2 Absolutely Brilliant Stop Motion Videos Using Action Figures

Just watch them please :D. They are both seriously amazing in their own ways, and deserve a lot of recognition. I would love to be able to make videos like this, they definitely have inspired me and Id love to make something similar with my own unique twist on it xD. I love the music in the Iron man vs Bruce Lee one and the implentation of well known sound effects in the Godzilla one helps to immerse you into the setting very well actually, I forgot I was watching a stop motion video xD.

Krazy Kakashi: An Official Fundamental In Making Other's Lives Better

I just logged into to my main Youtube account today as usual, and checked the new comments on my videos, only to discover the most shocking, enlightening and motivational comment I have ever received in my life for anything, and I quote:

Riaxaria

I just have to tell you my man, I have a good friend dying from cancer; If it not for the utter magnificence of your unique and brilliant Phoenix Wrong videos all this time I don't know where I would be right now in life. Thanks a great deal Kakashi, dont ever stop doing what you were meant to do. Continue inspiring others with your outrageous talent and five star sense of humor. A smile a day can change a life. A thousand laughs per minute can change the attitude of the world. HpyB!!!

That was posted on my Ultimate Wrongs Part 2 video and it can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HEEXWVLBw

Well, I think you can see why I was so shocked and amazed by that comment now. I actually managed to help someone out greatly in that sort of situation by just being myself essentially, not a lot of people can say that! All I ever cared about with these videos is also my life long passion, to be able to make others laugh as much as possible mainly with just being myself! This comment has been an unbelievable motivational boost for me, if ever required any motivation to keep myself goign with these videos, this is it. Im a veyr keen supporter of fighting cancer as my grandma very nearly lost her life to it a year ago and also recently a best friend of mine came down with a cancerous lump but is doing fine now with the treatments and all that. I also support several charities and I work for Cancer Reserarch so this is just an amazing discovery for me really, this is definitely going to keep me going with these videos, knowing once and for all just what kind of impact they really do have.

There you go anyways, thought I'd let you all know about it :).

Identities Box Project Update: Final Concept and Construction

With my Identities Box project so far, I havent got as much done as I would have liked to ideally. My concept for it is finally solidified now though, and Ive chosen how the box will be and the 5 elements that will form it.

With the core of the box, I have decided to go for the idea of the manga books on a table as I've learned how to build everything I need for that with 3DS Max now, and I can use Manga Studio to greatly assist me with it too. I'm not making the conents of the books interactive anymore, I believe that I definitely don't have enough time left to do that, but each book will still contain one of the 5 elemements.

My logo has already been built, and I'm currently building the 3D avatar now. I've endured weeks of frustration on how to use 3DS Max and modelling my character, but the penny has finally dropped and I know now what Im doing hence Im trying to make up for lost time now. The avatar will be a merge of the two outfits I showed for my character from IMVU, and if I do get time somehow, I'll try to model the secondary avatars as well, who are going to acts as pets for my main avatar.

The audio-visual element is going to be based on the tributes I do to the fan created parody series of the Phoenix Wright games, Phoenix Wrongs. I'm currently developing a video of my greatest sketches out of all 12 of the videos I've made so far and I may make it longer than the (just under) 10 mins that I usually do depending on how it goes.

My 4th element has finally been sorted on what it is going to be. It's going to be two seperate videos, included as one video, as I would like to have both videos in the project to be honest. The first video wil be a stop motion animation of a wooden mannequin I have dancing to different songs, or maybe just one depending on how long it takes to do all the photo shooting. The other video I will be submitting will be a whiteboard animation, but I'm throwing in a little twist on it. I own several whiteboards due to buying a bundle off them instead of 1 by accident on a website, and hence I thought Id make the most of them. Im going to have them arranged in a horizontal row and basically, imagine an animation starting on the leftmost board like someone kicking a ball. After he kicks it, I can use the whiteboards to show the ball traversing from one whiteboard to another as it flies to the right, getting larger on each board until it hits something or someone. I believe if I manage to execute this well enough, it will be a highly impressive video to watch :P.

And finally, the 5th element is going to be a slideshow of my drawings I have done, since I started using my graphics tablet to the last one I did, just before I made the slidehow.I've got an insane to impossible amount to get done in the time I have left, so Im currently trying to get as much done as possible whilst actually staying calm for the most part. One of my biggest weakenesses is how much I panic over things like unfamiliar new situations with high risks like exams and also nearing deadlines for projects, but I'm slowly learning to be calmer and more composed and focused now with them. Im not letting myself go into a panic frenzy like I usually do, I will get as much I physically can get done with this project and I for once, will be happy with what I managed to achieve regardless.

Drawings Update 7/4/09

Sorry I havent updated in a while again, have been so caught up with doing my Identities project work as well as my upcoming Japanese oral exam, so Im very stressed out right now, but I have done a lot of new drawings which I will show now:


This first drawing is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I'm a big fan of the series and this character so she was was on my list of characters to draw, and I chose this picture especially because it was done in the Chibi art style. I am extremely keen on this art style as I love how cute and adorable the characters look (xD), but I love how colourful and joyful they appear too, as well as the oversized head proportionality to them lol. I'm trying to learn how to draw Chibi style properly at the moment using some Manga drawing books, and I hope to be able to draw my own characters in it.

This drawing is of Link from the Zelda series, but this is a new art style invented for the series starting with the game Zelda: The Wind Waker. It was an all new cel shaded art style that caused both a lot of controversy as well as appreciation and divided a lot of the long dedicated fans. Up to this day, the style has grown on people more now though and has been used in other games, some of them starring the same Link from that timeline, which are: Zelda: The Minish Cap, Zelda: The Four Swords, Zelda: Phanthom Hourglass and Zelda: Spirit Tracks (W.I.P.). I added a black border around this drawing too after seeing how well it worked with the previous one, and I have to say, it's worked pretty well with both the coloured and original black and white versions of this one. I absolutely love black and white graphic style effects, but not in insane amounts as offered in that new Wii game Madworld -_-'.



This 3rd drawing is of Konata from the anime and manga series Lucky Star. I'm a big fan of this character as I find her personality pretty similar to mine and I love the colour of her particularly (xD). Hence I had to draw her too, and this picture I used seems to depict her in some sort of a Phantom Of The Opera outfit, which I haven't seen before, but I never watched the series through though. It could be a fan art for all I know, as poeple these days can actually replicate manga artist's work perfectly from scratch which is actually very intimidating for people like me now lol.





These next 2 drawings are of characters I created by "accident" when working from some step by step guides in my Manga books. What happened is as I was following the instructions, I drew the characters to close to the paper's edge and hence I couldn't fit on the whole of their hairstyles so I had to improvise and change their hairstyles to make them fit on the page. On the second drawing with the character at the top, that si a pretty accurate recreation of the original character as that one I managed to do fine. The first drawing was ironically a boy to begin with, but as I continued to draw him, he started to look more feminine due to how I drew him, hence I decided to make him a "her", and there's the final result of what happened lol. The bottom part of the second drawing went through a pretty drastic change too, he had huge spikey hair in a semi circle fashion, but as you can see, I changed his hair quite a lot lol. Also, I changed the colours of this drawing and that boy (who's now a girl), and I added face markings to this character to make them more like my own creations in essence.


This next drawing is one of my favourite characters, Rukia Kuchiki from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I really loved the original picture for this, hence I decided to sketch it out and this is what I got eventually. It was a pretty demanding drawing especially compared to some of my more modern ones, and I decided to start using different shades of gray and highlights for the black and white pictures to add more depth to the composition anyways.



This drawing is of my closest friend for quite a long time now, Leila Fox. She is a serious art fanatic and is one of the best artists I've seen especially non professional of course, and she is extremely popular with my old school's Art department for obvious reasons. I've been trying for ages to sketch a decent drawing of her, but I always struggled due to my lack of skills and experience with drawing human anatomy, hence I never managed to do one successfully. I finally managed to do this drawing though recently after a random, unexplainable surge of determination I got to fulfil this wish of mine and I used the same style I did with my self portrait to to draw this. I started using the Tones feature in Manga Studio, to help with the shading of this drawing as well as make it more eye appealing, particularly the background as you can see. Completing this drawing was a serious achievement for me and it gave me a fairly strong confidence boost as a a result too, and it was all thanks to getting a graphics tablet in the first place :D.



Finally, we get to another drawing of Phoenix Wright I've done, but this time in his original form as drawn by the artist. I loved how this one turned out after it was coloured, it really does resemble the original artwork for him very well, hence it did my confidence a good boost. Embrassingly, I was lazy with shading and colouring the bench he's on actually, as I was too tired to finish the sketch and I wanted to get it out the way at the time, so I cloned the bench from the original picture to save a lot of time and effort. It looks good of course being the original bench used, but it's also a pretty cheap result because I didn't draw and shade in the bench myself >_< bleh. Im still pretty pleased with the whole picture though regardless.

A Truly Amazing 3D Animation Video I Found

This video is a fan of the Naruto anime and manga series' attempt to animate scenes from the manga which haven't been animated yet. The person who made this used a combination of Maya, After Effects and Photoshop to produce his own animated versions of the manga scenes, and I was seriously blown away by it. This is something I'd love to be able to do, and it's the sort of thing I was hoping to work towards as Im aspiring to be a manga artist or a character artist/animator preferably. I thought it would be better to combine these two careers as much as possible into one, hence Ill be a character artist focusing on the manga style really. I'm going to try and work to this guy's level as much as possible, obviously it won't be an overnight process, but with enough time and determination put in, I could do it.

Drawings Update 29/03/09

This first drawing is of Sadaharu, a giant alien dog from the anime and manga series, Gin Tama. The picture was done in an orthographic style with 3 different views of him, hence I found it quite useful to draw as draing from different angles is one of my weaknesses.

This next drawing is of the Akatsuki leader from the Naruto Shippuuden anime and manga series, Tobi or his true name Madara Uchiha. He's one of my fave characters in the series with a really goofy personality that also really matches mine well and a brilliant voice actor to boot. I decided to colour this one on a whim and it soon caught on for me after it was done. It did turn out pretty well and now I aim to colour each new drawing when I do one if possible.

And this next drawing is of one of my most favourite characters in general from a game as well as an anime and manga series now, Sheena Fuyibashi. She is from Tales of Symphonia and she's another character who I adore for her personality, but I love her clothes too, especially since they are a kunoichi (female ninja) style. If you can, open the image in a new tab or window to see it in it's true quality and size :P.
This drawing is of an "legendary" character from the Zelda CD-I games called "The King". He never had a name as far as I know, that's how he is always referred to, the poor guy. The games are spoofed immensely because of how cheesy and childish they were, and the King with his extremely "memorable" quotes has become a huge internet phenomenon and gets parodied all the time. The writing in the picture is his most famous catchprase and it is abused a lot, people just love to say it, the man has been a massive influence but not for the reasons he was intended to be I dont think xD.

Finally, we get to the drawing I did a little earlier. This one is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series, Bleach. I absolutely love the chibi style of drawing and wanted to learn how to and master drawing with it, hence this picture was ideal for me, and it has turned out fantastic in my opinion! :D I particularly love how well I managed to colour it and replicate the original picture it was based on, even though this was a trace =/. I am doing drawings on a daily basis now, hence I will be blogging on them more frequently as I'm doing at least 5 drawings a week now :P.

My Personal Progress So Far

At the moment, I've got a 101 things going on, so I thought I'd blog about what's happening and what I'm doing for the course as it stands, especially as I keep forgetting to.
First things first, I've definitely decided on my pathway, I already had it in mind when I chose the course, and my mind hasn't changed at all, the pathway I'm taking is Virtual Environments. It combines 3 things I'm very keen on, Virtual Reality, Games Design and Animation, it's a sort of mecca for me right now XD. I'm currently in the progress of writing my 2nd essay which is all about design pathways for the course and pracititioners from the area you're interesed in. Embrassingly, I've only started the intro, but I will amp up the work done on it immediately, I'll explain later why I haven't gto as much of it done as Im meant to.

After being recommended a book by Roma and Jools doing a lecture on books, I decided to set out and get borrowing books from the library...finally lol. It was definitely a great idea, as I was a kid in a candy store when I found the games design and animation sections, hence i've gota lot of books to talk about now XD. Roma recommended me a book called "The Skillful Huntsman", which is all about the recreation of a particular book by graduates and students/teachers from one of the world's leading art schools which is based in America (Art Centre College of Design, Pasadena in California). the book is all about the design process the artists when through when they were designing the visual piece. What attracted me was how they devleoped the characters, they started out with hundreds of miniscule but pretty detailed thumbnail sketches of a character, and built up the character through increasingly complex stages, involving larger, more detailed sketches, silhouette forms, drawings of the head alone etc. It's really fascinating to see how they go from simple, tiny sketches to extremely detailed, awe inspiring, much larger sketches in the end which become the character you see eventually.

Moving on, I bought some books after borrowing them from the library and finding them really useful for the course, especially with the pathway I've chosen and they will also help wih my personal work and eventual career a lot too. I'm jsut going to list the books instead of describing them, as this blog is going to be very, very long without me describing them anwyays! The books that I think are really useful, and definitely worth a look for anyone considering Virtual Environments are:

1. Animating Real Time Game Characters - Paul Steed
2. Video Game Art - Nick Kelman
3. The Complete Guide To Game Development, Art & Design -David McCathy, Ste Curran and Simon Byron
4. Inspired 3D Short Film Production - Jeremy Cantor, Pepe Valencia
5. The Skillful Huntsman - Khang Le, Mike Yamada, Felix Yoon, Scott Robertson

I haven't actually read these books through ironically, I'd have to be Superman to have read all of them by now -_-', but from what I saw upon looking through them quickly, I was highly impressed. You can get all the books from the library, (after I return them on Friday of course :P) and if you wanna get them after seeing them, I seriously recommend Amazon, they are pretty cheap on there usually. As well as those books, I bought 3 books from the "For Dummies" range, which are Drawing, Manga and Manga Studio For Dummies to help with my drawing as much as possible, as seeing as I'm a complete beginner, I need all the help and practise I can get 0_0. Again, I havent read them but I'm going to try and read them as much as possible soon especially Manga Studio so I can get closer to drawing better as soon as possible.

As it stands, I'm currently undergoing life drawing classes as well as doing as my own sketches to boost my drawing skills as much as possible, as I'm aiming to be a character artist or an animator. I've done 2 classes now, but the term is finished so I have to go in the next term now. Our tutor reckons we shouldn't think about textures till at least 20 weeks into the course though, which could be in the 2nd year possibly. I have no real experience with drawing to be honest, I didnt really practise that much in the past, and I had such a "rollercoaster" experience with my drawings in the past before I upgraded to a tablet, I got put off it and decided to try wing it purely as a technical animator somehow. I've regained my determination to draw again though, as you can tell from what I've done above and my previous blog posts.

It is extremely difficult for me right now though, thankfully the life drawing classes are over, as in 2 weeks time, I have major exams for Japanese which are the last ones for this year, the super evil sounding oral exam is after the easter holidays though. In that same week, I have a 10 minute presentation to do for the Identities project, and also hand in the essay I mentioned earlier, due to my neighbours dogs barking for hours everyday and sending me into a near mental breakdown alone from that! I am going to try coming into uni to work now though as I've had enough now, I may use Boots Library's study rooms actually, or just go into Waverley, especially for computer based work. I have been reduced to tears practically from stress lately, and I'm currently finding things extremely difficult, the hardest part of my life so far, but I'm pulling through slowly. With life drawing, it's going to take me AGES to even do anywhere near decent drawings, and for someone with low patience and a tendency to get put off easily due to too much self reflection, comparison to other examples and lack of immediate results, this is so going to be "fun".

Finally, with the Identities project so far, I've got some of the elements built already as you will have seen from my blogs. Ive got my ideas sorted now, and Im trying to go for the table idea with comic books on it for the hub of the box. My logo has been made now, I've already got 1 of my additional elements ready which is one of my Phoenix Wrong videos (a compilation verison made exclusively for this), and the other additional element is gonna be a slideshow of all the drawings I will have done by mid April ish. Since I can easily make the slideshow quickly through Sony Vegas, Im leaving it till last and gettign everything else sorted including building the actual box. I'm still trying to master Bipeds, Walking and Facial Animation in 3Ds Max, and also learn how to make a table in it (I learn how to make a book). Hence, Im still trying to build my 3D avatar, but I definitely know how it will look, if you want to know what it will look like, check the blog before this one ;D. I also want to make some additional 3D avatar pets for my avatar himself, which are characters I made up and are quite fond of, so Ill try to make them in time for this project.

That's everything about what's going on with me at the moment I think anyways, ill update again in the future to let you know how the project is coming along then.

Drawings Update 11/03/09

Blimey, it has been a fair while since I last posted, but I have got some more drawings to show off. These were all done specifically for the Identities project, with the the 3D avatar in mind of course:


This drawing is off a new character I invented through total randomness XD. Im a massive fan of Ninjas and Meerkats, and I felt like combining them for some reason lolol. This is a basic sketch of what Id like my Ninja Meerkat character to look like anyways. I used a photo of a meerkat as inspiration and guidelines for this sketch. Ideally, I want him to be the pet of my main 3D avatar, although hes fine to be a stand alone character too.






With these pictures, I wanted to create a 3D avatar version of Jeffrey the Seal who's a character invented during the editing of my version of my group's one shot film lol. He started off an as ordinary imaginary character in the film, but I dubbed it with seal sound effects and thus Jeffey the Seal was born due to that XD. To produce these drawings, I bought some ceramic seals from the charity shop I work at, and I took photos of them, and used photos for one of them as the basis for the drawings. As you can see above, I took photos in an orthographic style, hence I have drawings of the Top, Left and Front views of Jeffrey as a result. I'm going to use these to help model the 3D version of Jeffrey neways.



If you've been following my 3D avatar diaries, then you should know who this fellow is^^. It's my character from IMVU, KrazyKakashi! Its the avatar I also want to recreate in my 3D avatar work for the Identities project, as the two different oufits there both contain the exact elements of how I'd love my ideal self to be! Anyways, to help with recreating my avtar from IMVU in 3DS Max, I thought I'd take screenshots of both outfits and draw them out, so I could look at them whilst I'm sculpting the avatar in 3DS. These were tough to do, as the quality of the screenshots (due to the quality of the game) weren't fanatstic and looked fairly horrid when imported into Manga Studio, it made zooming in difficult as a consequence, but I finally managed to draw them in the end. I drew basic versions of them by the way due to this problem as the finer details were much harder to see as well, but these will do perfectly fine for my 3D avatar, although the wings may benefit from some added detail.

My All New Logo

In order to develop my logo for my Identities project and personal work too, I originally started with Macromedia Fireworks CS4, but I eventually ended up creating the newer designs in a program called "The G.I.M.P."
The definitive nickname I want to go by for both my university work and my personal projects is: "Krazy Kakashiii", and hence I chose to base the design of my logo around this moniker as much as possible. I started out in Fireworks developing the text part of the logo, I experimented with some premade effects and textures to develop the logo, and ended up making quite a few different designs as a result.

As you can see above, I ended up creating logos with very different styles to one another. I was hoping to have a blue or green colour scheme, as they are my favourite colours and also, green is often associated with both the characters used in my existing logo. Hence, even though I do prefer the colour blue, I'm swinging more towards using green actually, as I feel it will blend and correspond with Tama-Chan and Kakashi due to their colour schemes. To be honest as well, green is definitely looking better than blue does with these logos so it would be good to have a logo based on several shades of green.

Looking back over the previous designs, I found the light blue one that I made with the "Hobo" was the most ideal font for my logo and was the one I felt most comfortable ad pleased with. I love how the shadow and highlight are used to make it stand out like that, it's something I enjoy adding onto text when I working in GIMP.

Anyways as you can see above, I set to work developing the final version of the logo text using said font. I decided to focus on a blue and green colour schemes as you can see here, but I also gave orange a try as a part of a very random whim. The bottom most logo is the one that I'm happiest with, and is the one I chose to use as part of my logo. Since I have sorted out the text part of my logo, all that is left to do is create the background/graphics for the logo and it will be complete. Ideally as I found out from a friend, the best thing to have done here, was to create the background for the logo in Adobe Illustrator BEFORE creating the text in Fireworks, as if you make the text in Fireworks first and export it, you can't really edit it easily in Illustrator, hence you lose a lot of freedom with the design of it that way.

So instead of using Illustrator, I decided to use GIMP instead as I'm a lot more comfortable with it and it means I can easily work on the logo from home. I set work developing a range of new designs for the logo neways featuring several different background in them, which I shall show now:

As evident from the pictures above, I created quite a lot of different designs for the logo, but my personal favourites from them are the Africa one and the one with a Geisha woman holding a Japanese umbrella. I was going to use one of them for my logo, until I came up with my newest idea...


I decided to sketch the picture I originally made for my existing logo, and make the sketch into a new logo! As you can see above, that is the logo I made after sketching the characters and colouring them in and then fitting the text on as well. The first version of this I made has no background, but I included a background on this to make it stand out better. I really like this logo actually, and I am going to use it as well as my final logo, but then again I'm still tempted to use the Japanese Umbrella one alongside this one too as a secondary logo. If anyone could give me their opinions on the logos and which one to choose, I'd very grateful :P.

Drawings Update - 1/03/09

This first drawing is of the main antagonist Gintoki from the absolutely amazing, hilarious and random anime/manga series Gintama :P. Everyone who has seen this picture loves it, and reckon it's at least the 2nd best one I've done so far, which is something I strongly agree with it. It took quite a while to draw you may have guessed, but not as long as the Kakashi one.

This next drawing is a self portrait I did as part of my practise of drawing myself, which is something I need be able to do for my ideal 3D avatar. I was meant to draw myself in manga style, but I decided to draw it in a more realistic style for now instead.

Ironically, just earlier today I decided to draw a manga style version of myself as you can see above me. This is pretty how I'd love to look as a manga character before I actually joined IMVU and made my ideal character there XD. I used the same photo of myself for guidance and drew this face with it, along with some help from one of my manga drawing books. I will attempt to do some more manga drawings of myself and also possibly different angles and expressions too as these will come in great importance for how my 3D character will look and function.

This drawing is of two of my most favourite anime characters, Tama - Chan from Love Hina and Hatake Kakashi from Naruto, who both have been mentioned a fair bit by me in the past, especially Kakashi. I'm going to try and use this drawing as part of the logo I have to develop for both my personal work and my Identities project, and once the final logo is ready, Ill post a blog all about the logo, the other ideas I had for it and my design process. I will also be colouring this drawing anyways as part of the logo.