More on Project Cheese

So just a brief update. We have a rough story board and we're in the process of replacing shots with completed backgrounds. This is the original story board without sound and moving shots so it makes very little sense but the second half is a little more interesting and easier to follow.




Perry and I recorded the speech but I've discovered I was not able to upload the file type so once I've got that converted I'll upload them here.

Project Cheese-Test animation

So over the weekend I've been hard at work hunched over my lighting box completing some animation tests and I've got to admit it was really nice getting back into it again. Drawing images of the same thing again and again and again with an attention span worthy of a nat and an impatient disposition should result in incessant boredom but some how I find all my thoughts slow down and I can concentrate.

Anyway work resulted in a lighting box encampment: character sketches perched atop, completed images ever rising on my left, caffeine fuel at my knee, food an supplies to my right butt cheek and necessary pillows and blankets sort of drifting about. I didn't really ever leave.

Each of the animations, 24fps, vary between thirty to sixty frames depending on their nature. I did four animation tests. These were a run cycle, "yes, no" speech test, action and response head swivel and a general gesture and idiosyncrasy test. While I was uploading the completed work to my laptop my external hard drive (perhaps due to the delicate displacement of my elbow) decided its USB cable socket was going to become dislodged and fall into the hard drive itself. So this means I only have two pieces of animation to show and that there is currently no way of accessing any of the work I did last year...

...I really hope I can get it fixed.

So this is the action and response test.

This was the first animation I did. At the beginning I wanted to create expression using just the eyebrows but as I went on I found it easier to squash and stretch the goggles as I would if I were animating eyes.

The second animation to survive the hard drive was the "yes, no" test.

I'm very please with this one mostly because I've never done speech with hand drawn animation and the test has proven to be very fluent. Another reason why I am pleased is kinda also because I didn't get a chance to run parts of the animation to see if I was doing it right until today. I didn't make any mistakes.
Anyway the tests (including the two I could not show) prove the character design is ideal for animation and suits the traditional style well.