Production Bible - So Far

Today was the draft hand in for our pre production work, We still have a lot to get done over Christmas but the ideas are there and I think its quite well planned out. Our Animatic needs to be tweaked still but that shouldn't be too much trouble.

Here are some of the Character pages, written by yours truly. I think we successfully kept to the style of Art Dec.

Toby Twirl Tales - A little Penguin.

I've been doing some work for Elliot on his 3rd year project because i'm nice like that. Nah, I just like penguins. Below is a little old walk cycle developed from one of the characters in the books, I found this to be the easiest walk cycle I have ever created in the history of my life. I like it. Have a gander.

These are the still shots, coloured to make it a wee bit happier.

 

Character Desigh - NQL - Production bible.

In the post below I featured some research sketches I had done for the female TV presenter for our animation, since then I have done the digital coloured copy, pretty darn chuffed with how it has come out if i'm to be so honest.

 

Below are two of the finished characters for this concept, the TV presenter who I have talked about previously that was designed, drawn and coloured by me, and then the Mafia boss who was designed drawn and coloured by Lydia.

 

 

The next characters that I have been working on this week are the two terrorists (in the most ridiculously inaccurate stereotypical way, I am not a racist, just to clarify.) We did some research on these and by that I mean put stuff from pinterest together to make a pretty mood board. As so wonderfully demonstrated below.

 

 

From this I sketched out a few handfuls of ideas, trying out different shapes, faces, styles and clothing until I chose the two that I felt most happy with, they are meant to reflect terrorism in a sarcastically humorous light, not that terrorism is funny or anything...

 

 (The tow on the left were the chosen men].)

 

I played around with different body shapes but decided it would be amusing to have them completely opposite in stature and facial expression. Below are the finished characters which I designed, drew and coloured.

 

 

Thank you and Goodnight.

 

Research Bible - Tv Presenter

For our pre-production work this year we have to hand in a Production Bible, and  Research Bible for our concepts that we had to pitch last friday to a script writer man of whom was very nice and helpful. 

Currently i am working on the Teleshopping channel presenter, she's a ditzy blonde lady with a large chest and presumably not much else going on, the joke is that every now and again she says something surprisingly intelligent about the inner workings of the products and everyone sort of looks at her like "what are you?" 

Today i was doing some body sketches, mainly to just learn how a bit better, it was quite an enjoyable session, women are certainly my favourite to draw because of the curves. I don't get a chance to draw boobs often, so it was fun. Hahahahaha, beats penis (see last post..) 

ANYWAY. 

Here is what i've been up to today. I'm about to import these into photoshop and do some digital
work! 

This is a lovely mood board that I put together for the character ideas.





NQL - Progress

So. Tomorrow we have a practice pitch to a man from industry, Lydia and i are pitching our NQL idea. In basics it is... (Delve into pitch..)

NQL is your not quite legitimate shopping channel, our concepts features a parody shopping channel that accommodates all your dodgy dealers, criminals and general crooks. The idea is that the host, a stereotypical blonde bimbo is constantly stuck trying to flog all these illegal, controversial products in a humorous way, she’s never entirely sure what she is trying to sell or what it is for and always finds a way of causing a dramatic accident.

It’s aimed to be a 15-20 minute animated series that would ideally be played late at night on channels like E4 and BBC 3. Monthly news stories and events would be taken into account on the writing of each episode to incorporate the events in a dark humorous manner, much like in programs such as South Park and Archer.

In this potential episode we have featured the illegal goings on of Mobsters, Terrorists and your good old local skinhead just trying to make a few quid.

You get the picture, so today we got to the studio early-ish, i mean 10, which is pretty good to be honest, considering the type of person i am.

We had to make some concept art in the Art Deco style as thats the card we were given, this is the piece i worked on all day that involved the special guests on the TV show. 

Funny in 15 - Wanker!

Today was our final hand in for our funny in 15 project, we decided that it was sensible to go with something to do with penis' because everyone knows that they are really really funny.

Elf did the anamatic for this (see previous post) and i did the character designs, they came out a little differently than i saw them in my head but i think they work aesthetically
 for the background that was also created by elf. We tried to merge them so it all looked quite matchy matchy.

Sammy animated the man on the left and i was stuck with the one that is having the time of his life on the right, i forgot how much i enjoy 2D animation and really should get some more practice in! Over all it was quite hilarious to create despite the confusing looks i got. Fun! Fun! Fun! The sounds do make me uncomfortable though, i suggest you listen to it with headphones on for full effect. 

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.

FROM FLAT TO A BIT LESS FLAT.

This here is an adaptation piece, I originally drew the image on photoshop which took a painstakingly long time but I was very happy with it in the end. It was an adaptation of another image of Istanbul I think but I modernised it and drew it as a city scape because that's what I have grown up with. I then put it into toonboom and added some secondary animation, I had no intention to make it a life like sort of animation because the image itself is very flat and cartoony which is the style I like. So I put in some animation which went with that style.

I like using toon boom but it crashed on me a lot and i'd never used it before so I had no idea what I was doing! Still pretty happy with the outcome though!

 

A nice home!

Didn't manage to sleep last night so made it to sunrise, and you know what it was pretty damn nice, so I whacked out the old (new) camera and snapped.

Something a bit different, and by that i mean 3D.

I do certainly sway towards 2d animation and that sort of thing but I have to say I didn't not enjoy doing the 3D work for this semester, I simply jut found it a whole of a lot more challenging. Anywho, one of our tasks this semester was to pick something from the outside world, weathered, and beaten and then take photos and whack it all into photoshop to create some textures. THEN potter across into Maya and make up something that sort of looked like a box, Maya is really not my strong suit so I chose a simple object with a simply shape that I knew I could really work on when it came to the Mudbox section of this work. So I chose a nice green box. After exporting it across into Mudbox I used my photos to create stencils and painted away, fiddled with some other stuff and tada!

 

Why dont'ca take a little look at what I really mean below!

 

 

 

 

Sea Project - An Update.

So, time has been ticking on and so have projects, we just had a major hand in for a lot of our first year work so I thought I would take some time to update this here bog which I have painfully neglected over the last month or so.

Concerning our Sea Project we had a massive redesign and complete change of focus about half way though which though not ideal was really for the best I think.

Our initial character designs where theses, we were really having an issue with knitting all our backgrounds and people and styles together to create one animation that flowed nicely because it looked like it was all meant to go together. In the end we had no choice but to re think, which leads me onwards.

Here inspired by the German expressionism movement and a fondness for old school horror are our new designs, again I worked on the characters and Paris did the backgrounds.

Character Designs.

 

Next up I had to draw them up in cut out versions so they could be used for the physical animation.

 

 

 

A new direction - German Expressionism

We have been in a bit of a rut without Sea Rescue project in that we had the ideas and the styles and the concepts but just no way in which to knit them together that would create an animation and invoked the dark, uncomfortable mood we were going for.
 
This was until we had our talk with Ann last week on our presentations we have to give at the end of the project about how they History and Theory unit of animation influenced our finished film. Obviously, without a finished film this is very hard to consider. Back to the point, Ann mentioned to us that we had to full dedicate ourselves to being really dark or really humorous, and considering our story has very few opportunities to be amusing we went with the first suggestion. She mentioned the influence that German Expressionism had on horror films throughout time, and even today with the likes of Tim Burton, so we decided to take a look and us this style to completely change the visual appearance of our animation and hopefully the mood.
 
I looked at a silent film online, one of the first iconic classics of German expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Everything was generally so creepy from the angular pointy scenery to the pale, tired, creepy looking characters. Exaggerating some features with angular make up or dark shadows really takes and ordinary character and makes them look a little bit off, which is exactly the type of thing we are trying to achieve with the narrator. (Source 1 and 2.)
 

Source 1.

Source 2.

 
I intend on doing a lot of research into these general styles over the next few days in hope of coming up with some characters that have layers to them influenced by German expressionism and the creepy, mysteriousness we want them to have about them.

Experimental - Raw stages.

I decided to take the paint technique further for my final experimental animation, I have now shot the raw images but they do need a lot of work over the top due to imperfect conditions, but such as life, i am still determined to make it work.

Here are some separate images from the actual animation i took, so you understand what's going to be happening!

Character Designing.

Here are the as close to final designs that i have come up with as of so far, obviously we still need to discuss them as a group so i imagine tweaks will be made. I wanted to go for quite a lanky stype because i thought this would look great for the end scene of our animation where they are underwater and it would allow us to move them in a very smooth, flowy, style. Also they are children, and children are still growing so always look a little awkward.

Narrator, scale, colour. 

Children, older girl, younger lad. 

Sea Project Anamatic 1.0 - The roughest of the rough. Except sandpaper, that's pretty rough.

Our first ever anamatic for the Sea Rescue Project, i understand that this is late but so is my Chinese food so i guess we all lose a little bit.

We admittedly did not leave enough time to put this anamatic together, having so many separate ideas we had not really got in complete order and put them together yet, therefore we drew this up in hope that it would show the story line we were trying to reach for, something serious and perhaps a bit dark.

These images were only drawn up in blue pencil and then the black i put on at the end on photoshop, with a mouse may i add.

Anyways, enjoy and i hope you are able to understand from this the sort of mood we are going to try and obtain. Cheers.

Well done for getting this far, here is your reward. Anamatic 1.0 - Rough