I tried to do some work...really...

So yesterday I arived at uni early to do some tests animations for the Deep project on ToonBoom. I decided I was was feeling enthusiastic and that I would get some proper work done. It took the first hour to find ither a computer that worked or would run toonboom without asking for an adminastrative pasword. Anyway four hours later my animation was almost complete and then it stoped saving. I had been saving it to my memory stick so I assumed it was faulty any tried to save it to the computer's hard drive-it didn't work ither. I then discovered that almost all my work had disapeared.

Meh.

Redid the entire thing badly in about half an hour so I could use it as a blue print for the next day.

 

It was meant to be my drone. Not looking to great.

More design stuff

My newest task has been to create some concept work for a short anime sequence. I'm looking at creating some robots/drones (roughly human sized) with the capability of fire power. Its been a loooong time since I've last drawn any bots and I'm just realising ow much I've missed it. This is a brief post as I've only done a little so far. Plus once I've done more and probably changed it several times over I'll rant with more depth. Any way here is a sample.

There. I've gone with organic structures. Tacking into consideration this is for an anime I'm rather against using blocks, aggressive pointy bits and anything that may resemble the original transformers series from the 80s (but I've watched the entire thing and I loved it). Anyway the point I want to get to is that bots most frequently seen in anime are not like that. The are mostly composed of curves and usually have an over all organic silhouette.

Thats me done fore now.

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.

And the project continues...

So several weeks back I began animating for  Project Cheese.
As much as I love traditional animation (also it would have looked lovely with the backgrounds) I decided to use Toon Boom. This was because it is a faster way of working, it is up to date with the animation industry and it also gives me practise with a graphics tablet.

Anyway here is an example of Some animation in progress.

When I began animating with this program a few weeks back I had barley touched this program or a graphics tablet and when I first used one my work was comparable to a five-year-old's scribble but eventually I managed to create actual drawings. So far things have been running smoothly I animate and Perry colours them and tweaks any tiny glitches.

Now I'm just waiting for a couple more backgrounds so I can animate this mouse interacting with the background.



And there's More

Once I had created what seemed to be a stable character design it then had to undergo animation tests. This is to see how far you can push the design, see just how much movement the design will allow while assessing the point at which it perhaps starts to loose shape. You may also find that certain actions just do not match the character's nature.
On top of this you also need to asses whether it can convincingly carry off important actions that need to take place within the film. For example our mouse needed to say "yes," and "no." As his mouth was so long I was a little concerned I would not manage to make it work.



The end result was very pleasing. I was able to make his mouth articulate yes and no with a defined difference. I then continued my test with a bit of action and response and a full turnaround.





I was very pleased with the turnaround as I had never done once before and hadn't had any tutorials for it. It runs fluidly and demonstrates nicely that he can he takes to full angles nicely.

Anyway whiles doing this I was directing the storyboarding and animatic. This is a "final" animatic (there is always a possibility that change could take place.)



Tadaaaah!

More on Project Cheese

Ah! Sooo busy!

So what is the state of my project so far?
Story boards-done
Background concepts and tests-done
Character concepts and designs-done
Test animations-done
Animatic-done
Pre-production bible-done
Me-exhausted.

Ok, I think I'm gonna elaborate over stuff now. Character design. Creating the general look of the character was rather interesting. The distinctive style of cartoon I had gone for meant the design needed to be simple but with a very defined silhouette and lots of charisma.

Here is an example of early experimentation

I ended up with this. As this Little guy was so easily expressive I stuck with the design. One of the most important assets any design could have, with a character that says so little, is one that can portray emotion through facial expression and physicality.

And here is a pretty final turnaround and set of expression tests just for the sake of it.

So once that was sorted I moved onto colouration. Bellow I experimented with three sets of colour: brown, grey and white-colours most people imagine mice to be. The brown was far too dark and the grey seemed to merge with the general colour scheme making it less defined. The white was clear and crisp and added as a subtle hint to his techie nature-a white lab coat was in mind.

The extra lines, used to separate the skin from fur, made the design all too complicated. The result was he looked lovely alone but became detached from the over all appeal of the cartoon. I liked it but it had to be cut.

Bellow you can see where I attempted to include flesh tones by just applying it to the tail (because it had a natural division line where it met his rear) but as the ears and nose were left white it looked unusual. In the end he was just white but I found it had a simple fresh appeal.

And this is the finalised design.

Anyway directing has been hard work but very enjoyable. I haven't really had the opportunity to implement an idea into film before so its been fantastic to finally do so. As well as character design I've been working on general concept design making sure that there is defined and cohesive imagery through out, story boarding with the group which involves many redrafts, building an animatic and hand drawn animation on the side.

So, rambling over, this blog was kinda long so I'll save some more for another.