The Revolutionary

Kenji

Aielman

For Wheel of Time fans :)

Sneak Peak

So, technically, my academic is over :D. Never thought I'd see the end! And that means I have time to actually post more stuff on this blog! I know it's been gathering it's fair share of dust lately, but when you all see the copious amounts of work that will be posted in the coming weeks, you'll understand.

I'm posting this screenshot and character turn-arounds a sneak peak into the animated short that I've just spent nearly five months slaving over. Once I'm moderately satisfied with the piece, I'll post it in full (along with everything else that went into it) on the site. Hope you dig it! :)

isaac turnaround 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.
seb turn around 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

Mid-Year Exam...Eish

the demon knife cabinet from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

So this was my effort for our mid-year exam. We were given three short soundclips, and we had to choose one of them to animate to. The objective was to come up with a coherent story, using the characters we'd created over the semester, and sync the story with the soundclip...a lot like the 11 Second Club does it. I ended up picking the clip that made the most sense to me...but it definitely wasn't the easiest!

Honestly, this could have been SO much better. We had a pretty limited amount of time to do this (two and a half weeks), so naturally, there's a lot of stuff that needs work, particularly the character animation. But anyway, there it is.

Below is the progression of the clip, from animatic to blocking.


June Exam Animatic (V2) from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.


exam shot 1 pass 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.


exam shot 1 breakdowns from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

The model sheets for the knife cabinet...

The final 3D model for the cabinet

 

Some of the planning...

Der Eichhyrnchen Führer!

For those not in the know, the title of this post means 'the squirrel leader' in German (inspired by Tarantino's awesome film 'Inglourious Barsterds') :) This is how I chose to design one of the main characters from our storyboarding class. Once we finished designing the characters, we then moved on to making macquettes of them, which was AWESOME! :) I'll admit, I was nervous at first, because I've never really trusted myself as a sculptor, but I gained a lot of confidence from doing this.

We used a special kinda putty called Super Sculpey to make them. Its a shame I ran outta the stuff; because it meant I couldn't quite finish up the tail as well as I'd have liked to. Anyway, I'm still really happy with how it turned out :).

 

These are the designs I eventually came up with. I decided to make the characters look a lot more rugged than the brief suggested. We had to choose one to sculpt, so I just went with the one that appealed to me the most. The rabbit's designed changed in the final storyboards, because this one was, um, problematic...

 

 

Just Because...

The mouse LIIIIIIVES!!

Yay! We finally got to character modeling! :) Seeing as we were heavily advised to keep our characters as managable as possible, I decided to go back to my old mouse designs from years ago. They're fairly simple, so I figured they'd work well. Seeing as they were the first characters I fully animated (in 2D), I figured they'd help me out in the same way in 3D. I just made a generic design that'll act as a blueprint for all the other mice (or 'Sarfo Rats' as one of my friends calls them) that I'll model later. A 'universal mouse', so to speak. We had two weeks to complete this project and there was a LOT that I learned.

These aren't textured, I just lit them all fancy-like...

I gained a whole new understanding of polygon-flow doing this...

By the way, the design for these mice is very much influenced by Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. Not to mention Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters.

Big Dreams

Some concepts for one of the characters in the final film I wanted to make this year. But seeing as making and animating this character decently within the limited time frame we have would be nearly impossible for one person, these concepts are gonna have to be put on ice for a while :(

Grad Show Pics

   

Some more promo sketches for the film I'm working on. I did these for my Fine Art Graduate Show. I didn't expect a great deal to come out of this, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they actually turned out nicely :) Here's hoping that the actual film turns out half as nicely!