(Art Foundation) Final Major Project (Dominic Toma): Njáls Saga Animation

• published: 31 May 2015
• views: 16

NOTE: Put video in full HD and crank up your volume for best results. Master volume is rather quiet and it sounds better the more booming it is. BEHOLD AND TREMBLE! Or at least shiver a little. Eh, that’ll do. SO, this is my final major project for my foundation year at New College Stamford to get back into the swing of things art-wise before going off to uni again. I wanted to try something different in tone to my previous efforts, so this time around I ran with an idea from a brief where we were tasked with providing an illustration for a section of poetry or lyrics provided, for which I chose the rather gruesome and grandiose segment of the Icelandic epic Njáls Saga (translated into English). After using a couple other shorter projects to conduct necessary research and settle on an art style I set about finding a piece of music that roughly fit the timing, tweaked the passage to be on beat, recorded a voice over in an attempt of a gruff Viking warrior (after delaying everything for a week due to getting a random mouth ulcer for the first time in my life), got over a newfound addiction to the Dark Souls game series, marathoned all 25 episodes of Fate/Zero for the second time, then spent the remaining 5-ish weeks animating the thing whilst Adobe Flash gave me no end of troubles :L Hell, that four second decapitation bit took two weeks by itself due to crashes and bugs. More importantly this video also served as a test for combining drawn animation with the After Effects trickery I’ve been learning recently for a much more impressive project I’ll be trying to finish over the summer – so that bodes well. So yeah, was a little short on time to finish this, and I had to uniformly simplify the art style so the static art and fully drawn segments would match, and my audio editing skills need work, but besides that I’d say it’s better than anything else I’ve made so far.