Third Year Film - Ideas.

In Third year we are tasked to pitch an idea for a short film, if its good enough and gets the go ahead then it will go into production in the Third year. I feel like i used a lot of the same words in that sentence but i can't be bothered to re-read it, i'm sorry. 

I've been doing some brain storming and i really want to do something with the brit gangster theme, so i've been looking a lot at animal as human films/series. Here are some moody boards i've put together to give you the gist of what i mean. 

There's going to be boobs, guns and murders.

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!

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.

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.