Motion comic test

Plastic Oceans Animation

Plastic oceans from Abbey Armstrong on Vimeo.
My finished film for our charity animation.

Plastic oceans further development

Plastic Oceans Animatic 

I made this animatic to focus on the timing and movements for my animation and to see if everything would work together, and in the end i believe that it does. Music is a copyright free track called November by BenSound.

More Scene Concept Art

These concepts were mainly colour, lighting and texture tests with me trying out some new brushes and seeing how everything looked together. 

Professional Engagement Document

For this project we were tasked with creating a document and certain branding pieces for ourselves to help us record our interactions with professionals and hopefully increase our chances at getting hired. One section of this document required us to contact 20 companies/ professionals to get advice and questions answered. This was a really helpful experience as it's something I wouldn't really do unprovoked and I ended up getting some really good advice and contacts from it.

Show-reel 

Abbey Armstrong 2019 Showreel from Abbey Armstrong on Vimeo.

Business Card Front

 Business Card Back

 Creative CV

Jolly Rogers (Group Game project)

One of our projects consisted of forming groups and creating a concept for a mobile app or game and our group decided on a pirate themed RPG pixel game.

All work for this joint project can be found over at - http://teamthoticus.tumblr.com/

Plastic Oceans development

When we were given the task to create an animation for a charity I immediately knew I wanted to work with an animal or ocean charity. After some looking I was torn between two charities: Plastic Oceans and WDC, so to help decide i created a concept and mood board for both options; in the end deciding to go with my favourite idea which was that for Plastic Oceans.

Concept:

A sea lion journeys through a plastic riddled ocean trying to find the rest of its colony. As it travels through these oceanic landscapes it passes a variety of other sea creatures but they are all made entirely of plastic. As the animation progresses our sea lion begins to slow as it becomes more like its surroundings before turning entirely plastic itself and sinking to the depths.

MoodBoard -

Storyboards -

 These storyboards show the journey that our main sea lion makes, through many different sea-scapes and past a multitude of plastic creatures before finally finding another sea lion, but it was too late and it has already turned to plastic. Our main sea lion then collapses beside it and the camera pulls out to show the two on a huge pile of plastic waste. 

Sea Creature Concept Art -

All the creatures in this film save for the main sea lion will be made from a variety of different plastic products such as: Jellyfish plastic bags, Pipe Eels, a Milk bottle whale and a plastic bottle sea lion.

Digital Idea Mock Up -

After having my concept and storyboards done I proceeded to make a digital piece in Photoshop to try and visualise how I wanted the final film to look. I quite enjoy how this test turned out and it has a visible difference in style between the two main factors of the sea lion and the plastic environment.

I initially had a different idea when it came to animating this film as I was planning to create and animate the seal in Maya as a 3D model but after creating the model I began running into issues with the rigging so I decided to scrap that direction and chose to create it all using Photoshop and After effects instead.  

Scrapped Model

11 Second Club (October 2018)

11 second club (October 2018) from Abbey Armstrong on Vimeo.

This is my entry for October 2018's 11 second club, which finished in 19th place http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/october18/entry/7klR3k. 

   

The live brief that I decided to produce work for was the 11 Second Club. The audio clip for the competition that month was as follows:

MAN 1- “oh, this is… pleasant. You could feel the history coming from the walls in here.”

MAN 2- “Yeah, isn’t that wonderful?”

MAN 1- “Not when the history fights back!”

My idea for this clip was to have two characters walking down a dimly lit corridor in an old building such as a castle with suits of armour lining both sides of the thin passageway. Focus will be on the first man as he speaks, then following his flashlight around the room. The second man then walks past the first, over to a suit of armour when he speaks then raises a hand to knock on the suit’s helmet which falls to the floor with a clang. The next scene shows the two men surrounded by the suits of armour with their weapons drawn as the first man speaks his last line.

I had planned to produce this animation in Maya, using the character resources the 11 second club provides but after more consideration I changed my mind and chose to produce it as a digital 2D animation using Photoshop. Creating the other assets such as the armour and the surrounding corridor would be quite a time consuming process and I believe I would have missed the deadline.

Inspirations for my visuals came from a location in Resident Evil 4 for the corridor and for the characters I just based them on themselves (The ones in the audio clip) as i'm a fan of theirs.

Resident Evil 4

Shane Madej & Ryan Bergara (Buzzfeed Unsolved)

After I had my proposal done and visuals in mind I went on to create the storyboards and then begin animating as there wasn't much time for this live brief.

In the end I am pleased with how it looks visually as most of my animations up until this point haven't been coloured and i'm pleasantly surprised that I finished in the top 20, but if I were to do this again I would defiantly focus more on the frames themselves rather than the visuals as the movements are quite limited.