Rabbit Life - My Short Film

At the beginning of this academic year i pitched my film idea to 4 industry professionals as well as my lecturers and all 3 years on my course. Nerve racking is an understatement, anyhow my film got the green light and i've been producing it this year. 

The story is simple and concerns a young rabbit that lives a little sheltered life in his hutch, on deciding to escape and explore the big wide world he stumbles upon a secret underground animal street, from here he gets progressively messier as the goes on a wild night out. Here are some of the final turn arounds and Backgrouds ready for the film. 

Bloody Hell, i've been a slacker! - Yellow Submarine.

So far this year you will notice that I have updated my blog all of zero. I do apologise but I will be getting some posts in order in the next coming weeks.

 

One of our projects this year is to work on a live brief, Our course leader Derek is currently directing an animated/live action short called Deep, its got something to do with Greek mythology, medusa and torn film strips. The idea is every time there is an imperfections on the film strip a whole other world opens up in the story, or something like that. I've had it explained to me more than once now but I wont lie, I'm a tad confused as I unfortunately missed the first lecture.

 

Anyhow, the section I have ended up working on is based heavily upon the Yellow Submarine, the film made by la Beatles. It's super wicked awesome fun because its some super solid 2D animation, which I happen to enjoy, accompanied by some bizarre colours and creations. I shall write another post that covers this in a lot more detail but for now here are some character designs that I have been working on for the Blue meanies, if you have seen the animation you will be familiar with the bad guys. We are using a similar design to represent the gangsters in the film.

 

Lovely.

My outlines.

Coloured, Init.

Within an Environment.

Jazzed up a bit upon feedback.

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. 

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.

 

 

 

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. 

Character Designing - Progress.

Over the Easter break i've been working one some Character designs for our Sea Project animation, here are some of my ideas and progression towards ideas that are nearly ready to submit as a possible final idea. It's been fun doing this it's sort of been my first taste of designing a character to fit into a story and we have agreed that we all like the style of the final image here so that shall be what i work with.