Personal Projects

Along with the numerous compulsory projects we've been given over the past few months, I've been working on some more personal things in my free time too :)

Since new year, I've been trying to get into the habit of doing 30 minutes of creating a day, this could be working in Maya on an animation, drawing something, writing something, it can be for university or just something I want to work on and so far, I've kept to it. For the most part, University work takes up this time and usually much more than 30 minutes a day, but when I've found I've not had any work to do for university, I've worked on my own projects or projects for other people, which I guess I'll show and talk a little about below :)

One of the first things I worked on, in January was a walk cycle of the Bull Creature Rig, I worked on this for around 5 days, 30 minutes a day. I really enjoy working with quadrupeds and it was a nice, simple rig to work with :) The walk cycle is below. It's still pretty rough and could do with working on a little more, but I'm quite pleased with it.



As many of you know, I participate quite regularly in the Guild Wars 2 community, it's one of my favourite games, so I often find myself doodling fanart of some of my favourite characters in it. Below are a few digital paintings I've done recently......only now realizing that every non-university digital painting I've done in 2014 (that I'm able to show) has been Guild Wars 2 related and that does make me come of as either a fangirl or a little obsessed...but oh well :P Here they are

 

The above was drawn for a friend of mine, who sent me some materials in-game to help with a weapon I'm working on crafting, I drew this to thank him :D

 

Just a quick doodle of my character Gwylen, I'd gotten a letter from an NPC talking about how they'd named some of their children after me, in my honor (after I'd helped these NPC's out with some stuff) and thought it'd be fun to draw some of these babies with the GW2 name tags showing my characters name, above their heads.

 

The two paintings above are of Marjory and Kasmeer a couple in the Guild Wars 2 living story, who I'm quite fond of :) I plan to post a little about the Guild Wars 2 living story on my personal blog at some point, as I have a LOT to say about it. I do plan on starting up personal blogging soon, as I have a lot to talk about, I've recently completed several games, including Depression Quest, To the Moon and a few others, so I'd really like to discuss more about them on here :) Of course, this blog goes towards my grades at the end of the year, so blogging for coursework is going to be my main priority here and I've been very busy lately, so have been putting starting it off, more than I probably should be. Bare with me, I will sort out the website and blog soon though, I promise! (I only have 7 weeks left of uni right now anyway, so in the worst case scenario, it's going to be no longer than 8 weeks ^^)

When I get around to it, my plan for my website is to have (Main/Blog/About Me/Resume/Contact me/ for the main page and then for the blog to be split into two, tags wise (Game Development/Course Blog/Personal Blog) and all feed into one place, similarly to how it is now, with my blogspot account, but I'm hoping to phase out usage of that, when I can figure out how to get it displaying more clearly on my website (with tags and things till in tact) as I've noticed many embeds from my main blog didn't make it in the transfer, so I'm going to have to go back and fix all those, before I really get rid of the blogspot one.

Probably not helping me on the "looking like a GW2 fangirl" front, I've also done a lot of edits recently, using footage from the Guild Wars 2 living story. Editing is something I really enjoy a lot, so I've taken to picking a random "Creative commons licenced" song off the Newgrounds audio portal, that I like and then spending the night editing it to Guild Wars 2 footage and sometimes audio, when I'm finding it hard to sleep. There's something quite therapeutic about timing footage to beats :3

Below are all of my recent edits.

 









 Along with these random edits and things, I've been working on a couple of undisclosed projects that, unfortunately, I can't talk too much about.
One of them is a card-game project for the company When Worlds Collide the company responsible for the RPG system with the same name :) 

There's 5 of us working on the project right now, as artists for their upcoming card game, set to be released on Kickstarter sometime soon, I've been working both as an editor for promotional material and as a digital painter for some of the card art. We're very close to having completed all of the work we were commissioned for soon, so it won't be too long before the game is released and I can show some of the art created for it.

One other project I was working on was Project TDHAS, a project I've been a part of for a while now (I think I've talked a little about this before). It was originally a game made by Tristan for a university assignment, that he chose to continue working on. It's made in Unity 3D and went from originally being a top down game, to being a 3rd person game. I was on the team as an art director, producing seamless textures, UI graphics and backdrops for the game and was going to go on to work on animations, once the project got further in. Tristan was the main designer, modelling and coding it and there was also a composer on our team.

 Both Tristan and I are juggling a lot of work right now (and he's started on a new project and the assignment has been handed in) so I'm not sure what the fate of this project will be, but it was fun experience working for him on it.

I'd never done any kind of texture work before, so it was a new experience for me. The game works on PC and is able to connect to an android system, for puzzles such as lock picking or safe breaking. Here's Tristan's blog post on integrating those, showing the android lock picking game and one of the environments (albeit not very textured) areas in the game.

Finally, I'll talk about this more soon, but in my free time I've been working on a personal project of mine called Taking Wing. It was an idea I jotted down whilst at Bradford games festival, being inspired by the talk Jaromir Plachy gave on his inspirations behind Botanicula. Falmouth University is starting a games development degree next year (one I wish I wasn't too late to be a part of) and as a result, 3rd year animation students can now submit games as well as films, for final year. We'll be pitching these ideas soon and I'm hoping Taking Wing gets greenlit, so I can put it towards my degree in 3rd year and collaborate with other students on the campus, such as composers.

I'm currently working to build the game in Stencyl, although this is subject to change, depending on whether I find the program too limiting or not (I only have experience in  RPGmaker XP and Game Maker but chose Stencyl because it seems to be more versatile from an animation perspective, something I'd need if I was to submit it as my final animation project)

Here's a screenshot of the production bible I'm working on and a concept for the first level and the current title screen (working, but subject to change...the writing is animated with a flicker)

Fingers crossed pitching it goes well, I guess! :)
 I'll talk more about games and other projects soon (particularly past games projects, as I'm about 98% sure game development and 3D character animation are the areas I'm most passionate about and would most like to go in, now)

But for now, Char out! 

Updatess :D

Hey all,
It's been a rather long time since I updated you all, but I thought I'd just post some of the work I've done since January :)

As mentioned in my last blog post, I've been working on a production and research bible for an animated film in the style of Edward Gorey.

This project, ‘Pick and Mix’ revolved around us picking 4 cards at random out of a hat. One of these cards would act as the art style, one as the genre, one as the main character and one as the location. The cards that I received were: Edward Gorey for the art Style, Opera House for the location, ‘A doctor’ for the main character and Family Feature film as the Genre.

The first thing I began researching for this project was the subject of Genre. The card I picked for my film was ‘Family Feature’ and therefore I had to know what family feature films entailed before I began writing a synopsis or started thinking of story ideas for this project. ‘Family Feature’ as a genre is very broad topic. It can range from live action films such as Mrs Doubtfire, to animated films such as Bambi. The only real rules defining a family feature film is that it has to be a feature film and can be enjoyed by both adults and children alike. The majority of these films are between U and PG in rating, with a very rare few crossing into the 12 rating category. Some very popular examples of ‘Family Feature films’ are, the Harry Potter series, Dr Doolittle, The Lord of the Rings series, along with the majority of Dreamworks, Disney and Pixar’s feature films.

Considering that family feature films appear to be pretty broad in themes and plots, the only restriction I gave myself when coming up with a story, was “is it kid friendly?”. Meaning my film should be free of explicit themes and language, but enjoyable to both adults and children.
My next step was coming up with a compelling story, this was something that was incredibly tough for me, I re-worked it several times. Going from a toy-story esque film, involving a shelf of souvenirs in a doctors room coming to life, to coming up with a much more dramatic plot, involving mental health issues. In the end, I chose to go with the plot involving mental health issues, as it’s something that has been a pressing issue in my life lately, regarding people I care about, so I felt much more compelled towards that subject matter.

I have always really liked films that involve fighting against an evil source with hand on hand combat, similar to how it is done in many video games. Wreck it Ralph is a recent family feature film and the majority of animated feature films I looked at, had fight scenes in them somewhere. I used this to give me some perspective on how scary I could make the film, without pushing it out of the ‘family feature film’ category by making it unsuitable for kids. Brave was one of the films I looked at quite extensively, along with Rise of the Guardians, two recent Family feature films with quite dark themes behind them and some impressive combat scenes. These were the two films I used to gauge how far I could go with my film, This project, ‘Pick and Mix’ revolved around us picking 4 cards at random out of a hat. One of these cards would act as the art style, one as the genre, one as the main character and one as the location. The cards that I received were: Edward Gorey for the art Style, Opera House for the location, ‘A doctor’ for the main character and Family Feature film as the Genre. This research bible will serve as a storage place for my thoughts, concepts and any research done for this project and should prove very helpful when deciding on particular assets for this film and keeping inspirations in one place.

The first thing I began researching for this project was the subject of Genre. The card I picked for my film was ‘Family Feature’ and therefore I had to know what family feature films entailed before I began writing a synopsis or started thinking of story ideas for this project. ‘Family Feature’ as a genre is very broad topic. It can range from live action films such as Mrs Doubtfire, to animated films such as Bambi. The only real rules defining a family feature film is that it has to be a feature film and can be enjoyed by both adults and children alike. The majority of these films are between U and PG in rating, with a very rare few crossing into the 12 rating category. Some very popular examples of ‘Family Feature films’ are, the Harry Potter series, Dr Doolittle, The Lord of the Rings series, along with the majority of Dreamworks, Disney and Pixar’s feature films.

Considering that family feature films appear to be pretty broad in themes and plots, the only restriction I gave myself when coming up with a story, was “is it kid friendly?”. Meaning my film should be free of explicit themes and language, but enjoyable to both adults and children.
My next step was coming up with a compelling story, this was something that was incredibly tough for me, I re-worked it several times. Going from a toy-story esque film, involving a shelf of souvenirs in a doctors room coming to life, to coming up with a much more dramatic plot, involving mental health issues. In the end, I chose to go with the plot involving mental health issues, as it’s something that has been a pressing issue in my life lately, regarding people I care about, so I felt much more compelled towards that subject matter.

I have always really liked films that involve fighting against an evil source with hand on hand combat, similar to how it is done in many video games. Wreck it Ralph is a recent family feature film and the majority of animated feature films I looked at, had fight scenes in them somewhere. I used this to give me some perspective on how scary I could make the film, without pushing it out of the ‘family feature film’ category by making it unsuitable for kids. Brave was one of the films I looked at quite extensively, along with Rise of the Guardians, two recent Family feature films with quite dark themes behind them and some impressive combat scenes. These were the two films I used to gauge how far I could go with my film, they also gave me some tips to other aspects and themes commonly prevalent in family feature films.

I also looked at other family feature films that star a doctor as the main character, Dr Doolittle was one of these, a film with lots of comedic and light hearted aspects along with him trying to save the lives of his patients, bringing more serious undertones.

My final story idea revolves around a performance psychiatrist by the name of Dr Mathews. He is well known in the performance industry for having questionable techniques but amazing results and success when helping his patients. Most establishments will not hire him unless the matter is vital, because he is viewed as controversial by the performance industry.

Eugine, a new opera singer, who is set to open Canada’s newest opera house, in front of royalty in a week, has broken down during one of his rehearsals with an anxiety attack. Dr Mathews is called in to help him combat his ‘monsters’ by using a machine to transport himself artificially into the mind of Eugine, where he can fight them sword and shield. Dr Mathews is in for a surprise though, as Eugine has more monsters than he has ever seen before and he can’t combat them without Eugines co-operation. Eugine is very stuck up and self righteous, someone that can not be easily budged. The film follows serious undertones, whilst being somewhat light hearted when involving the interaction between Eugine and Dr Mathews, an interaction I think can be made quite comedic.



The first hurdle I faced, in regards to style, was that Edward Goreys character art lacks any kind of emotion to it. Characters all seem to have the same expression, regardless of situation, this being one of the things he was praised for, that any situation can go, with his art and it’ll just seem natural. From an animation standpoint however, this is one of the difficult things, especially with Monsters Within being such an emotionally charged film, dealing with fears and anxiety and phobias. I wanted to keep to Edward Goreys style as much as possible, but also be able to portray character emotion the way that was necessary for my storyline and also would keep the film fresh and interesting. This inspired me to begin trying to work in his style, sketching out what I thought some of the characters would look like in his style and then tweaking them a little bit, to portray more emotions.

The biggest thing I noticed about Goreys style, limitation wise, was that his characters features were very small, this probably being a contributing factor to the emotionless feel to his work.
When taking Edward Goreys style to animation, I decided it would be best to use his crosshatching style on either the backgrounds or the characters, but not both, as I felt it would be very distracting and difficult to understand what was going on. I played with two ideas to solve this. The first idea being, to have the backgrounds digitally painted in colour and then Edward Gorey style black and white cross hatched characters over the top. My second idea being to have a cross hatched, Edward Gorey style black and white background, with simplistic outlined Edward Gorey characters, in flat colour over the top.

In the end, I chose to go with the later idea, using a simplistic water colour style that Gorey has used in several of his pieces. I used Paint Tool SAI or all of the artwork, as the program was perfect for getting a nice, clean, pen-like line work for the background. Something I struggled with in Photoshop, Flash and other programs I tried. I made mood boards of some of the locations and mimicked them in Edward Goreys style, and also broke through from the style a little bit, sketching some dramatic digitally painted pieces of concept art, to get me started and really get a feel of the movie I wanted to create. I went through several iterations of character designs, from the original, toys coming to life idea, to a loose Edward Gorey style and then finally onto the accurate Edward Gorey style seen in the final product. I originally created the animatic in a loose Edward Gorey style, with normal cinematography, using varied camera angles and shot types. However, after having a feedback session with my lecturers, decided to stick more closely to Edward Goreys style, reducing the amount of camera shots and making the existing ones very front on and flat, similar to Edward Goreys work.

We were required to animate a few seconds of animation to ‘prove’ that animation could work in this style. I originally planned to do a cut-out animation of Eugine collapsing, but after a little more thought, I decided I’d quite like to animate it frame by frame. This decision was mostly based off the fact that I found Edward Goreys style limiting enough, emotion wise and I felt that animating in cut-out would make this and even bigger issue. It would also require me to learn Celaction in just a couple of weeks and I thought it would be beneficial to my work to stick with something I was confident with, instead of rushing to learn new software in just a couple of weeks.

I decided I wanted to animate the monsters, for my short snippet as I thought it would be fun to figure out how these creatures would move. I also needed to keep my work in the Edward Gorey, watercolour and cross hatching style. The program flash is a pretty limiting one, when it comes to colouring techniques, but I felt the timeline was absolutely necessary for me to get the movement of these creatures correct. I decided to work across several programs when animating, and really liked the idea of working with the flicker produced with cross hatching and watercolour in a frame by frame style animation (Similar to how The Snowman looks, produced with coloured pencil).

I ended up having a pipeline for creating a frame, I’d sketch it out in flash and use the timeline to ensure the movement was how I wanted it, I’d then export it as an AVI file and import it frame by frame in Photoshop, which I’d save as individual layers. I’d then save it as a .PSD and import it into Paint tool Sai, where I changed the opacity, drew other the top in smooth lines, added cross hatching and coloured in the watercolour style. This would then be saved as a .PNG and brought into Sony Vegas, where I chose the time it was to be displayed and pieced all my animation together.
I am very pleased with the final outcome of the animation, but I’m not sure how viable it’d be in a commercial space. The flicker works the way I intended it to and I think the animation works well for a dream-like sequence, especially with the watercolour and cross hatching making it look quite eerie. However, when considering export times and switching between programs, it was taking me upwards of an hour per frame and at 25 frames per second, I don’t think that would be so viable in a studio, unless a strict pipeline was adhered too.

Overall I really enjoyed this project! It pushed me out of my comfort zone a lot, when designing characters and working to someone elses style, something I feel was a good thing overall. I’m very happy with the final animation, however, for the amount of time it took to animate such a small shot, I think finding a better technique to animate in, would be best for time management and efficiency. If I was to do it again, I think I’d probably look for a compromise between Goreys style and simplicity for animation, hopefully by doing this it would allow me to animate more efficiently, whilst still keeping a relatively high standard of work.

I think this project has taught me a lot, in regards to character design and wat it means to work in another person’s style. I enjoyed thinking up stories for the project, ad a lot of fun sound editing for the animatic and really enjoyed seeing the Monster coming to life, after spending so long staring at each frame.

I think Edward Goreys style could be used for animation, but as much as I like it, I think it is a little too complex for your average feature film. The style would fit in quite well at art shows or film festivals however and may have some success in advertising.

Below is my final research bible, compiling my inspirations for the project

Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwCeP4T97JdFNldqaUFIdS1SUE0

and then my final production bible, detailing the film/character designs ect is below :D

Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwCeP4T97JdFeGJfSHlET2NEM1E/edit

Here's an animatic for one of the scenes



and here is a short animation, experimenting with the style :3





I'll blog again soon, to talk about my new projects :D I've got a couple of game projects along with a few other things that I'm working with ^^

Until next time
~Char out

2013 a year in review :3

So, here it is, my last post of 2013 :D

It's been an interesting year, I've learned a lot, had a chance to further my animation skills at least a little. Passed my 1st year and already made it through half of second year, created some animations I am proud of and some, not so much. I also decided where I want to specialize, which is a massive leap for me :D

I came onto this course being completely in love with all animation styles and techniques and didn't really know whether I wanted to go into post production, pre production, production or other things.

It was only at the end of 1st year that I decided that the thing I'd most like to specialize with, is 3D Character animation. I really enjoy working in Maya and trying to bring characters to life, using this method sounds perfect for me :) Subtle eye and body language are things I always seem to pick up on in films, so it'd be nice to learn and get good at bringing characters to life myself.

We recently got set an 11 Second animation project, to the November audio clip from the 11 second club, you can see this below.



I spent a few whole days working on this animation, paying attention to as many little details as I could, even though the rigs I was using (Nico and Fox 1.0 from Creative Crash) didn't have as complex facial controls as a human rig would've. I enjoyed playing with the ears and tails especially, working on follow through and overlap motions.

I received some incredible critique from my 'mentor' that I posted about a while back, so I'll be improving this animation and working to his feedback very soon. He's given me a lot of tips and advice on how to improve the way the characters interact, along . Infact, I'll post it below, as it's really helpful advice may help others too, plus it'll make it clear what I'll be changing at some point.

"First off nice job so far! You've really improved since I saw your first animation! Also, an 11 second 2 character dialogue shot is NO small task! Don't sell yourself short with "only 11 second short one." Thats a lot of animation!!! Even professionals at Disney and Dreamworks average 4-5 seconds per week. It's pretty ambitious!

First things first, that camera angle! Flat on the side is the most boring camera angle you could choose! Switch it up, put a 45 degree angle on the center of the shot. Play with camera changes, over the shoulder type things to really keep the shot interesting!

It will also free you up from being stuck to forward/backward awkward movement. In terms of the acting, some of the choices work, some don't so much. At first for example she's coming on strong in her voice, but she backs off when she's saying it. It doesn't sound like shes intimidated by him or anything, so maybe try reversing that move and having her come forwards towards him when she says it.

Same thing when she curls up and sits down. She's taking a lower position than him on screen and psycologically, which makes her look weaker. Again, she's coming on pretty strong. Get her up and strong! She probably can't get above him height wise, but you could perhaps lower the male wolf a bit in order to make that happen!

That being said I like his body language when he says "I don't cry." It makes him seem proud the way he puts his head up, which he sounds like! But then you drop it down instantly! If he's really proud, he's not going to go into sad mode again! He might look away or look at his foot or kick the dirt or something, but lowering his head again makes his proud statement not so strong.

Those are just some general ideas to think about as far as the acting goes. The body says 1000% more than the voice does!
In terms of mechanics, I would take a lot of time focusing on those! Study how a dog should sit and really work on making it seem like she's sitting when she sits down in the middle! Make sure the feet aren't sliding around. You've got a fairly large pop around 2 seconds in when she sits down too.

I realllly like the mechanics you have going with the dog on the right. He's not moving too much (a common issue is wayyyyy too much movement, or what might be called "over animating") He's kinda backing away at the end which feels nice enough mechanics wise (Acting wise I might place that more towards the beginning because he's put his pride on the line after his statement) You wen't really simple with him, WHICH IS GREAT! It's such a smart decision and it really helps him feel nice!

The girl is what I would say is overanimated. She's walking back and forth for no real reason, she sits down and stands up for no real reason. You can do something like this easily with two poses. Maybe start with her sitting and then come up on him when she says "you know what'd be really nice?" (Not saying change your whole shot, just things to think about in the future!)
But again, super nice progress as far as where you came from! It's honestly not horrible, but it's got a long way to go at the same time! You're doing great! Keep it up!"

I'm definitely going to work on removing some animation from her, as well as posing. I really love the idea of her starting out from sitting, as I struggled to get her sitting animation to look authentic. I'm not sure whether I'll get all of this done for the deadline, as I still have an essay and 3 production reports, among other things due this month as well. But I'll be sure to try my best with it, and even if I don't complete it for the deadline, I'll rework it for my show reel anyway, so expect that on my blog soon! :)


Another thing I wanted to talk about was Kieth Lango's tutorials. Kieth Lango's blog was suggested to us in first year, because of his amazing article on Pose to Pose animation. What I didn't know, was that he used to do a series of VTS animation clinic tutorial videos every week, that could be subscribed to like a magazine. One of my friends at University recently noticed that he was selling 60 hours worth of these VTS tutorials in a bundle for £18. This was only for a couple of days, so I was really lucky to get in on it, but from what I've seen of them so far, they're incredibly, helpful and detailed tutorials, ranging from timing and poses to character animation itself. I can't wait until after deadlines, so I can really get stuck into them! For anyone interested, he's still selling these 60 hours of tutorials for £60 on his website here, I'd definitely recommend them! It's an incredible price for so much knowledge.

Just before I end this post, I thought I'd put up some Digital Paintings I've done recently, the first 3, practicing Lighting and the Final 3 practicing colour :) The first 3 were some pre-vis concepts for my Production Bible, which have since been scrapped, for a different style. The second 3, being random warm-up doodles whilst I was home for Christmas c:

and finally, the end of year showreel!



I'm slowly trying to phase out most of my 2D animation, replacing it with newer 3D work. Mostly because the majority of my 2D work is very old or sloppy to the point that I am unhappy with it. But also because I want to have a more specialized and detailed 3D show reel that I can continue adding to :3
I still really enjoy 2D animation and will probably continue working on 2D animations at one point or another (I've already applied to be a tweener/clean up animator on a couple of the 3rd year 2D films as well as a character animator on the 3D project Lone Wolf, so I'm looking forward to 2014!)

I hope you've all had a wonderful year,
See you all in 2014!

Funny in 15

As promised, this post is about the 'Funny in 15' group project we were set at the beginning of the term c: What follows this is my written production report for the project, detailing the processes myself and my two team members went through whilst creating this animation.

This year started with us being handed our second ever group project, our task was to create a 15 second animation that makes people laugh. This task was set in order for us to work on timing and plots in animation. Unlike our previous group project, this project was to be done in pre-determined groups, not ones that we picked ourselves, like last time. I got placed in a group with my flatmate Bradley Spice and another member of my course, Rhys Harvey.

This project was very open ended. We were allowed to do anything we wanted, as long as #1. It was funny and #2. It was 15 seconds in length. This gave us a lot of scope to work with, so my team mates and I began by meeting up to discuss themes for this project. Our decision was to each go away that night and find short animations/films on the internet that we found funny. We created a facebook group for correspondence, that we posted these videos to. Some of the ones we looked at were ASDF Movie, Eddsworld, Purple and Brown, Bumming Crew and a bunch of 7 second videos known as ‘Vines’.

We determined by looking at these, that we wanted to play on the ‘unexpected’ side of comedy, similar to how things like ASDF movie handle things. We met up again to draft out some ideas that we thought could work, coming up with 3 or 4 ideas each. We narrowed all of these down to 3 main ideas that we thought would work decently.

These three ideas are as follows:

Idea number 1 involved two guys walking towards each other down a corridor. They end up stopping and stumbling over each other deciding which way to pass. They take a couple of steps and break into the dirty dancing dance move, the music cuts out half way through and the one of the guys stops, drops the other on the floor and walks on.

This idea played very much on the surprise aspect, along with being relatable to every day experiences. There aren’t many people who can say that they haven’t ended up in that situation in a corridor when both you and the other person are trying to go the same way, ending in that awkward, ‘which way are they going?’ dance. The dirty dancing move is also one that many people know, so it plays kind of on common interests too.

Idea number 2 begins with a pretty, tarty looking girl standing in an elevator. A scruffy guy walks in beside her, causing an awkward pause, it is completely silent during this time and the two exchange weird looks with each other. We played with the idea of the guy doing something awkward like scratching his butt. Suddenly the lights flicker and go off for a few seconds. When they come back on the two have switched clothes and the guy, after admiring himself up and down, walks out with a gay prance, leaving the girl to just stare, to wonder what just went on.

Once again, this idea focuses on the unexpected and also on familiar situations. Travelling in lifts with strangers often leads to long awkward silences and being in close proximity to somebody who maybe doesn’t bathe as often as they should, so we felt this idea could be relatable to many people.

Idea number 3 was more taboo than the others, which played more on awkward situations. This idea was based around toilet humour and focussed on two people in toilet cubicles. Loud farting noises can be heard from these two cubicles and they seem to be in competition with each other. The cubical doors and lavatory floor shaking more and more each time. A guy walks in, planning to use the urinal and gets knocked out by the stench. The noises stop and one of the cubical users emerges, turning out to be a well-dressed woman.

This idea, along with being based on the shock factor (as the previous two were) was based a bit more on taboo and already identified bases for comedy. ‘Toilet Humor’ is something that has been around for centauries and is universally thought to be funny, if not a little immature. The other thing we played on was challenging preconceptions made by society. Society as a whole tends to have the view that women don’t fart/women are always pristine, pretty, well kept ect. This idea challenges that and I think it’s something a lot of people would find funny, with the extra gag of the urinal guy fainting from the smell, just in case.

The three of us each took one of these ideas to animatic stage, I chose to do the elevator scene, which was incredibly challenging to figure out, due to the complex timing needed to make a situation awkward, whilst still fitting in the rest of the gag and keeping it at 15 seconds in length. We couldn’t decide between these ideas, so we took them to our lecturer Derek, who suggested we carry through with idea number one, but push it further, making it more taboo. Derek didn’t think we needed the character to be thrown on the floor, saying it didn’t add much to the gag. He talked about us playing more on taboo, maybe adding a gay kiss scene to the mix, something we thought would work and decided to go with.

Our idea was now a business man running into an angry sumo in a corridor. The sumo charges at him, looking angry and viewers will expect him to try and attack the business man. Instead the business man picks him up, holding him in the air in a dirty dancing style, hebefore t two share a romantic kiss. The gag ends with a cut/disk scrape sound and the sumo falls on top of the business man, crushing and killing him.

This gag once again plays on the unexpected as well as playing on the taboo (which although more accepted nowadays, being gay is still classed as)

We were all very happy with this idea and Brad began by re-making the animatic and adding the kiss scene into it. We showed this at one of the bi-weekly production meetings to get feedback from Andy, who told us to work a little more on the timing, holding the kiss scene longer and shortening the part when the sumo runs up to the business man.

We did this and once both we and Andy were happy with it, began sketching out character designs. Rhys designed the business man and I designed the sumo. We decided for a very flash cartoon-like line art style, with simple cartoon faces. The background was to be in a more painterly style, so it didn’t clash with the animation. Rhys began drawing out the backgrounds for this project whilst Brad finalised the animation in the animatic, so we could work over the top of it when coming to do the final animation. This short relied a lot on the perspective of some of the shots, so this was really helpful when coming to produce the final thing.

Rhys and I decided to take a character each, in order to keep style similarities when animating. I chose to animate the sumo and he chose to animate the business man. Our team worked well together, exchanging flash files regularly and updating each other on progress. Brad compositing the final thing together and adding sound/music to the animation, exporting and uploading to the group regularly so we know what worked and what didn’t.

For the most part, we stuck closely to the rough animation Brad did for the animatic, this was in order to keep the perspective right but also because we felt it worked well. Rhys and I worked over the top of this, adding extra animation where necessary and giving life to the characters in terms of style and expressions. As a group we were able to complete the animation on time and I’m very happy with the result. I feel we’ve worked superbly well together, very good communication between all of us, no fallings out and all deadlines were met on time.

The biggest challenge this project gave me was working with a human character, although Flash is a program that I’m experienced with, human animation is still, is unfortunately, pretty alien to me. This is something I hope to improve and practice on in the future. When animating the sumo, I stuck more heavily to Brads animation guidelines than I’d have liked, because of this. Animating the run cycles and getting the movement of his body fat was another huge challenge for me, and something I don’t think I pulled off as well as I was hoping. Although I think the animation is enough to convey our gag, I think I could’ve worked into it a lot more, adding more squash and stretch and overlap to it, to make it feel more lifelike as I feel the animation I did for the sumo feels kind of lifeless and static. Something I wasn’t so happy with, in the end. If I had more time, I’d go back, add more key frames and work on better applying the basic principles of animation into the sumo animation.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project, I feel that it’s helped me better improve my communication skills, work to a deadline and I enjoyed the challenge of getting the comedy aspect to work. I think this project has helped me better understand the production process as well as helping me a lot when working with others and improving my time management skills. I enjoyed the freedom this group project gave us, as unlike the Sea group project, which had predetermined audio, this one was done completely from scratch, which was both fun and a challenge in itself. If I was to do this again, I think I’d try to better implement the 12 basic principles of animation, to prevent my work from looking too dry and lifeless. I think my team and I worked outstandingly well together and I’d happily work with either one of my team mates again! I’m quite happy with the final outcome of the film, I think it portrays the gags we wanted it to portray well and I’m glad we were able to meet all the set deadlines for production and complete it on time, even if it is not necessarily my favourite piece of animation I have done so far.

Our completed Funny in 15 animation is below :)

Achievement Unlocked: Year 1 Complete!

Second blog post of the day is a new 'achievement' xD Today marked our final hand-in and therefore, the completion of the year :D
It's gone really, really quickly, but has been a very enjoyable one c: I've learned a lot, made a lot of friends and I can't wait to get stuck into next year and work on my own stuff in the summer c: (I have two small group projects planned, one 2D game project with my friend Danny and a CGI, cut-scene like, short with my friend Tristan, from Plymouth University, Watch this space c:)

Below is my showreel, showing some of my best motion studies work for this semester c: along with a little bit of life drawing :3



I'm very happy with what I have achieved this year, but think I've stayed in my comfort zone, a little more than I'd have liked to (particularly with the dragons and lack of human animation). My intention is to take Post production next year and work a lot on CGI, 3D animation, as it is something very out of my comfort zone a little bit, but still something I'm really interested in and enjoy doing c: I also intend to do a lot more life drawing, to try and improve on my human anatomy skills :3

But yes! I'll be updating this blog regularly still, over the summer, so you'll still be hearing from me ^_^

Then next year, I have the pleasure of living with 6 other animators and an English Literature student :D Should be great fun ^_^

Until next year!
~Char out!

The Group Project - A much needed update

Heya everyone :D It's been a few days of working solidly, since I last updated, so here's the rundown of what's been going on c:
Yesterday, as a group we had to present the group project we've been working on for the last two months, I think we presented pretty well and we were able to finish the film on time, which is always a massive plus! c:

For anyone interested, below is our final group film c: I was going to spend time blogging more about the production stages of the film, like I have been doing, but due to deadlines and being short on time, I haven't yet. I'll talk about my role in the film, later in this blog post and update you guys on our production logging, as a lot has changed since the last time I talked to you guys about it o:



I'm actually really pleased with the outcome of the final film and I think everyone in our group worked really hard to achieve it :D My main role in this project was as a 2D animator, working on the interview scenes c: As seen in my 'An insight into the group project' post, we had a production log. Since then, we have had many discussions and feedback sessions and a lot has changed. Our final production log is below.

With many of the original scenes deleted and a lot of re-organisation in terms of animators. Katie and Beverly switched with me, to work on the chibi style of the flashback scene together, whilst I was put to work, exclusively on the interview scene. Below is the work I produced for this project, that made it into the final cut. I really enjoyed this task as it was very far out of my comfort zone, working with human animation isn't something I'm used to doing, and I really enjoyed working on it :D



Our reasons for cutting so many scenes that were previously present in our animatic, was mostly due to feedback from our lecturers. We regularly had meetings with Kathy, so she got to know our project quite well, then occasionally we'd have the odd meeting with Ann to discuss where we were going with the project, theory wise and to work on our presentation skills. When the project was still in its animatic stages, we were able to get some helpful feedback off Derek, who really liked our animatic and gave us several pointers in ways to improve it. However, the final decision for changing our work was after a screening with Andy. He mentioned that our scenes seemed to be quite fast paced compared to the audio clip we were working from, which gave way to a much slower mood. He said it'd be good for us to cut out some of these more 'busy' shots and focus more on extending just a few of them, to better fit in time with the audio. We all agreed with this and decided to lengthen what was previously the 'surfers' scene and the 'wave claw' scene into a longer sequence, keeping it all as one shot. I felt this fit the audio much better than what we previously had and I'm glad we had that session with Andy and were able to make those adjustments.

We decided to go for a non-serious, slapstick-like approach to our project, taking inspiration from things like Charlie Chaplin, Chuck Jones’s animations, Ren and Stimpy, Felix the Cat and a variety of other places. This was quite a risky thing to have done, considering how serious our audio clip with, I spent quite a lot of time researching genre conventions of slapstick comedy and we all made sure that in the ‘flashback’ scenes, the animation was loose and the expressions were exaggerated, to achieve this effect. I was a little worried about how well we’d make this work, but overall, I think it worked really well, and coupled with Georgi’s music, giving it serious undertones, I think it makes quite an atmospheric, whilst still fun, scene.

Overall, I really, really enjoyed working on the group project, I think we all worked well as a team and it helped us get a better feel of what it'd be like, in industry, to have different roles and go from a starting idea to a finished product c:

Deadline #1 Complete

Hey everyone c: Yesterday was the hand in date for half of the work for this semester, which was kind of scary, but a huge relief at the same time ^_^

I'm going to split my work into two posts, as I have both work from the 'Adaption' project in both 2D and 3D to talk about, but also very different work from the background project and for the sake of ease, using my labels, it'd be easier to do them both separately c:

In this post, I'll be talking about the Adaption project, a project in which we had to take a page or scene from a story book/game/comic and re-create this in Photoshop, putting everything onto layers, then perform a camera move through it in both Toon Boom Harmony and Autodesk Maya.

As promised, below is my checklist, showing what I have and haven't completed for first year c: My next deadline is Friday the 31st and then first year ends on the 14th June and we get our results back on the 27th June :D So I've got some very exciting and scary times coming up o-o

Updated Checklist - 

• DGA130 Design for Animation Experimental - Handed In
• DGA130 Design for Animation 3D Modelling Project 24^th May Academic Office time by 2pm
• DGA130 Design for Animation Background Project 24^th May Academic Office time by 2pm + 12.00 hrs Online
• DGA140 Digital Animation Practice 2 Individual Adaptation Project (layout test shot) 24^th May Academic Office time by 2pm + 23.55hrs Online
• DGA 120 Motion Studies Showreel 31^st May 2pm in Academic Office + 23.55 hrs Online
• DGA 120 Motion Studies Portfolio 31^st May 2pm in Academic Office + 17.00 hrs Online
• DGA130 Design for Animation Ident Project 31^st May by 2pm in Academic Office + 23.55 hrs Online
• DGA140 Digital Animation Practice 2 Group Project (Sea Tales) 31^st May Academic Office time by 2pm + Presentation on 30^th May 2013
• DGA140 Digital Animation Practice 2 Blog 31/5/13 23.55 Online

I'll keep my blog going until the end c: and I've got two projects (a one 2D Game Design one with my friend Dan and a 3D cutscene/CGI film one with my friend Tristan) set for the holidays c: So the likelihood is that I'll continue updating my blog throughout the whole of the holidays with information on both those projects as well.

In other news, Urashima Taro, the project I got to be a part of, a month or so ago has been officially completed and you can watch it below c:



Anyways, onto my adaption project c:
We were set the project producing a 'test shot', opening scene of a story book, game or comic. This had to be done using the program Toon Boom and had to show depth and some sort of 'background animation'.

For this project, I chose to adapt one of my favourite story books as a child. A book by Karen Hayles named The Star that fell. The book is done in a water colour style which I really like and I tried my best to re-create this in Paint Tool Sai, before importing it into Photoshop and then Toon Boom for use as part of this project.

We had to focus this project on the environment, not the narrative of the story, so I chose my background animation to be a horned owl taking off, rather than the star falling to earth (as seen in the book) as I felt the star was more of a narrative choice than a  background one, and there were owls later on in the story, so it wouldn't be out of place to do something like that c:



I created the opening of this animation using Toon Boom Harmony's perspective tool. This me to decide where each 2D piece was on a plain, giving the illusion that some parts of the scene were further away and some were nearer to the camera.

The 'background' animation had to be something that wasn't too intrusive, so in the left hand corner, I animated a tiny owl that fly's off the screen after a couple of seconds in order not to destroy the effect of the background. I'm quite pleased with the outcome, however, I think I could've spent a little longer working on it, as it's not very smooth and looks quite rough. I intend to spend more time over the holidays analysing the movements of animals like reptiles and birds in order to learn to animate them better (and humans, because as you can see from my Ident, my human animation needs a lot of work c:)

You can see my finished rendition of the Toon Boom Ident Below c:



For our second task it was required that we import this into Maya, model each piece of it and then perform a camera move through the scene. For starters, I really feel like this project helped me to improve my understanding of Maya, particularly in terms of projection mapping and using textures and I really enjoyed working on this piece, seeing how you can achieve different results with ‘2D style’ animation in 3D software packages.

This project was one I struggled with at first, but quickly began to get the hang of, as I imported more and more layers into the scene. The brief required that we give some sort of 3D sustenance to the work, so after projection mapping my layer onto a plain, getting my desired size and depth, I was able to build this up, stretching it out and giving it much more of a 3D feel (This would later allow me to give the Illusion of 3D when I performed my camera move)

I built the scene up using a variety of plane, situated different distances apart, and I used one image plane with the entire, completed background design projected on it. This enabled me to gauge where certain things had to be placed in the scene. I chose to leave the close up trees out of this scene as they caused a lot of problems for me in terms of the camera move (and they were something I added into the Toonboom scene as an after thought (they were not present in the book I was referencing the image from). I think maybe, if I was ever to try and re-do this project, I would work on finding more ways to incorporate these into the scene as I feel if would make the camera movement a lot more interesting.

As for the composition of the scene itself, I am quite pleased with how closely I matched the 3D scene to its original toonboom counterpart. I did however, find some parts of it very tricky to work with. When re-creating this, I found that the ‘hill’ or ‘ground’, which was previously of a good size to work with, became very hard to manage in a 3D environment. Framing the scene for render and positioning the camera in such a way that it showed all the parts of the scene it should, without showing the Maya grid or background (breaking the illusion) was also really tricky for me. I feel my scene could’ve looked a lot better and the camera move could’ve been improved dramatically if the hill for this environment was higher, allowing me to focus in more from the start.

Overall I am quite pleased with the modelling for each piece of land/layer in this scene. I think particularly the house, worked very well at keeping the ‘3D illusion’ and that the camera angle wasn’t so bad, considering what I was going for. My original idea was just to have the camera literally move in on the scene in kind of a zoom motion, but after consideration, I decided this was a little bit dull, for something I was making the effort to model into 3D and so I chose to make the camera move a little more interesting. The final move was more of a zoom and then a twist, showing the detail/3D effect I had on the house.

The only real thing I’m very unhappy about in this scene was the background, sky and stars. I think if anything was to break the ‘3D illusion’ on this scene it would be those two parts as I found it incredibly hard to make them work together in a way that didn’t make them seem flat. Putting the stars and background on a separate plain made them seem as though they weren’t part of the sky and were able to move around on their own. I felt this made the scene seem rather cluttered and busy, however, attaching them both on the same plain make them seem really static. For my final render, I chose to have them on the same plane, as I felt this was the least confusing out of the two options I had. I’m not sure if this was the best option to have taken, but I think it was alright considering the options I had available to me.

To conclude, I am reasonably happy with the final outcome of my 2D to 3D piece however, there is always room for improvement. I feel I have significantly improved my knowledge of Maya whilst working on this project and if I was to do a similar thing again in the future I believe I would be able to pull it off with slightly higher quality and standards due to what I have learned. 

The final product for this can be seen below c:



The other project we were given for our 'Design for Animation" module went by the name of "The Devil is in the damaged detail and required us to model and texture something we've seen outside of campus, with some form of detail on, in the programs Maya, Mudbox and Photoshop.

It was suggested that people on the course not so familiar with Maya should model a wall or section of wall for this brief. I’m not very confident with Maya yet, so I took up this challenge and went about photographing a wall with some detail that I could work on modelling. The area we were modelling had to be off campus and so I took my camera with me to some volunteering I was doing at a community garden and photographed their shed. I think my photo’s for texturing were pretty clear although I could’ve taken them when it was lighter, as the area of wood I was photographing was in shadow and I feel this made it look quite dull.

I began this project by working with a plane in Maya, I tweaked the image I intended to use  was a texture so that the wood planks were straight and then assigned the photograph as a lambert material.  I then worked on the 3D effect the area using brushes and pulling or pushing in parts of the detail, for example, the darker parts of the photograph (like inbetween planks) I pushed in and the lighter parts (the planks themselves) I pulled out and empathised.

The final result was a section of wall that looked like it was in 3D. I then applied a simple camera move to this, to show it off from all angles.

Overall, I am quite pleased with the outcome of this piece, giving the limitations I set myself. However, I regret not choosing to model something more adventurous. If I were to give this another shot, I’d definitely work on UV unwrapping a cube and building a more 3D environment, instead of just texturing one side of a plane, I’d begin texturing all the sides of a cube, so it’d look better both in the 3D turnaround and as a whole. I do feel this has helped me somewhat, when it comes to improving my skills in Maya, even if I didn’t push myself as much as I could’ve

The final piece for this project is below :3 



But yush :D I'll see you in the next post, where I'll be talking a little about my 2D backgrounds project and some of my influences and inspiration behind it ^_^

Until Next Time
~Char

Completed Ident Signing in c:

Yay, I finally have something to show you guys! c: There will be more very soon because my deadline is in 4 days, but until then, I thought I'd show you my completed ident and talk about some of my influences behind it ^_^

Okay, first off, here's the progression I made on my ident since my "Introducing the Falmouth University Ident Project" post a couple of weeks ago :3

I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about my style influences for this project. I plan to talk more about my animation inspirations in the summer at some point, but for now I'll just show the 4 pieces that influenced me the most with this project.

My two biggest inspirations for the longest time have been Toniko Pantoja's 'Crayon Dragon'



and Qing Han's 'Night Light'



You can pretty easily see the similarities between the two and I really loved the paint brush/colouring idea shown in both of these. I intend to produce some other animations in my free time at some point making use of similar ideas.

The other two inspirations were: Chelsea Gordon-Ratslaff, someone who has also been a massive inspiration to me. Her 2D animations are very, very expressive. I really wanted the characters I was animating to 'come to life' in terms of subtle eye movements and facial expressions and I feel I have achieved this to a degree, but nowhere near as much as I was aiming for.
Either way, it was her Portal 2 animation that was another big inspiring factor in my ident.

 

and finally, my fourth biggest inspiration whilst doing this project was Studio Catch's "Her Lions Jump"


I really loved how dynamic the lions movements and expressions were in this and how the two characters interacted with each other. I ended up changing my animation style, particularly with Saffie, a little to allow better expressions and eye movements as I felt my previous style was quite limiting.

I began by cleaning up, inbetweening and line-arting the animatic. Animating the human for this project was a particular challenge for me as before I came here, I only really practiced animating quadrupeds (and in MS Paint at that xD). I'm not really very pleased with the final animation of my human character as she seems a little static, hopefully fluidity of human animation is something I'll be able to practice and improve on in the coming months. I'm really pleased with my dragon animation though, it was really fun to put the subtle eye movements and expressions into her c:
I made sure I applied the basic principles of animation we had learned, into this animation, particularly stretch and squash and overlap c:



I then coloured the whole thing, making the paint on the end of the paintbrush green, so I could greenscreen chroma key it to include my experimental animation 'paint' when I imported it into Sony Vegas.




I worked on another green stage with white to create the 'Falmouth University Animation' part, green screening that and fitting it over the top. I then found some fitting royalty-free music to add to it and I had finished :D I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome of this animation, however I think the human animation really lets it down and is something I'll need to work on in the future c:

I played around with the timing a little bit on the final version also, as the timing of the paintbrush being thrown seemed a little out. 

My final Ident is below c:

Walks with performance

We were given the task a few weeks ago to create three different walk or run cycles, each expressing a particular mood or state of mind. A month or so ago, we were also given a 6 hour acting workshop, this was done to improve our performance, particularly in the area of exaggeration, something that would help us a lot when it comes to our animation.

We had a choice of 6 'states of mind' to work with. Late for work, Distracted (eg on phone or talking to someone), In a bad mood, In a good mood, Flirty female and Macho male. I chose the Good Mood, Bad mood and Late for work for mine.

I actually really enjoyed planning and working with the different moods for the walk cycles as it allowed me to think a lot more about how the character would react in these situations (making my happy walk very bouncy, with high knees and chin up and my bad mood walk more slouched over, low knees and head to the floor)

My final three walk cycles are below :3


Good Mood Walk -



The Good Mood walk was the first one I attempted, I'm quite happy with the overall outcome however, it seems to jump at several parts and it's pretty easy to tell when the animation loops. I wanted to portray the happiness of the character by putting it's chin up high and making more of a skipping motion with the legs, lifting them clean off the ground and I think I achieved this, although, it needs work in parts. When creating this, I wanted it to look as if the character was moving its head from side to side, however, I think it looks kind of like the eye is just bobbing up and down on its own instead of it looking as if it's the characters head itself that is moving.


Late for Work Run -



I am more pleased with my Late for work Run Cycle, this was the second one I attempted and I think it turned out quite well in comparason to my happy walk. There is less of an indication on this animation that it was a loop/cycle animation as there is not much of a jump there, like on the first. I'm actually really pleased with how the hair on the character came out and I worked quite hard on making this work the way I wanted it to. I think the only thing I'd consider working on on this one would be the beak of the character, as it seems to boil a little bit when moving.

Bad Mood Walk -


My Bad mood walk cycle was the final one I attempted, I think I have shown some improvement since the first walk cycle, however, I think I could've done a better job at tweening this one because the back leg seems to flick a little to quickly at one part. I think maybe the character comes up to high in certain parts too, making the walk seem less grumpy than I wanted it too.

But yes :3 Deadlines are fast upon me now, you'll be (hopefully) seeing many more updates about what I'm up to, soon ^_^ I'll be blogging a little less frequently than usual, because meeting the deadlines themselves are the most important things right now, but this blog is getting marked on the 31st of May, so I'll have all of my work up on it for then :D

Until next time! c:

Introducing the "Falmouth University Ident Project"

A week or two ago we were given the task of producing an 'Ident' for Falmouth University. This project is being supervised by Adam Aiken, who has worked in the advertising side of animation for years and will be able to be very helpful in terms of feedback for the project.

The brief for this project is pretty loose, something I really like about it :D

Idents tend to be ways of advertising, usually a television show. These are really commonly seen between ad breaks or after shows, particularly on channels like E4 (Estings) and on childrens channels such as Nickelodeon. These tend to be around 5 - 10 seconds long and serve as a fun way of reminding viewers what channel they are on :3 Most idents will have a short lead up and then display the logo for the channel. We have been asked to do the same, but with the Falmouth University logo c: (It's recently undergone a change, becoming Falmouth University rather than University College Falmouth and therefore the branding and logo's for it have changed, so we'll all be using the brand new logo in our idents)

I wanted to practice my character animation in this, particularly in terms of expressions. I also wanted to push myself, whilst sticking to things I know (due to the deadline time constraints leaving little time for experimentation) I have chosen to animate this project in Flash, as it is the program I currently feel most comfortable with and animate two characters, the first being my dragon character Saffie and the other one being a simplified human character of myself, similar to the one I used on my lifting animation, back at the start of my motion studies unit.

My animatic for this project can be seen below. 

 

Our brief for this project has to include some kind of reference to our experimental animation, my way of including this will be through the blue 'paint' which will actually be parts of my blue plastercine from my experimental animation, since making this animatic, I have spoken to my lecturers who think it'd be a good idea to have the character catch the paint brush and then swipe it across the screen, to make the movement more dynamic. I will keep this in mind when producing my final piece.

I'll post more as I do it :3

Until Next Time -
~ Char

Some insight into our group project ~

So, last time I posted, I promised I'd talk today about our group project about The Sea, in my next post, so here it is I guess :3

I covered a little about what the project entails in my "The Sea Project: An Introduction" Post, so for anyone that missed that post, I'd suggest taking a look at it now, so you can get a general overview of what we're up to with this project.

Since writing this post, we have done an awful lot of planning and liasoning with our mentor for this project, Kathy. From the chosen storyboard that we created combining all our idea's, in the last post. My team mate Beverly drew up all designs digitally and passed them onto Katie, another member of our team. Katie then worked with these to construct the animatic, allowing us all to have a better understanding of the timing we were going to be working to.

The completed animatic can be seen below  -



We still may be adding some tweaks to the beginning and end, in particular a small plot twist, which I won't talk too much about, at least not before it's finished ^_^

Seeing as a lot of people were going to be taking a more literal and serious stance to this project, we decided to go for more of a foolhardy, comedic take on it.  The style we've chosen for the project is, for the interview shown at the start and end of the animatic, a Waltz with Bashir cutout style animation, and for his 'flashback', a very cartoony 'chibi' like style. The backgrounds will be handled by our team mate Georg who will be working in Maya to produce a semi-realistic ocean and building for the interview to take place in, for us.

To make things easier for us, for the interview Beverly has drawn the symbols and I will be animating these, we chose to do it this way to keep this part of the film as consistent as possible, the flashbacks however are something we will need to work hard on to keep the consistency and style similar between all of us.





We've had several meetings to try and practice the style to get it as consistent as possible.






At the end of the day, there will probably be a small amount of noticeable change between our styles, but we'll try and work to minimise this as much as possible.

We're pretty much all set to start production now, It's taken us a while to iron out changes in the animatic and to come up with a consistent style and backgrounds but now, all there is left to do is start work on it.

Our production log is below, detailing who has which part on the project and showing how much has been completed so far :3

I'll be updating more on this project in future blog posts, but here's how much we've got so far at least c:

~Char