Uber blog (I went a bit overboard this week)

First of all, apologies for not putting my I-dent up, it completely slipped my mind, if I remember I will put it up tomorrow when I am in the studio. I also completely forgot about Andy’s comment last week so I shall try and write about that this week as I think it will offer some more insight into my I-dent.

To start though I thought I might talk about our new project which looks really good. The whole script writing thing has been something that I have been looking forward to for a while and the brief has got my creative juices flowing, I have gone into geek mode and started researching it already. I am a bit apprehensive as I have never written a script before, everything I have done in the past has gone straight to storyboards and they where never particularly clear as I was working by myself and knew what I wanted to do, I have also never attempted anything with dialogue (I know we don’t have to do that for this project but I think I should stop putting it off), so I hope it will be an interesting experience.

I have also started to get some ideas for the storyboard project and I am hoping that I can put some of the theories that I have learnt from Herbert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics to good use but I think I will need to re-read my notes from that first.

Right, another quick bit on the I-dent:

Although I used Flash to animate the I-dent so that I could use puppets, making everything a bit easier and less time consuming to animate (which it was) I found that the stuff I drew by hand looked the most effective and fluid. This doesn’t mean that I want to stop using Flash but I think I need to look into using some of the tools in it more subtly, and mixing them with the traditional animation function.

This all brings me conveniently round to an article that I read in the March 2008 issue of Animation Magazine; Watch Out For That Tree…Again! George of the Jungle swings back into action. By Ryan Ball, which talks about the remake of Jay Ward’s 1967 animation series George of the Jungle by Bullwinkle Studios and Studio B Productions, in which Even Baily of Classic Media (Bullwinkle studios) states that despite the series being animated in Flash it was “…important that the new George didn’t come off looking like a Flash Show… great Flash animation looks like great traditional animation…”

Having said all of that I think Harold’s moonwalk looked quite good and that was animated using a puppet; there where a lot of messy edges and the animation was a tad jerky but I think that was more down to my own mistakes than anything else and with a bit more time I probably could have cleaned up that sequence.

As I mentioned last week I think my main fault was that I was too ambitious in a lot of areas; in terms of what I was capable of producing, what could be conveyed in the time restrictions of the I-dent and the limitations of Flash. Despite this I think that the editing helped to bring together the bits that did work and with a bit of re-jigging in the order and repeating other bits I hope I was able to make something that was understandable. Editing was something that I found quite fun and is another area that I want to look into in the future.

Bells whistles and shiny sparkley bits!

This week I thought that I would try and talk through my thought process behind my I-dent as I have only really covered the style that I used (I would have a copy of my final version here but I forgot to render it out in the correct format so I will stick it in next week). My original idea for the I-dent was inspired by various characters and ideas that I had before the project which where adapted to suit the brief. The characters, Dorice, Harold and Cheesy Dave,(pictured) where inspired by a range of sources, chief amongst them were Monty Python’s Pepperpot sketches and I had planned to produce a similar sort of sketch for my I-dent.

However, as the project progressed and I started to do line tests the story changed to Harold’s dance which at the time I thought would be more manageable then a full blown sketch due to there being fewer characters and no dialogue. Cheesy Dave was dropped and for a short period of time Harold’s pigeons where going to make an appearance but they where later dropped. As I started to pursue this idea I wanted to use a ‘funk/hip-hop’ style soundtrack and looked at a lot of videos for inspiration, I ended up taking a lot of Harold’s dance moves from them .The most useful where Run DMC’s It’s Like That and Soul Sonic Force’s Renegades of Funk, the Rage Against the Machine cover was also useful. This theme was later replaced by a sort of technoish type track, as it seemed to fit better with what I had in mind, which I got off one of Andy’s CDs (Kids R Cool – which I think says it all).

When storyboarding I think I was a bit too ambitious in terms of what I was capable of achieving in the time constraints and what Flash could do. Several scenes where never actually animated because I ran out of time, others had to be animated traditionally by hand and then bought into Flash and I had to cut others because the illusion of camera movement that I wanted to create just did not work. It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because the I-dent ran over by three or so seconds even with out the deleted scenes. This problem was solved by making rapid cuts from one scene to the next which I do not think would have worked had the I-dent been slower paced but I think the music supports the plot do a degree that the audience still know what is going on.