Funny In 15!

Another task we've been set this semester as a year group is to create a 15 second animation that has to make people laugh. Now I don't know about you but I consider myself to be a pretty hilarious individual just not always intentionally. Trying to make people laugh is the hardest thing in the world, especially when they know its what you're trying to do. I got put with Elf and Sammy, 2 people I hadn't worked with before but get along with well so I was happy. It's nice to have new inputs and views, it means you see things that initially you would have missed. We had a few ideas but Elf came up with one we went with as it was simple and fit into the 15 seconds well, it was just to do with a tree falling on a cow basically, but in our heads we tried to set it up in an amusing way. Here are the anamatic/storyboard boxes I drew up for elf to edit into an anamatic.

 

 

 

I hope from this you can understand what the plan was, on reflection we didn't actually like the idea, and didn't feel that it reflected our humor at all. We didn't find it funny so there was no way in  hell we were ever going to be able to put the energy into it to make other people find it funny.

 

Here was our original anamatic -  

 

 

We surrendered to this idea, and left it here, went away and had some thoughts. Elf came back to us with an interesting idea. It was nearly crossing a line but not really at all because this is animation and we can do anything we want and people don't care because its cartoons and no one takes cartoons seriously, anyways... right??

 

So, here is our new concept, its funnier i'll give him that, and i'm all for going with it!

 

I think its funny, anyway.

 

Pre Production - Idea Uno.

Lydia and I were given the phrase, "cut to the chase" and the theme Shopping Channel. Initially we were at a loss and then it came to us like rain in a drought. (Artistic imagery there..) We decided it would be amusing to do a teleshopping channel dedicated to criminals/terrorists/all things bad. We could play heavily and amusingly on stereotypes, although we did tame ourselves a bit as we didn't want to insult anyone...

Turned out however that Derek and Kathy thought if anything we should be more outrageous and have some sort of climax, which i think will be really really fun to think over! It's a really fun idea that i have spent a large amount of time laughing over.

Here is our rough anamatic thus so far, a lot, and i mean a lot of work needs to be done but i think its got the bare bones of something that could be quite witty.

Sea Rescue Project.

For our final group project last year we were given sound snipets and then told to animate to them, they were stories of rescue at sea. We chose eventually to go really dark with ours and kill off a couple of children, to put it bluntly.  We never finished the film because of post production issues.

We chose to do ours in cut out style as there is something really charming about it, I drew out the anamatic after Paris and I deliberated over the shots, we got this thrown together quite quickly and after talking with ann made some massive character changes and plot changes. With the German Expressionism influencing our film with other animations such as the Cabinet of Dr Calagari I went ahead with character design and drawing up the waves while Paris did the backgrounds. We did all the character animation in the stop motion room green screened under a line tester, it was a fun but time consuming endeavour. Paris and I then edited it all together on After effects and Andrea tried to put in some 3d smoke on Maya, some issues were had with this but in the future i would like to get it finished. I also tested out some faces with toon boom.

Here are a few of the shots, as i said it was never finished so sadly there is no whole film to watch.

Atmospheric..

Spoiler, they die. 

Probably my personal favourite. 

You know what, i was pretty chuffed with that font! 

So there you go, something to waste your eye energy on. 

IDENT - More back log of work.

Basically, Basically, Basically i was in no position to put up any of the finished work from last year as my hard drive was not with me and that was the magic green box that had all me stuffff on it!

So, thought i might do it now, was meaning to make a point of getting this blog back to life anyways, this here post is concerning my Ident for the university. I strayed from my normal artsy outside of the computer style and actually decided to create something that was simple and entirely digital. It was nice to do, and a lot simpler than i thought it would be. It's funny looking back at it now, so much i would have changed!

Experimental, Better late than never?

Last year we worked on something a bit different, an experimental animation. They say its an excuse to get us away from those computers we are so forever glued to, such a nice idea, shame it did not work too well.

Andrea and I decided to collaborate and eventually used the idea of painting with light and editing it all to the sound of the music in a stopmotion way.

Here was our final product after many an hour on Premiere trying to get the timing correct and many many moments spent fiddling with cameras and lighting in my bedroom to make it possible! Pretty pleased with it to be honest!

I did a hell of a lot of work on this and was creatively drained of ideas by the end of it! Also, i keep smelling garlic and its been bugging me for days and as i write this post i realise its because i spilt garlic mayo on my mac days ago. Life win.

On a plus, i was pretty proud of my editing on this considering it was a pretty new thing to me!

Pre Production - Pick a card.

New Year, New projects. I chose to go forward with pre production this year and one of the tasks that was set to us included coming up with concepts from completely random ideas. We were given 4 cards, I received, Fairy Barmaid, Health Education Programme, U.P.A, and Schwarzwald. Not necessarily a match made in heaven but whatcha gonna do?

After a bit of thought and googling I decided that I thoroughly un-enjoyed the 1950's flinstone-esque style that I was given, I will admit I chose to over look it a little bit but am trying to incorporate the background tone style into my concept piece.

United Productions America

After meeting no revelations with this style I decided to focus on the character I was given, a small talk with different people made me match this with the setting, the Black forest in Germany. Fairies and Forests go together hand in hand so that wasn't an issue, the really trouble maker was the Heath Education Programme. I spoke to Andy briefly the other day and he mentioned that a lot of the fairy tales that were written were initially devised to keep children out of the forest as it was dangerous.

Moving forward my idea is to use this Fairy Character to highlight issues such as was done in the fairy tales, except instead of being scared of the forest im going to focus on issues that the Health Education Programme would have focused on. Issues such as Pregnancy, Drinking, Drugs, Diet, Diseases, etc. I think It would work well like a 50's advert or promotional video where there is a narrator asking the character questions.

Unfinished Concept for the Fairy that all the bad things happen to.