Enviroseminar

We had a seminar today on creating environments and backgrounds. Right at the beginning we had another history and theory lecture from Ann, which are my least favourite lectures, and I often disagree with some of the things she says, but its still pretty fun, and we get to see many different forms of animation.
Then Kathy showed us the work she did as a backdrop designer for various animations, many of which were at TV Cartoons, the company behind "Father Christmas", "Angelina Ballerina", "Oi Get Off Our Train" and "Wind in the Willows". It was one of the most interesting lectures so far, and I found the backdrop drawings were really awesome, using a brilliant range of techniques, media and colour. We learnt about limited and deep spaces in a background, and we spoke about how we may collaborate with music, graphic design and illustration courses, so they can design characters/soundtracks etc for us to add animation to.
Kathy also spoke about how best to draw foliage and trees, which I found really useful, as I found them difficult, and how you don't draw individual leaves but merely suggest then. Backdrops are often 15 field in size, with space at the edges to extend the scene
Derek also briefly taught us about a layout where the camera shots in a scene are thought out. I learnt that > is the symbol for a camera in a layout, and i found the difference between Dollying and Panning, and between Zooming and Tracking.

Here is a website we were given with brilliant backdrops from hundreds of big animations, which I can see  being very useful in the future. Here it is :animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com