BLU Artist Research

Blu is an artist that has travelled all over the world creating works of arts that have a point to them, working with spray paint on small murals all the way up to creating huge images on the sides of building or wherever he deems fit. He typically tries to conceal his identity from every one as much as possible and trys to be a shadowy figure just like Banksy as he would rather get on with his art, rather then go to huge exhibitions he would prefer to go to other territories.

Blu's fame was first found in 1999 after he had created a series of illicit graffiti which he had painted in the historical centre and suburbs of Bologna which was the capital of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region. In the early years of his career he was simply limited it spray paint which is why he appeared in the graffiti culture. However in 2001 he started to use house paint, using rollers which he had applied to telescopic sticks which aloud him to reach a much bigger area to paint on. With the ability to do this he started to create human figures which emitted a range of emotions and looked as if they were from a cartoon or video game.

Blu has travelled all around the world to places such as: Central and South America, West Bank, England, Spain, Germany, Italy and other parts of Eastern Europe. He has created murals in all of these country's to do with things such as plantation workers not being treated properly and creates a point out of art which people can then relate too.

This shows you where he has visited and what he has accomplished in each of the places.

Character Loop - Ideas and Design

We were told to come up with some ideas for a character that we would eventually animate, we were given a sheet of A3 paper and let our imaginations go wild. However I missed the lesson so I had to come up with a few ideas quick and came up with a few:

A ghost with huge eyes and a sad mouth as he is dead and not happy about it. I would animate the legs that sort of look like tentacles to move about slightly and possibly had dribble slurp up and down from his mouth as he looks quite cute and cartoon like.

A space invader sort of shape with strange eyes and a small mouth. I would animate this character by having his mouth get bigger then shrink back down whilst he changed through a variety of colours.

A face with buck teeth and huge blood shot eyes. I would animate this character by having the blood vessels enlarge and shrink whilst his pupils moved around and he twitched his nose every now and then.

A rabbit with huge spoon like ears and two huge buck teeth. I would animate this character by having his ears sway from side to side slightly and one would twitch every now and then and he would also scratch the side of his body to indicate he has fleas.

A bird with unproportioned body parts such as Huge eyes, Huge beak and small wings and legs to make it slightly cartoon looking. I would animate this character by having his wings flap really fast as they are smaller than his body so need to keep him a float, his feet would tuck up and down into his body as he flew, his eyes would also look around to see what was going on.

After looking at the pictures for a while I had decided to animate the ghost as I thought I would enjoy it the most and decided to make some changes to one of his eyes and make it bigger and the other smaller to give him a cute kind of look and make him slightly rounded and squashed rather than have him long and thin.

His eye sockets would remain blank throughout every scene as he is a ghost. His legs which are small tentacles will sway from side to side to make it look like he is moving or hovering within the air. I also selected 16 colours and decided on three to use which I thought would look best and applied them onto my character, I eventually decided to go for the green I had selected as I thought that it looked the best and is personally my favourite colour.

After this we were given a a booklet to lay out the frames for our character just like the bouncing ball task. I created 13 frames that would loop together with his legs swaying from the outside to the inside and the dribble hanging down his mouth the being sucked back up to give the impression he is a cute little ghost.

Bouncing Ball Animation

I was given a sheet which explained the ball animation and how to do it step by step. There are specific frames which are detailed for specific reasons as they are key frames such as when the ball is at its peak in the air or when it has impacted onto the ground. We had to draw these out 1st on a small sheet of paper and have a line along the bottom to act as the floor and this was the guide to line each frame up as well. We copied the main frames 1st then started to fill in the rest of the shot for the ball, these mainly consisted of the ball falling down and then bouncing up again slowly losing its momentum until it had gradually stopped and stayed still.

One we had all of these frames onto our small booklet we then took a screen shot of every page using iStopmotion and a digital camera connected up to the mac. I blue tacked the back of my pad of paper so that when I turned over the pages the pad would not move so the line would stay in the same place and create a smooth flow throughout the process. However a few of my shot at the end got blurry and I couldn't focus the camera for some reason so I tried to make them look as good as possible but I still think it looks quite good despite the blur.

Once we had each of these we then had import it into Final Cut and create a small animation out of it however the clip only lasted for about 4 seconds so we had to copy the clip and repeat it a few times to give the video some length.

Stop Animation Sound Exercise

Today we combined our iStopmotion video and sound where we used coins that were inside a tupperwear box. The lid was slowly removed and the box would then slowly falls over onto one side and the coins would then pour out of it, they would then spread out around the box and then reverse the process and go back into the box with one coin left and then the lid to the box creates a ramp for the last coin to roll up and after it has fallen into the box the lid secures itself back to the box again.

The sound effects were recorded directly into final cut using the voice over tool. We did a variety of sounds such as tipping the coins out of the box, scraping a coin along the table for the sound effect of the coin rolling up the lid, the snap sound when the box flaps open and close. We then combined the two together and slowly pieced the parts of sound together that we needed to create our animation clip.