Brainstorming
We started off looking at a drawing in Aemilia’s sketchbooks of a cowboy and we were all kind of drawn to the idea of making a cowboy character to be honest I’m not sure who suggest making a cat cowboy but we all agreed it would be fun to try. We tried drawing out our own ways of interpreting a cat cowboy and kind of merged our favourite parts into one. Despite really liking the idea of a poncho or a bandana we agreed it would be harder to show movement or actually move the characters body.
Making the Puppet
Once we had our character design idea down we went straight into making and assigned ourselves parts of the body to work on Rhianna worked on the heads and hats, I worked on the limbs, Gracie worked on the boot design and whiskers as she was absent for a couple days but helped out as much as she could later with the filming and then finally Aemilia worked on the body/tail and hay barrel/crate El Cato is sat on. I think this part was pretty easy we all worked quite fast so that we’d have extra time to film our tests. For the limbs I took these long skewers/sticks and cut them in half to make up the main bone and then stuck trying in between to make a loose joint of sorts that would make it easy to move the arms around and bend them. Then for the hand I used the thicker wire to bend one long piece into five finger shapes so that we could mould the hands to hold onto the cigar easily and firmly. I think if I were to improve i’d use the wired for the joints instead of the string as it works better to hold up as it was quite tiring trying to make sure everything was in it’s right place.
Transitions
This small side test definitely helped me pay attention to little details like how visible the pins we used were and if the shapes we did transitioned smoothly into the others which I think definitely helped us work on different parts of the body cooperatively.
Tests
Here are some images as well as the clips of the animated tests we did for El Cato the main aim of this was to familiarise ourselves with using the cardboard puppet but also to understand how we could work well as a team, what techniques worked best and what issued we faced so we wouldn’t have to go through it again when we actually started filming. One particular issue we faced was that we thought we’d be fine just moving the cats limbs with no real plan but it wasn’t very smooth so we tried drawing out arcs on dragon frame to help guide us and that worked much better, it really made the animation look smoother. As a group I think we worked well in pointing out issues we noticed, we weren’t best as explaining why things were problems however I do think it was because its a bit difficult to get used to using the right terms when describing problems or ideas that we had learnt in jess’s rotation.
Filming
Overall I’m happy with how the animation turned out and how well we worked as a group and each tried controlling different parts of the body, my favourite part is probably the tail and whiskers I love the look of them twitching and how realistic and smooth the tail movement is. If I were to improve something I’d probably say the way we covered the smoke on the cigar we originally used black duck tape but I think it wasn’t very hidden in the shine of the lighting so I would’ve tried to use the black cloth instead. As for feedback we got a lot more positive information and barely any improvements from our peers in class we still made sure to note down what was commented on in our sketchbooks.