So another project and a restart

Ok. As soon as I came back to uni I was ambushed by a third year, Omari, and his Final Major Project. The simplified basic concept: Little Loud: The Animated Series is a about a good little girl with a big bad shadow.

The project is to be around three minuits long and we are doing one episode which is set predominently in the child's bedroom, at night. The advantage of this story is that it is simple making it easy to to tell within a short space of time and the single setting also means you don't bombard the adience with too much info within a short time frame. Its logical.
The characters are the girl and her shadow.

My first task has been to work on character design. I noticed that his mood board was mostly comprised of gothic imagery, the majority was identifyably Tim Burton apeal so I asked if this was the visual vibe he was going for but this was not the case-it was mearly insparation for the shadow.
Anyway here are my first design ideas.

She is meant to be shy and timid ten year old who is creative and exciable when alone. She sometimes turns here blanket into a cape and (obviously) in here PJs.

 

You get the idea.

 

 

 

After spending time crafting and egineraing this crafting Omari and I had a meeting were he told me I had to change race and shape. Shere was to be african/carabean. Meh. Nothing wrong with that. Its what you do as a character designer. So I wnet off and did these.



Since the last meeting Omari had a better idea of what sort of style he want to go for but he likes the character so I've got to take these drawings and create the stylised variation. I've got some shadow concepts which I'll discus in a different blog so see yah.

Still alive, I think...

Ok it's obvious: I haven't been around for a while. Why? Long story short a lot of crap happened within a very short space of time and I allowed my self to be distracted. I lost sight of my plans, my enthusiasm and, apart from Project Cheese, I stopped attending uni.. I am greatly annoyed with my self-it took me a long time to decide what wanted to do with my future plus no one thought I'd ever make it to university, or college even. You get the gist.

So what happened to Project Cheese? I was enjoying the entire project. It was going well, it was ahead of schedule, someone vital stopped coming to uni and gradually this caused the entire thing to loose that solidity. It did get completed. Hate how it turned out though. The compositor of my group reordered the shots as he saw fit (ignoring the animatic and notes I left for him.) He then proceeded to hand it in without informing me, despite the fact that I asked him to show me before hand so, as director I, could check it and perhaps work on making alterations.
Usually, as a director, it would be my role to sit with the individual editing the shots together or at least watch a short edited sequence and give it the "all clear" so you can make sure that it is just right but if that person starts and finishes the edit without informing you then it is out of your hands.

Perhaps I'm just blaming someone for my falier. Maybe this only happened because I was a bad director. I'm not looking for sympathy, I don't feel sorry for my self, I'm just disappointed.