Animation practionour research: BLU

BLU

Blu is an Argentinian active street artist who conceals his real identity. He lives in Bologna and has been doing street art since 1999. He travels around the World doing active street art on all different kinds of buildings. He first became known by doing spray paint artwork  in Bologna. In 2001 he started doing his work on a larger scale and using different and bigger equipment by doing this his work became more powerful and stood out to people and made him even more global.This got him to work with other artists making short films of animation his lastest work has been in places such as Spain,Greece, Italy, and Poland. This video is about an unscientific story about Evolution and it's consequences a lot of his films are simliar to this with them all having great movement through animation.
In 2008 Blu was asked to do a painting for the Tate Modern buliding where they were celebrating street art and Blu as an Artist. All of Blu's work is kept in a fast pace style and he takes inspiration from the buildings he works with you can see this in all of his art. Today Blu still uses animation to create his most known work to do this he use istopMotion where he paints his work on the walls and pavements but once he has done a frame he paints over it in white or grey to carry on the motion. This video shows Blu's ambition to make his work stand out to other artists this piece was done in Buenos Aires and Baden. This is some of Blu's best known work and shows why he is so popular around the world.

Character loop ideas

I started off by thinking about how my character would move and how it would look on screen. I drew the first character on the left hand side, I liked this idea but I wasn't to sure what would make him insteresting because there wasn't much I could do with him except to make him walk I wanted something that was more exciting, I did think about is eyes popping out but I thought this would be too hard to do. Two of my other ideas came from the bouncing ball exercise where the character or clock would roll while their face or clock hand would move. I liked this idea but I thought it would be quite simple and boring over a number of frames. I then came up with the idea of a moving zip, I thought I could add this to a charcter and make this its mouth. I was having trouble thinking of how my object or character would move. I thought about a balloon and how it is quite a simple object to draw a number of times but could be more interesting. I combined the idea of the zip and the ballon and started to add deatial to these ideas and I came up with this charcater.


I combined all of my ideas together to make one idea. I drew a basic shape of the balloon and the zip as I knew what the movement would be in these. I added the blue strip and head antena to make him look more exciting. I put these on him because they could also move if I wanted to add anymore movement or the eyes could blink after some time. All of these factors would make up a larger amount of frames.

Bouncing Ball Exercise

This bouncing ball exercise is my first piece of animation to start with I got together 32 pages all the same size ready to start planning my frames. I numbered all the frames and using a template I drew the action line on the last frame. This was so when I got to frame 31 I will be able to trace over the same line so each frame shouldn't move around to much and look simlar. Then I traced the key frames out I did this because at these frames it was important the ball was in the right place it would also make it easier when going through adding the other frames as you would have a rough idea where the ball should be and what it would look like and it makes the action look smooth. I added the inbetween frames this was hard because I needed to see where the ball had been in the previous frame to make sure it would work. The line was starting to move over time so not all the frames would be perfect.


Once I had drawn all the frames out I filmed the ball using the software Istopmotion I stuck the book down so it would move as I turned the page. On Istopmotion I recorded each page on page 32 I recorded it a few times to make it clearer and that when it was played in a secquenes it wouldn't move on too fast. I exported it to final cut and copied the clip 5 times to get a continous video of the ball. I think the video turned out well with the ball looking realistic and the cloud slowly moving along. Through out the clip the flower does move a lot if I did this again I would make the flower open up but I do like the style of it where its hand drawn.