Hello!

Hello and welcome to my blog which, as you can see from the rather clever title, has been set up to cover some of the research and work I'll be doing throughout my final year at Abertay. It's taken a while but I think I've worked out(more or less)what my project and dissertation are going to be about and I can finally start putting some bits and pieces up. For my project I will be creating an animation of around 2-3 minutes in duration and my aim is to use limited animation techniques, particularly those developed in Japanese anime but in a non-Japanese setting, in this case the wild west. I chose this idea because I wanted to develop my character design, storyboarding and story telling skills.

To be honest I don't have very much experience as an animator even for a student so on the face of it committing to a project such as this doesn't make much sense. The reason for this decision comes really from seeing the 4th year exhibition in the summer. My main interest at this moment is more towards the pre-production side things such as character development, storyboarding etc but looking at last years graduate's work made me want to have something tangible to show for my hard work. I decided to learn about limited animation as it is a style which has evolved primarily within the animation industry through the need to make the process as efficient as possible and was invaluable in the early days of Japanese animation as a way to overcome the lack of experienced animators.

As well as detailing my progress as I go I'll be posting up some of the things that inspire and interest me too. The video below is from a documentary called "From Scrolls to Screen" which appears on the Animatrix DVD and it essentially summarises some of the techniques and influences that will inform my project. I hope you enjoy the blog :)