EXP: 11 Second Club Development work

 D I P P I N G  A  T O E   I N T O   A N I M A T I O N 

Whilst working with the animators on the Lifting Tower Project I asked them about other animation competitions that they enter into, they had seen some of my GIFs that I'd worked on and knew that I was interested in entering a smallish animation competition for part of my 603. 

They suggested both Loop De Loop and 11 Second Club, I had previously looked at loop de loop but wasn't really sure it was my kind of thing, but I had never heard of 11 Second Club. 

The basic premises is that you are given an 11 second clip to animate, it has speech in it and normally requires some degree of character design. It seemed like a perfect fit to develop more of my character design AND work in animation. 

The clip for October had been a small clip from a vampire movie, where two characters are talking about what to go to a fancy dress party in. One was a quite classic vampire sounding (think translyvania I want to suck your blood draqula and you're on the right track). The competition accepts all kinds of animation, whether its stop frame or hand drawn, whatever really. I decided to go down the hand drawn route as I'm fairly comfortable with animating on photoshop, although I do want to further my adobe skills. 

I started off by listening to the clip and trying to envision what the main voice might look like. I then started to think about what nose he would have, what face type. I was thinking classic italian vampire, black hair, dark eyes and a larger nose.

After I had established a face that I could (sort of) replicate almost perfect every time, I moved onto thinking about movements. I wanted to give off the feeling that this guy was very in charge and somewhat of a vampire snob! I experimented with giving him a classic vampire pendant, whether he would flares or not, cape or not?

I wanted to start with him mostly because he was the main speaker, the other person speaking doesn't have as much speaking time so I could get away with illustrating/animating him less.

I did make a start on illustrating him (he is the guy in blue) I wanted a slightly nerdy guy because it matched the voice, I also had to look into what wesley snipes wore as blade (as this is a crucial line in the script) to start basing it off him.