Week 38 Comments

This week was nice but a little busy. We had an ok amount of work days but had to worry about presentations/papers. What frustrated me this week is not getting a lot of progress on my poem. The Poem is due in a few days and I haven't made much progress yet. But I can wine about it all I want. In the end I brought this upon myself by procrastinating an worrying about how I would pull what I want off. So I'm going to finish it by the deadline and I'm going to try a few interesting styles to achieve that. What made me happy this week was think of an idea for my next video. I decided to the evolution contest and I thought of a good idea for it too. It's going to be an animation and I can't wait to work on it. I'm currently looking forward to working on that and I hope things go as smoothly as I can make them in the days to come. Anyways link of interest...

This is the trailer for the new Lego Batman movie. I really liked the Lego movie when it came out in 2014, and this movie looks like everything great about that movie now with Batman! I love the art style they do for these movies and it also looks very funny. Also funny enough it looks a lot better than what Batman V Superman was... ughhh.  I personally didn't really like that movie that much, The stuff with Batman was good and Ben Affleck was honestly one of my favorite on screen Batmans ever, but the rest of the movie was just really boring and nothing really made sense. But this movie looks like they are attempting to add some sort of joy to the film.

Drawing people that look some what real

This article was about a few techinques to draw more real looking people. The first tip is to draw around a line of action. If you don't have this, your characters posture could look weird and not focused, almost like a robot. It's important to draw a line of action so you have a certain flow to your character. The next tip is to do a head count for your characters. By this it means drawing out how many circles (being the size of your characters head) tall your character is. A smaller more cute like character might be a only a few circles tall, but a taller more heroic character might be a lot more. The next tip is about keeping in mind how broad your characters shoulders are. This might seem like a pretty insignificant detail at first but it really does change the look of your character. The wider and broader your characters shoulders are, the more strong and heroic he will look. Similar to the last technique. The next technique is keeping in mind where the parts of your face go. It's important to keep in mind that eyes are pretty much dead smack in the middle of your face. Meaning you should start with the eyes and build off of that, being how tall the forehead or chin should be for example. The next tip is keeping the next straight but not too straight. You shouldn't draw the neck as flexible as a noodle, but it should be shifting a little bit in some direction just so you don't look like a stiff robot. The next tip is to make sure smiles go from ear to ear. Smiles can look really awkward if you don't do this, so make sure the outlines of the mouth are almost like a bridge between the ears. And the last technique is to think inside boxes. This technique is to draw 3D boxes and then construct your character inside these boxes. This technique is especially useful for drawing in perspective.
I found this article very useful. Most of these I had heard before, but I hadn't thought of using the box technique before. I usually construct my characters from lines and circles, but I'll defintaly try out that in the future.

Reverse Shot

This video by Every Frame a Painting is about the art of reverse shots in film. Reverse shots are shots that are one after another that some how mirror each other. This video specifically focusing on the Coen brothers way of using this technique. The Coen bros. typically put the camera in between the two actors while dialogue is going on. This way each character gets separate shots, and unlike other films you don't see the backs of the other character. The coen bros. also use a closer lens so you don't as much feel as though you are spying on the characters but right close to them while the action is going on. This fits the Coen bros. common theme of isolating the characters, with shots and plot. The lens. And finally the Coen bros. use a certain rhythm with their editing. There's never any long pauses unless they are obviously intentional. A lot of other directors tend to be a little more realistic with pauses between two characters talking, but the Coen bros make the dialog go back and forth very fast which gives it a nice feel.
I liked this video a lot, as I am a fan of this channel. One of my favorite technique that the Coen uses that I try to use regularity as well is there fast editing style with dialog. You definitely have to pay attention to that stuff because it can really bog down the rest of your video. In my own work, I try to get a certain rhythm to it as well.