Who am I? Why this blog?

Who am I? Why this blog?

My name is Helen Prichard, and I studied for three years at Norwich University College of the Arts, and graduated in June 2010 with a 2:1 BA (hon’s) Animation Degree. Though out my years at university I have developed a unique style, which I would describe as dark and sketchy. I use stop motion as my main animating technique, and then composite my final work in After Effects and Final Cut Pro; I also design the sound to my animations using Logic.

I made this blog to showcase all my work, and what projects I have been doing over the years at University and after it.

I am currently available for hire as a animator, illustrator, character designer, storyboard artist and website designer.

I hope you enjoy my blog!

After University

Website

Since I finished university I have finished my website which is now up and running: http://www.helenprichard.co.uk/ 

(Currently down now until I buy more website hosting!.. but here’s pictures of what it looks like)

This is an example of the scripting I used:

Design and Illustrative

 

Showreel

As well as having a new website, I have now also finished making my show reel:

Tea

I’m currently working on an animation called ‘Tea’. We had to come up with an animation storyboard as one of our projects during our fist year at university, and so I have finally decided to animate it. It’s coming along slowly as I’m finding it hard to find spare time in which i can work on it.

This is the storyboard:

With this animation I want to concentrate mainly on getting the timing perfect, and showing my drawing style through my animation; rather than having a brilliant storyline. Though I hope people will find the story interesting, and I hope that the ending isn’t what they expect. I want people to find the story dark and menacing.

This is a bit of my animation so far:

Since then I have carried on working on the project and this is what I have done since then. Its slowely getting there, I can’t wait to start colouring it!!

I have also been working with my friend Daniel Saunders on some animation projects, here are some of my character i’ve animated so far. I think i’m getting fairly good at shading/colouring now!

The Time Machine

I have also created some illustrations for the theatre production of the time machine, which was shown in March. As soon as i’ve had a chance to scan my work in i will add it here.

Sketch Club

In the last few months we’ve also started up a sketch club, where we try to meet up every week and go out and draw things we see around the city. Heres the link if you’d like to find out more: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Sketch-Club/241121155940755

Third Year

I am finally in my third year, and currently working hard on my final major project.  

After many attempts of coming up with story ideas I finally came up with one I liked. I wrote the story myself, basing it on fairytales.

My story is set in an old english wood, back in the times when wolves were still common. It consists of  five main characters; Father, Son, Daughter and Grandmother & the wolf.

In the story a little boy has befriended a wolf, but when the boy becomes ill the wolf is blamed. The wolf tries to help the little boy, and the boys family, but he still becomes the victim within the stories end. My story is about the tragedy of jumping to conclusions, and the victim who has been wrongly accused. 

This is one of my finished scenes, now painted and edited on after effects, hopefully it will give you an idea of the style i’m aiming for.

This is my final animatic for the film –

Below was an earlier attempt of my film animatic, this one also includes sound. I have included my earlier animatics to show how I have developed my work over time.

The following is run test of the girl character that will be in my film.

I then did a line test of my wolf character running, i also wanted to test what it would look like painted in water colour and quite liked the effect.

Then I did a walk cycle of the little boy walking, I then painted each frame with watercolours. I then plan to add the walking boy to the background that I filmed at the start. I will then animate the background separately, doing things like making the grass move in the wind, I shall do this on after effects.

I have finally done my background test and I think it looks ok, did this by flood filling the backgrounds red in TV paint then importing this file into after effects and colour keying out the red, i then added the background and added some effects to that. This is my result –

Since then I have begun to start animating following my animatic. The animation is still in its very early stages, i still need to paint the frames and add the backgrounds. I can see the animation needs some changes as some parts are to fast. The black frames appeared were i was impatient and was taking pictures of the frames before the camera had managed to upload the previous pictures. Also i need to re-do the last walk cycle as I have the feet following on the same line, rather than two parallel lines, thus he looks like he’s on the catwalk, which wasn’t the look I was going for!!

Below is the next bit I have filmed of my animation, this to also needs changes. I need to make the animation between the different scenes smoother which is what i’m currently working on. Also I kept for getting to change the focus as I was zooming into the frames, which I will have to remember to do next time.

Today is the 1st of Marach and I stayed in the studio until 7 o’clock this evening, and have been working very hard! I got a little tired at the end of the day, and saved my test in the wrong format which is why it looks squished – but this is the third part of my film!

I have since done some background tests, in the first test I have just moved the trees over to the left in after effects, in the second test I have cut up the image and put it into 3d space in after effects then filmed it using the camera tool. I think I will use a mixture of both in my final film.

eventually I will put my final film on here, and my character designs.

This is my current ‘in progress’ show reel:

second year, second assessment

This has been one of the best terms so far! During this term we got to go to Holland, which was amazing. During our time in Holland we had to design characters, then choose a Dutch student who’s character would interact well with our own. Me and my housemate Kayleigh stayed with two dutch students called Ruth and Auke, and I did my project with Auke.

Below is a picture of me and Auke, and the characters we designed.

These our some other sketchs of our characters:

Above is my creature it is a mix between a kangeroo and a deer, I imagined it to have quite a shy personality, but also to be quite mischievous. Below is Auke’s headless Eskimo.

I also made a model of my character in a game just to see what it might look like a different angles.

This is our final film:

All our other work for this project including storyboards and rough animation can be seen at this website – http://helenauke.wordpress.com/

Auke has also edited the animation more, and one got it on the front page of the website!! http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/490635

As well as this we also had to design a animation for the BBC’s spring watch program, which I am still currently working on. Just for you to get an idea of how it’s looking here are a few screen shots from after effects.

The following is my nearly completed springwatch animation, just have the sound left to add. Also I’ve rendered it to stream def so it’s not in the right ratio, when i put my finished film on it will be the correct size!

Our next project will be either lip sync or text on screen, I have chosen to do lip sync. I will be animation to a poem using flash and x sheets!

second year, first assessment

In the second year of my course you get to choose your specialist area; and of course i choose animation. 

The first term of animation was designed to give us the chance to use different techniques to animate. It was a very intense learning curve, as we got introductions to all the new software that we would be using.

These included: After Effects – for the sonic postcard,  Dragon – for the puppet and emotions animation and TV Paint – for the dynamic animation. As well as this we also had to learn how to use logic pro to do the sound editing, and final cut pro to edit our final animations. We also had lessons in film language!

So as you can imagin it was alot to remember all at once. This is why our projects for this term where all kept quite simple and short.

The sonic postcard was our first project. In this project we had to animate a still image by cutting up into layers in photoshop and animating these seperate layers in after effects.

We also had to make all our own sounds for this project, the chicken and dragon noises are made by my friends, I then edited there voices in logic pro. The fire noise is made by crunching up a plastic bag and blowing into a mic at the same time!

Then we did the dynamic project, It is a hand drawn animation which has been coloured in TV paint. The background was added afterwards in after effects. The character idea had to be taken out of our summer holiday sketch books.

These where the sketchs that inspired the animation,

I then researched into the form of cats, and how there bones connected so I could create the right movement.

Then I redesigned my character so it was easier to animate, and made up what the creature would look like at different angles.

And this was my finished animation, it’s very short at 10 seconds but has been made so that you can put it on to a loop cycle.

Then we did our puppet animation, making the puppet was very fun! Again we used stop motion (moving the puppet a little bit at a time, then taking a photo). We had Barry (who made the wombles) help us on this project.

These where the sketchs I made for the design of my puppet.

This was my outcome to my puppet film

We also had to make a animation which focused on one emotion changing into another. For this I desided to do sad to happy.

Illustration & Photography

On this post I just wanted to show my collection of artwork that I have done over the years.

Above is one of my first year graphics projects – we had to redesign some packaging

(above) This was a illustration for my lip-sync projec in my second year

I made this dragon illustration by hand drawing the design, scanning it into my computer and painting it on photoshop.

I made this illustration the same way i made the one above it

This is a close up of the above picture

this is a character i designed whilst i was on holiday

This illustration was made using ink and water colour

This is another chacter that I made up whilst on holiday

Again i made up a design and painted it on photoshop.

This was part of a graphics project in my first year.

This picture was part of the same graphics project.

A collect of tiger prints that I made in college

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am quite proud of the above drawing as I did it without any reference.

This drawing looks both like a clown and a old lady.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My First Animations/Films from College

This was an our final outcome for our moving image project, it was my first ever attempt at live filming. I was quite pleased with the result.

This is a joint project I made with my friend. We both made diffent characters, but animated the whole thing together. The characters where made using plastercine, and we animated it using the stop motion tecnique.

I also made a animation on flash after finding out what Shellac was! Unfortunitly I no longer have the original file so can not edit it, otherwise I would have corrected my spelling mistakes and the glitch where lines appear.