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.

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.

Project Cheese-a delayed update

So work on the project is running rather smoothly now. At the beginning I'll admit we were a bit behind but now we're bang on track.

Anyway I thought I'd begin this post by rambling a bit about the idea. I'm not actually sure how it arose. I was just presented with the brief "yes, yes, yes, yes, no," and then, *PING!* it just materialised in my brain: there was a mouse, he was stealing cheese from a podium with a mechanical hand, he was quivering with the kind of excitement that only a mouse charged on pure caffeine could do, "yes, yes, yes, YES!" and the cheese was squished, "NOOOOOOOOO!" That's basically what happened.
After a minute or two had passed the idea had evolved a little. The little film in my head was in the style of a Chuck Jones version of Tom and Jerry, which I enjoy too much...I may happen to have had a Chuck Jones' Tom and Jerry box set for a few years...and suddenly, perhaps with the nature of the cartoon in mind my idea became set in a cheese museum.

Anyway I ended up as the director, which I'm actually really enjoying, animator and character designer. I have Brian working on concepts and backgrounds and Perry working on story board and sound. I think my self lucky as they're both doing a great job.

Here is a page from Perry's story board. It's nicely paced and there is some nice composition. This is subject to change and is changing as he is currently doing e new draft.

This is an example of Brian's background work. It's a downward shot and its in mid progress but anyway he's captured the style perfectly. It is epic.

We've progressed since all this work and over all I'm rather pleased with how much we're doing and the pace we're going at. I've just finished some test animations and hope to blog them soon.



Toon Boom

So today I was confronted with Toon Boom for the first time. The lecture was mostly about getting to grips with the interface (especially the storyboard tools).

Toon Boom was designed to make the transfer from traditional media to technical media easier (also this makes it much easier to learn.) Plus it's capable of a large number of applications so looks its kinda evil.

Sooo many tabs!

It is capable of storyboarding, full animatics which encapsulates the use of time lines, the ability to apply sound, drawing tools and the application of cameras. It can also be used to animate so yeah its kinda a bit like flash.

Anyway while experimenting with the interface I couldn't resist but...

Rendering stuff

So this is gonna be a quick one. Today I learned different ways to render in Maya for the perpose of creating separate layers. For example a colour layer or a shadow layer and there are many, many others.

Here was the origonal simple scene rendered.

And bellow are some other render types.

Diffuce No Shadow

One Depth Remaped

One Spectar No Shadow

Anyway there are some examples. Tadah! End.