Gorillaz

The British band Gorillaz has always inspired me through their character design and animations that went along with their albums. The movement of the character animations are emphasized to portray the personality of each individual and exaggerate the style of the designs. The animation then evolved to using 3D software, in this case Autodesk 3DMax, creating a realistic perspective of the virtual band. The 3D animation was used alongside film which worked well as the characters interacted with the objects around them. Even though the animation has become more realistic with the rendered textures, the characters still hold the illustrative style of Gorillaz that they are known for. 

The animatic inspired me through the use of the imagery being key frames for the final product, capturing the main emotion and movement for that frame, the use of colour to emphasise the atmosphere and the use of the camera angles to exaggerate the scene.

Looking behind the scenes of the music video, it as interesting to see the designers adding textures to the 3D models and also the basic polygons that the characters are modeled from. From this I saw the importance of the performance reference before the movement of the animation, to create a smooth action.

I feel like I can identify what practice that I want to work in, through the animation and modeling of the characters seen in the Gorillaz music video 'Do Ya Thing'. I enjoy storyboarding, making animatics, and character design/animation, in order to inform my area of practice, I want to look at modelling in own time, looking into creating textures and making cartoon based models, and also create a short storyboard and animatic of a character animation of the model I would be making. To show this process I could look into creating a time lapse of making the model - look into recording process? what equipment is needed? av suite?