drawing tablet as much as I can (by drawing lol), and with an urge of drawing something more meaningful, drawing my grandma was the next thing came up in my mind. There was this vivid photo that was taken few years ago during the New Year when she was playing MahJong with us. She won one huge game and was smiling as bright as I could ever remembered her doing so. Her "peace" sign was shy, but freeing.

The MahJong set was modelled with geometry node distribution by points :laugh: I couldn't help it. The fan was 3d modelled and they felt better off without any materials added. The timing and spacing need to be tuned.

Then - had more time to think about timing and spacing, but I still wanted to draw freely, so came up with this bird morphing random cycle animation.

Lots of random stuff in the past month. treating vimeo as my dump site :D