Over the past few weeks I've been trying to come up with an idea for a 2D illustration based piece of work that I can produce for my fourth year project. I knew early on in this semester that I wanted to focus on 2D art this year, to advance my skills and define my personal style a little more, but I had a little trouble figuring out what direction my project should head in.
I made sure to consider how the honours project might work in conjunction with other modules this year, like whether it would allow for enough research to help me produce a detailed and successful dissertation too. After a couple of months producing practical work for a seperate 2D animation project, I've finally found what I think is the best approach to take.
Lately I've been working on producing my own 2D parallax animation for another class and it's this that gave me the inspiration to take my studies into this style of animation a little further for fourth year's modules.
Parallax animation is a technique whereby a flat 2D image is seperated into many layers which are then arranged in 3D space within video editing software such as After Effects, according to the depth at which the objects/characters/scenery sit within the original image. By arranging the scene in this manner and animating a camera object to pan/scroll/zoom within the layers, it produces a specific style of animation that mimics 3-dimensionality and depth using only the flat 2D layers. While being a very basic style of animation, it is very stylised and well-suited to certain circumstances (in-game cutscenes, loading screens, title screens, credits etc) and has captured my attention since I first began experimenting with it.
The reason this style of animation appeals to me is that from the studies I've conducted into it's uses up until this point, I've discovered that within the games industry it is often associated with a comic-book style of illustration, which is the style my artwork currently takes. I'm focused on producing bold, stylised, semi-real portrayals of characters and scenes, which seem to work well when the parallax technique is applied to them, enhancing their depth and providing the viewer with a new way of looking at them.
Learning the required techniques for these animations has forced me to think objectively and sometimes outside of the box, as I've seen very little tutorials on the subject. Rather I've had to reverse engineer existing animations to try and figure out how they were made before devising my own methods. As such, I've carried out a number of tests - some fails, some successes - and am continuing to explore the possibilities of how my work might be able to bring something new to the style.
I love the workflow involved with a project like this as it encompasses a variety of stages and requires several skills to ensure the project runs smoothly. Storyboarding, script-writing, designing, illustrating and editing are just some of the requirements when soloing something like this, and the technical challenge of it had me hooked from the beginning.
In following posts I'll go into more and present some examples of the parallax style before showing my experiments to date and describe what I've learnt so far. I'll be talking a bit more about the techniques required, their limitations, and how I hope to figure out enough about the subject to bring something of my own to it and eventually produce an original, portfolio-worthy piece of work.
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