Design Bible

Here is my design bible: an explanation coming soon!

New story line

Once again I’m afraid that the update on the dissertation progress and the character development that I did over the summer will have to be put on hold as surprise, surprise, I have changed the storyline for the final project again. All shall be explained shortly but first I would like to announce the arrival of my brand spanking new blog (one clearly wasn’t enough) “Photography Fodder” – it sounds better if you say it in a Cornish accent, dedicated to all things of a camera and light based nature. As of yet there is nothing on it but over the coming weeks I plan to post some stuff on it for your viewing pleasure.

So, the story line I am running with for this week is that the piper now survives and bludgeons the poor little creatures to death with a book; all would have been explained in my lovely animatic, but blogger wont let me load it. So I will have to describe it to you: (if anyone really wants to see it let me know) it contains elements from the original storyboard as well as new stuff which aims to build up the characters a bit.
I have tried to keep the different types of shots to a minimum, I think I will be able to get away with three or four, to speed up filming as much as possible, camera movement has also been limited; now there are only two shots requiring it, the truck-in on the poster shouldn’t be too much of a problem but the pan shot of the creatures may be a bit tricky, so I will have to do some tests to see if it will work.
I am hoping that this is pretty much the finished article in terms of the story, as this is the third version, obviously it still needs a bit of tarting-up to make it look pretty though. The main problem encountered with the story has been establishing the character’s roles and giving the audience something to empathies with. I have tried to solve this by showing the poster at the beginning, which will be advertising for someone to get rid of the creatures or something along those lines – the piper now has a purpose. The piper now has a proper sinister walk and nasty hand-rub thing going on, basically stolen off the child-catcher in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang – we now know the piper is bad and wrong (this also sets up a nice twist when things go wrong for her). The piper is constantly referring to a manual – we know she isn’t very good at her job.
As you have hopefully noticed from the animatic everyone now has eyes, so they can see, it also makes the creatures a bit more cute and lovable. Which character the audience empathies with is still a problem, mainly because I am still not that sure which character I want them to like. I have also started to look at things like The Trapdoor for inspiration to inject the animation and character design with a bit more humor. This week I hope to go away and do a bit more concept art of the characters to give them that trap-dooresque kinda look because the current look of the characters isn’t really working.

new script

I know that I was, at some point, going to go through the development of the final project and a bit of a dissertation update but for the time being I think I need to go through the rather drastic changes that have taken place to the script of the final project.

So we had the original storey, which was basically the Pied Piper storey, both Derrick and Andy suggested that I put a twist in it to make it a bit less predictable. I tried to do this by just making the piper character a bumbling fool and keeping the same storey, except that everything that could go wrong would. Although a bit more entertaining this version of the storey was still way to predictable and in my opinion still too close to the original Pied Piper Storey. So I took it away again and twisted the hell out.

What I created is pretty much the storey I am now running with. The piper is still a bumbling fool but now the creatures get a hold of her flute, control her and then she dies of a heart attack – good wholesome family fun. It is a bit like my OSTN idea (dancing etc.) but at least it is my idea. There are still a couple of issues: I need to establish that the piper character is attempting to be the pied piper – probably by giving her some kind of book which she keeps referring too. I also need to develop the chain of events that lead to the piper throwing away the flute which leads to the creatures getting hold of it as it all happened a bit suddenly.

So my next job is to re-do the storyboard, most of which can hopefully be salvaged from the old one but we shall see. I am going to try and but a bit more emphasis on continuing action from shot to shot though – just to make it flow better.

A little bit more

Back again! Time to try and a bit of explanation to my earlier post, which was written in the midst of riding the cusp of the creative wave, as it where. I’m a bit more calmed down now, sort of.
Basically I’ve had a bit of a rethink of the script and come to the conclusion that it was a bit up itself so I’ve gone completely the other with it now and tried to poke a bit of fun and generally make it as silly and unserious as possible.
Originally both Andy and Derek had suggested that I look at different ways of playing out the story (eg: having Leurre seem harmless and then turning on the creatures) because it was too predictable but I got the feeling that neither where too hot on the main story. Derek suggested that I look at The Pied Piper of Hamlin by Jiri Barta, I think its safe to say that I am now a firm fan, I especially like The Club of the Laid Off, it very much appeals to my sense of humour and the clumpy looking animation is also quite amusing.





However, this did little to boost my confidence, until I woke up this morning with a rare can-do attitude to life and had a good old brain ‘shower’ session and now have something I shall try to mould into a script.

Bring on the sillyness!

Stop press! Oh dear god what has been going on in my head over the summer – churning out this pretentious crap. Getting Derek to look at my script yesterday is quite possibly the best thing I’ve done on this project and certainly saved it from going arse over tit.

I had completely lost my way and it is about time I get back to doing what I do best; complete and utter silliness. Which can only be achieved by an all out assault on common sense! So I’m going to tootle off now and cram this sorry story line with as much random stuff as my mind can muster!

Trim the Fat!

O.K. so my plan to keep up writing the blog over the summer to save me from having to do what I am about to do failed somewhat. However, I have just about got the bulk of the prep done for the film I have to do – concept art, reference material, motion studies, scratch track etc. all of which I will explain in later entries but today is dedicated to storyboards. I have also done some more research on my dissertation, although probably not enough, but I would like to think that I now have a better understanding of what I am going to be writing about at least. Also, a quick little note to just outline my general intentions for the ole blog this year. I am going to invest in a diary or post-it or something papery to jot down daily/weekly progress on things to: a: make the blog a bit more accurate, and b: if the workload starts to pile up, which it inevitably will, since I am making a film and writing what is essentially a book, then ole bloggy may take a backseat in my list of priorities. My little jottings should still provide something which is recording the progress of my work, and more vitally something to refer to when I have to write a years worth of blogs in a night – so don’t panic if it all goes quite on the blogging front. Also, my internet connection is about as reliable and fast as my animating so things could be a little sporadic.

Now, to get the proverbial ball rolling as it where. I was feeling quite good about my storyboard but a rather lukewarm reaction from people I have shown it to has lead me to have a bit of a re-think. Granted, these weren’t animation people but I still think it highlights an issue. I am hoping that its just a problem with clarity, as the same people seemed to like the script, of course if its an issue with the actual storey I can make the odd tweak but if the basic concept is flawed then I am more or less screwed.
Anyway, to try and sort the techy stuff I have read Don Bluth’s The Art of the Storyboard to try and iron out little problems and make the storey ‘flow’. The book had some very good pointers about layout, lighting etc. Stuff I had already tried to take into account but not necessarily executed in the right manner so it will probably be beneficial for me to redo quite a lot of it in the next week or so. To get that started, right here, right now, I am going to attempt to go through the entire thing and justify everything I have done, and chuck anything I can’t. “Trim The Fat!” as Mr. Bluth would say.

Here we go then:

The main characters are:
The mites: the ‘creatures’ I referred to in my last blog
Cheveu: the main mite
Leurre: The piper

For the entire film I want to shoot with a filter over the lens which creates a sort of looking through a key-hole type effect, inspired by an old bit of A-level work I found lying about. I also want to use a ridiculously small depth of field and perhaps a fish-eye effect to make everything really claustrophobic and disorientating – like the Quays. Oh yeah, the whole thing might also be in black and white.

Shot 1: I’m not quite sure why but at some point over the summer I decided it would be a good idea to include some sort of mechanical device in the animation and promptly set about studying the innards of a clock. I guess I just like all the cogs and stuff. Out of everything I have done I am most unsure about this and don’t really know if it is necessary or not. I can justify it in a roundabout kind of way, in that it is my interpretation of a theory of Wilhelm Fliess, who cropped up in my dissertation research, which based around the idea that the world is based on rhythms of numbers.
Taking further inspiration from the Dadaists Francis Picabia and Johannes Baader who produced artwork inspired by machines and the like I arrived at the conclusion that Fliess’ theory could be represented as a machine. And what machine deals with numbers? A clock. I have dubbed my clock The Entrelacer. The rhythm of the clock also syncs up nicely with the scratch track and could be used to dictate the beats of the animation.
So we start out with this shot of the The Entrelacer – if this is cut I may keep the ticking in the soundtrack, as a more subliminal thing – but I do like the look of the clock and how it is nicely divided up into sections. Anyway we then pan up through the clock to a shot of the street, Poussièr, where the story takes place. I am a bit worried that the street is not recognizable as a street but I quite like the idea of the characters moving through an abstract space.
I envisage animating the clock in 2-D, by hand, or dare I say it, on Maya (obviously some 2nd year lackey would deal with it if that where the case). In post this would then be comped onto the street which would be a stop-mo set, essentially creating one big picture that you could move a virtual camera over in after-effects or something.







Shot 2, 3 & 4: Along with the previous shot of Poussièr these shots create a montage which serves to set-up the scene – an idea used in lots of films but I particularly noticed it in Che: Part 2 where the same technique is used to establish a lot of the camp scenes. During these shots I thought I could mess about with the focus playing with areas of interest, just to art it up a notch. Another idea that came to me on a whim was to have the transition between these scenes work like a slide projector; with the image sliding off, black, then the new image sliding in. I’m not really sure what this would add to proceedings, it might not be worth the hassle to work out how to achieve something which may just confuse the audience. A fade in and out between each shot might work better. Shot 4 ends with the Mites emerging and a slow truck in. This might be a right pain to do in stop-mo so I may just use a sequence of different shots, which gradually get closer to the action. If properly executed this should achieve a similar effect.













Shot 5: Here we see more of the mites emerging. In this shot and all of the ones featuring the mites I want to use quite low camera angle, to show their perspective. Actually I think this shot doesn’t work that well and would be better shot from the right, looking left. Or it may work quite well if I got rid of this shot and replaced it with what you end up with after the truck-in on shot 4.

Shot 6: I really like this shot, which pans with one of the mites as he moves through all the other mites. He moves left to right to put the viewer at ease, the whole aim of this shot is to identify the mites as cute fluffy animals. I am slightly worried that this upsets the flow and therefore might work better as a montage, with the same character moving through the foreground in each to keep continuity.












Shot 7: My initial idea for this shot was to have the mites in the foreground Leurre to slowly come into view in the background. However, if I where to turn shot 6 into a montage I would use this as the final shot with the character that is followed throughout coming into the foreground. I’m not sure if I want to shift the focus from the foreground to the background as this may show Leurre too clearly and I want her to remain quite ambiguous at this stage.

Shot 8: This is a reaction shot of one of the mites to Leurre, showing her presence with a looming shadow. Originally I was going to shoot this over Leurre’s shoulder but that would show her perspective of events, which I don’t want to do at this stage. This shot is a bit bland though so I might have the reaction in shot 7 or start the reaction there and finish it off on this shot with maybe a bit more of a three-quarter view.












Shot 9: Another shot that I quite like, although to keep continuity it might benefit from being shot at a lower level.









Shot 10, 11, 12 & 13: The first time we see Leurre clearly is when the mites do, so it is fitting that it is from there POV. We then go back to the mites, recycling the angle from shot 5. By only using these two shots throughout the exchange I hope to build some tension, I would like to think that it works but I’m not quite sure why.
















Shot 14, 15, 15b & 16a: Again this repetition of shots continues except I change the shots of the mites to show Cheveu investigating Leurre. I think this all works o.k. but shot 14 and 15b would benefit from more of a three-quarter view, just to make them look a bit more interesting.

















Shot 16b & 17: I’m in two minds about these two shots: I can’t decide if I want to keep them as is or shoot everything into shot 17. I’m happier with the higher angle on 17 because we have now seen Leurre properly but in terms of shot economy it might be better to shoot it from the same angle as 9.

Shot 18: Now Leurre starts to get proper scary, to intensify the scene I want to include a light source behind – an idea stolen from A Clockwork Orange – and tilt the camera a tad, I know I went a bit overkill with this on the Robots project but I was watching Doubt the other night and quite liked how increasingly extreme tilts where used to build tension, so I’m going to nab that idea too.


Shot 19: I really want to exaggerate things on this shot – nice long shadows and a high angle to make Cheveu look really insignificant, the shadow of Leurre’s hand should be roughly where Cheveu is, as if its grabbing him. I’m not sure if I should include Leurre in shot.

Shot 20: Lower angle to show perspective of mites, definitely needs to be shot from right looking left or maybe a POV shot of mites in hiding showing Cheveu running from Leurre would be better, it also leads into shot 21 nicely.











Shot 21: Eye level shot to ease tension slightly, but maybe keep tilt (were not out of the woods yet) would be really good to get a shine off the flute. Would be better as a full body shot to lead into 22.

Shot 22: Nice set piece for Leurre’s dance, nice and simple in terms of camera stuff but an arse to animate.














Shot 23: Again, would benefit from being shot from right looking left or including Leurre, like in the alternative to 20 as this would flow better.

Shot 24: I want to shoot this from the mites perspective but I don’t want Leurre to seem to threatening, so I might keep the camera quite far away.














Shot 25: I want to show the weird little dance that the mites do in one go, and I figured the best way to do this would be an ariel shot, this also provides a clear cut between the different parts of the story because it is so different from the other shots I have used. I suppose the best way to do this would be to somehow get a rostrum on the stop-mo set and mount the camera on that.

Shot 26: Same as 24, might use a lower angle to make it look more dynamic, or get a full body shot. Leurre should exit left to maintain flow.











Shot 27: Leurre enters right, folloed by mites. Again, a lower camera angle might work.

Shot 28: Don’t really need this shot, so will cut it.


















Shot 29 & 30: I like these shots a lot; I want to fade into black at the end of 29 and fade out on 30 to provide a clear cut but its quite nice that the movement keeps the flow and provides an interesting comparison between the two sets. It would be a lot to animate in one go so a montage may be better, then again I am getting a bit montage happy.















Shot 31 & 32: Its very important that Leurre is on the right of the screen as this will increase the tension, a lower camera angle may also be beneficial. I will also mention that I want the fire to be the main or maybe even only source of color in the film. I’m not quite sure how to do this, I’m sure there is a way to do it in after-effects or something though. As for animating the fire I thought I could probably have a light behind the set, shining through the hole in the oven, then by altering the light intensity between frames I could make it look like it was flickering.









Shot 33: I was worried about crossing the line of action (or whatever its called) on this shot, so I got as close as I dared. However, I think I could actually get away with it and just shift the camera slightly to the right to get a nice profile shot of Leurre. This may bugger-up the next shot but we shall see.

Shot 34: Another shot I quite like, inspired by the teacher character from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. One problem, however, is that Leurre is on the left, when ideally I want her on the right, unfortunately I cant flip the shot due to continuity but I could exaggerate her leer so that she bends round from the right.








Shot 35: Nice simple shot; door to oven slams shut, fade to black.

Shot 36: I’m not sure if I want to include this shot or not – it does provide Leurre with a bit of a purpose but I think it might be a bit cheesy. If I where to use it I thing I would use a long shot from behind instead.

update

Another quick little update, this is more for myself so I can remember what I am doing so it will probably just end up as a random set of incoherent notes that get mashed into something readable at a later date.

My final major project is coming along nicely; I now have a script and some rough thumbnails and am working on a load of concept art and character designs. I am also hoping to make a couple of models of the characters and maybe do some experiments with different effects that could be applied to the finish of the set.

I am afraid to say that, yes, I have ignored the advice from the panel and gone off and developed my crazy, puppy drowning idea which have turned into something slightly less drastic. I had thought it was quite an original idea but it is actually very similar to the Pied-Piper of Hamelin but there you go.

I have tried to keep the storyline and anything I have to make as simple as possible; there is absolutely positively no dialogue and if I am clever I can probably get away with just having two sets and a minimal use of special effects, I am also considering doing away with all Foley sounds and just having a music track but I think it may be too early to call that just yet. The main character is pretty featureless except for arms; it doesn’t have any legs so no walk cycles to worry about. The ‘puppies’ have now evolved into no descript ‘creatures’ which I am considering making out of lint and stuff, collected from a wide variety of nasty sources.

In terms of animation the creatures should be quite easy to animate as they are just lumps, although attaching rigs might be fun. The main character will be trickier, I plan to do a dance scene and I also want to try and get that rippling effect you see in the early Creature Comforts. That said there are lots of films with similar movements to those which I want to get so I might just ‘borrow’ a lot of the animation, like I did for the OSTN project.

Advice: its for wimps

So here I am again back to the blog, yayyy! And I don’t even have to be doing it. What is going on?

Well dear readers I thought to my self that since at some point I am supposed to write about the ‘thought process’ behind my work, it maid sense to make a start at it now whilst I’m actually doing the work rather than trying to remember/make-up what I did six months from now. So now you know, knowledge is power!

So what have I been doing? Well, I have tried to make a start on the final project work which is starting to gain a bit of momentum now but I fear it could all be in vain as I have sort of accidentally on purpose chosen to ignore the advice I was given in regards to it. You may recall that I submitted three ideas; the space one, something arty and pretentious and the happy cheerful story about a crazy old lady who throws puppies in rivers (guess which was my favourite).

Sorry I am really crap with names so I have renamed the advice panel thing as follows: ‘script man’, ‘Andy’s wife’ and of course Andy himself. They seemed to like the space idea the most because it had a narrative or at least potential for a narrative but the truth is that I haven’t really looked at that idea for almost twelve months and have gone off it a bit and don’t think that its worth me trying to work on something that I no longer have any passion for.

So taking the panel’s advice into account I am happily waltzing through the big gate marked: DANGER! DO NOT ENTER OR YOU WILL DIE HORRIBLY! And combining the two ideas that got an icy reception whilst at the same time trying to avoid a momentous cock-up and come out smelling of roses and more importantly alive and sane. Some of the advice has got through my thick skull and I will attempt to get some sort of narrative going so hopefully I don’t compliantly alienate the audience but at the moment I have a collection of random ideas that need stringing together somehow.

Well, there you have it: a mission statement!

On an unrelated note, here is a nice cheerful video, with what i think is some greenscreen stuff, I am rather proud that i found it:

Portfolio

Last Blog o the term. Whoop! The main purpose of this weeks entry is to explain the extra stuff that is in my portfolio but first I shall give a brief update on Talking Dog.

This week I have got a couple more scenes done, progress has been a bit slow as I had some problems with the rig holding the hoverbike (georg built me a new one). That did eventually get done but it looks a bit stiff. I am finding at the moment I am somewhat lacking in sticking power on this project, I tend to fizzle out around lunchtime and then just mope around in the afternoon. I am hoping that a decent rest over the weekend will leave me feeling refreshed and ready to tackle next weeks dose of robots with a bit more enthusiasm.

Now! On to the stuff in my portfolio:

Jesus Just Left Chicago
This was a bit of an extension on Kathy’s storyboarding project; she suggested I turn my idea into an animatic, so I did. It was cobbled together a bit quickly so the flow is a bit iffy and none of the drawings fit to screen but I do think that it reads a lot better than the storyboard.

Glasney Vs. Tremough
An idea which I started to develop over the summer but really got into in my free time the last couple of terms. It is about a cosmonaught, Glasney (it sounded vaguely Russian) who has a mundane little job in a communications satellite… until the world is destroyed and he is the only person left alive, or so he thinks. He eventually bumps into another survivor, Tremough, an American, at first things are hunky-dory until the characters start to fight over mundane little things which eventually descends into an all out war to conquer each others spaceships in the name of their now destroyed countries.
I really got into designing Glasney’s spaceship, disturbingly so, and even started to try and build it in Maya, but those files were on my data stick that went missing (and foolishly were not backed up).

Requiem for a Dream
A pretentious working title that I stole from an article that I read as part of my research for this project. This is the thing I was banging on about when I got back after summer. It is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange although I have gone off it a bit since I started doing stopmotion as it would be so hard to do but I am warming to the idea of just using the book as a starting point and then create something completely different, a bit like the Quays.

Some stuff

Once again I must apologize for the complete lack of blog stuff over the last couple of weeks, hopefully things will be back on track next week. I did have some videos of all the stuff I have been doing on talking dog but once again blogger is not letting me upload them so I will talk about something else instead.

So, fist of all I think I shall discuss my dissertation, as that is pretty fresh in my mind. I think that I am going to do something on themes of childhood in the work of the Quay brothers, although I am still not that sure how I am going to be approaching the subject. I was hoping that doing my dissertation proposal would have helped me get my head round it but I ended up cobbling that together a bit a producing a load of pretentious crap that didn’t really explain anything. I do know that I want to read into psychological theory so I am hoping that when I do that things will start to fit into place and I will have a better idea of what to do.

Kathy’s drawing project was also a bit of a disappointment; I really wanted to make a good job of it but I had to rush to get it done and except some character designs I didn’t really do any sketchbook work for it, bar a bit of life drawing stuff I stole from one of last years sketchbooks, which was the whole point, so I am not expecting great feedback.
What I did submit is here for your viewing pleasure (although blogger is bringing them in the wrong way up and refusing to let me upload the sketches) and was inspired by some weird and wonderful ideas I had after watching too much Quay brother’s stuff. I can’t really explain what is going on because I am not sure myself; I just drew random ideas that came into my head. But the main theme is of a character thrown into this strange yet familiar world, much like some of the Quay’s films.
I am toying with the idea of using it as inspiration for the project next year but it will need a lot of refining to get it away from something that looks like a purely Quay Brother’s inspired piece, which it is at the moment.

Just a quicky

Once again apologies for how late this entry is and for the complete lack of videos that I promised last week, hopefully now that Talking Dog is out of the way I will be able to get my act together a bit.

Yes Talking Dog is over! We didn’t even get close to finishing but then again we have said that we wouldn’t from pretty early on and I think we achieved what we set out to achieve; which is something that looks good for our portfolios. Our intention is to finish it in all, since we have put so much work into it but for the time being my priority is to deal with the backlog of work that I have pretty much ignored since Easter.

In terms of technical animation stuff to do with Talking Dog I don’t have much more to offer other than what I said last week, although Andy did point out that some of my stuff was lacking in anticipation, so I am going to try and brush up on my animation theory and then go back and re-shoot some scenes. Rosie is now hard at work doing in the special effects and stuff on the animation that I have done and it is looking really nice. I predict that in about six months it might all be done.

Miracle please!

First off apologies for such a crappy entry last week and the rather late offering this week; things have been getting a tad hectic with the talking dog project as of late and I have had very little, if any time to do anything else.

Now, talking dog: once, again Ben has done a smashing job on the sets, he is this project really, I just do what I’m told in respects to the set and character build. Where I get a chance to shine (in theory) is the animation where Ben becomes my assistant. We have done some nice tests, mainly focusing on walks, as this is a good way to get character across. I think they are finally nailed. Ed hook’s books have really helped for this. Karl has got his cool guy swagger, which is very much lead by his hips, the rest of the body is nice and loose and just follows them around. Jim, who I imagine as being a bit more heavy set, has a nice clompy walk with lots of exaggerated steps, which are lead by the torso. I will pop some videos on at some time in the near future when I have the time.

Tim was a big help on the lighting and I think we have a really nice looking set up that brings out the textures on the set and the characters. The set is lit mainly from the side, with the odd fill but the main emphasis is on the characters who are mainly lit from below by a tungsten light which gives them a nice orange hue on camera, which is in contrast to the LED’s on the rest of the set. I also used a little bit of fill and backlighting on the characters to get rid of excess shadows and set them apart from the background. Again you will get to see this on when I get a chance to upload some videos.

Have you started animating then?!?! You ask. And the answer is sort of. Ben and I shot the first scene on Friday evening on bright florescent orange screen but we are not sure if the whole keying thing can work effectively as there is quite a lot of shadow, so that may have to be redone. I tried to do some more stuff on Saturday, which was going quite well and till half way through the first shot Jim’s ankles decided to snap off rendering my days work useless. I did glue Jim back together, or at least tried, I will have to wait till Tuesday to see if they have stuck effectively and are still strong enough to animate with. If they aren’t we will have to put him on a rig which will be a right pain as Karl is already on one and the rigs wont be able to pass in front of the characters as that would make painting them out near impossible. Quite frankly this was a delay that this project could ill afford, what little chance we had of finishing on time is now completely gone.

Shorty Mc Short

Right, just a quicky this week as I want to go see Sir, Allen fire some knob, but I feel I need to do something productive as I have spent the last hour trying to do my film review and have come away with little more than a paragraph; the whole writing thing aint happening today.

So, work. Robots is coming along nicely. I must admit that I spend days wondering if we will ever get it done but I am having a good day at the moment. This is mainly due to Ben’s superb puppets which look like they will be a joy to animate, so maximum kudos to you mr.dennett. We are onto set building tomorrow which we are going to try and keep as simple as possible to save on time.

See, I wasn’t lying, it is very short

Byyyyeeeeeeeeeee

Set Design!!

Easter is over and here I am bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to learn! (supposedly) Yay!! What glories tales of my exploits do I have to tell you all then? Well, I have become an avid watcher of Timmy Time (here’s the intro) and have successfully lowered my mental age to single digits as a result. I try to convince myself that I watch it to study the animation, which is very good by the way, but it is actually quite entertaining, although Timmy does come across as a bit of a smart arse at times. I also did a bit of work when the fancy took me.

Robots! My tasks over Easter was to finalise the set design and shoot some reference stuff for the animation. So here I have oodles and oodles of concept work of the sets and some screenshots of 3D models that I made of them. In total there are three sets that we are using; the Sarge’s office, outside the shopping mall and the shopping mall itself. We may also need to produce some simple backgrounds for the intro but were not 100% what’s going on with that yet.
As I have mentioned the past the overall look we want for the sets is a futuristic but tacky 60’s/70’s kind of vibe with a very drab colour palette. I deliberately designed the Sarge’s office so that it got narrower at one end, making the Sarge look bigger. I also envisage this set being quite small and cramped.
I have designed the exterior of the mall to be quite simple to save on build time; most of it will consist of textured boards and a backdrop.
In the interior I want the Mars Travel Agency to be the main focus so I have made that a nice orange to stand out against the bluey gray of the rest of the set. I have also tried to leave quite a lot of scope for visual gags in the store front and billboards.
Well that’s all for now…until next week!

Continuing from last week

Just a quick little note to update you on the robots thang: I think we are now moving away from my slightly trippy spaced-out vision of the future, which is fine. The main focus is now on producing something which looks nice and professional(ish), regardless of whether or not we meet the deadline.
I am spending easter doing concept work on the interiors and hopefully producing some 3D models, on Sketch-up, which is much friendlier than maya. I am also recruiting a rugged band of my most bizzare friends to film the storyboards so that we have some reference for when (if) we start animating.

The End

Grrrr! I'm Angry!

I warn you now I am in a particularly foul mood so I may go into full on rant mode but for the time being I shall try to keep things civilized. I think me previous blogs have been a little vague so I am going to attempt to write about all the stuff I have been doing in a little more detail.

So, to begin with I shall talk about the literature revue and all that lark. At the moment my proposed dissertation title is ‘Themes of Childhood In The Work Of The Quay Brothers’, just a tad ambitious methinks but you never know. This title came to be as a result of the lit review which I did on general stuff surrounding the Quays, amongst this I found some theory about childhood in their film This Unnameable Little Broom or The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Like the good little aspiring plagiarist I am I have stolen the idea and ran with it; today liberating the library of its stock of books that have anything to do with child psychology and how it has been incorporated into art. Providing I can understand this stuff I intend to do my next review on it and sound dead clever and bookwormish.

Next, scripting and comping! I will be honest, I have little, if any interest in this and don’t particularly enjoy doing it and since there are lots of other things I’d rather be doing I delegate it a very limited portion of my time. Nevertheless, I did, at first try and do the comping task but after a fruitless morning of trying to get the sky to move with the background (I only got the background in because of the a tutorial Pete showed me) and the Talking Dog yapping at my heels I gave up, slapped an angry logo on it, and rendered it, all in the space of five minuets, done!
You may be surprised to learn that despite my general anti-computer stance I have actually done scripting before! Granted, it was a very basic self-taught form of scripting but it does mean I have a rough understanding of computer speak. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I am any good, or I enjoy it, quite the opposite really. I do try and pay attention to the lessons but I find I often drift off into la la land and emerge with a random script that I might be able to write but not necessarily know what it does and why. So I think the scripting project will be fun. :d

A quick ikkle mention for the editing movie mash-up thing, I quite enjoyed it and was pleasantly surprised by how relaxing it was to do. It was interesting to watch the trailers, in particular the terminator one, to see how themes such as eye-line, movement or camera angles where carried from one scene to another to keep the trailer flowing smoothly. I’m afraid all that went out the window when I got my hands on it as I was more interested in making Arnie dance to Singin’ in the Rain.

Ok, I’m getting tired now so I shall discuss talking dog next week.

Avast!

Avast! What is that on the horizon?!?! Why it’s the good ship ignorance lumbering into view! With her merry crew of drunkards, now fueled by whiskey not rum.

She may have sprung a leak or two but the old girl will pull through; hoisting the storyboard sail so that the winds of narrative will blow us to calmer waters and away from the craggy shores of over zealous set building and such like.

The gist of what my pirate ultra-ego is trying to get across is that we launched into our set and character build a tad too hastily, before we had any proper storyboards actually in place, hence not really knowing what we required. Thankfully that man I can’t remember the name of, the set builder guy, set us back on the straight and narrow and I am now hard at work producing a storyboard, which will then be used for the animatic and hopefully be ready for Friday.

On Friday we all got together and had a day of building which was quite a nice organic experience; watching the character develop as we found stuff that would suite it. The characters we had built where the acne brothers or whatever there called, a policeman, Jim, Carl and the Sarge. Considering they are constructed out of odds and ends that Ben had amassed and a collection of hacked up Barbies and Action Men the evil aliens look surprisingly like my concept sketches (which I now have for your viewing pleasure along with some possible ideas for the sets, im sorry if some of them are sidewase) and the policeman bares some resemblance. The other characters are a bit different as they are adapted from things that Ben had already built. Ben has also constructed a cityscape, which I think sums up the overall hicildy-picaldy look we want. Hopefully we will be able to use all of this in the animation but if worse comes to worse we can always use them as guides for future building sessions. I will try to get some photographs of all of this along with the animatic for next week.

I feal all piraty. Arghhhh!

So here we are again, proving that I have not learnt my lesson and am a glutton for punishment I am about to embark upon a voyage into the sea of stop-motion aboard the good ship ignorance. Will it be a voyage of no return? Only time shall tell. And the scurvy sea dog’s accompanying me: peg leg Ben and rum-swilling Rosie.

O.K. I’m running out of sea-faring words now so I will stop and behave myself. In all seriousness I think that we can actually do something quite interesting with the old robot script, despite the disappointing sound. At the moment I think we are going for a spoof buddy cop series about two officers who are rather past their prime and of course the big joke is that actually, everybody is a robot.

I have been looking at quite a lot of Quay brothers’ stuff which has resulted in some rather trippy ideas: we are thinking of possibly nicking the idea of the tricycle ridden by Gilgamesh in This Unnameable Little Broom, (which I can’t actually find on Youtube, so apologies) and plonking the chief character in a similar contraption, surrounded by monitors, blinky lights and wot-not. I have also been toying with the idea of not giving any of the characters mouths or legs, conveniently eliminating the need for lip-sync or walk-cycles. I do have sketches of all of this but I am a bit pressed for time so I will try and scan them in later.

In terms of the set and props I have been thinking of quite a disappointing and satirical future where the human race has made little progress beyond making everything nice and shiny. I think the sets have the most scope for bringing humor into the script so hopefully we can work in quite a lot of visual gags. I have been looking at the work of Ken Adam, who among many other films designed the sets for most of the James Bond films and Dr. Strangelove, as his sets look quite futuristic but also have that 60’s/70’s vibe about them and I think that this could be an interesting look for the L.A. of the future.

Dissertation

Greetings once again and welcome to largely dissertation themed blog. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the reading week task and I’m hoping that that and the literature review things we are doing will help me get back into the swing of essay writing.

At the moment I am not too sure what I want to write about for my dissertation. I’m probably going about it completely the wrong way and looking at individual’s work rather than a specific theory as a starting point. Nevertheless I have carried on and looked at some interesting essays involving the Quay brothers and Jan Svankmajer, who I am interested in but don’t know a huge amount about. So that could be an interesting way of finding some theory’s to look at. On the other hand I am also quite interested in the whole 1920’s/30’s German art scene, DaDa and all of that, particularly the work of George Grosz and John Heartfield but I’m not sure how I would link that to animation.

The other are that I have considered looking at is acting theory as that would hopefully benefit my animation at the same time, the only drawback to that is that, from the little I understand of it, there are so many different theory’s and approaches to acting.

So the jist of what I am trying to get across is that I don’t really know what I am doing.

Anyway just a brief mention of my crazy old lady who throws puppies in the river story. I have had a play at developing my character designs from the original exercise. The originals, as you can see, where quite crude and sketchy and focused wholly on the puppy killing bit of the story.

I have been trying to soften up the character a bit so that the audience will just think it is a nice story about an old lady and her puppies, then I can spring the horrible truth on them!

What a forgetfull day I am having

The blog returns and you would be forgiven for thinking that after such a lengthy absence I would have a lot to talk about…Well I do, so there.

I think a logical place to start is to have a little natter about the various bits and bobs I have been up to for the past week or so, so assessments. I didn’t think that they went too badly all things considered, with the lip-sync stuff I already had a rough idea of what was wrong with it all and had re shot it, twice, however in fixing the problems I merely created more. I think this is mainly because I rushed the re shoots because I was eating into time that I had set aside to do the storyboard stuff, with hindsight I could have actually afforded to slow down a bit and taken my time as I was able to get the storyboards done quite quickly. Ho-hum, I was going to have another bash at doing the lip-sync today (inspired by the lip-sync workshop at Exeter, that was very good) but after traipsing up the hill I discovered that I had left my dope sheets at home so I will do it tomorrow.

I’m not too sure how the storyboards went really, the feedback was a bit mixed and last time I checked there was no mark on moodle but I’ve got a nagging feeling that I focused too much on the artwork and not enough on developing the story, we shall see though.

Now, on to the reading week…I have actually surprised myself and done some reading! So far, I have read the passages in Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation and Andy Darley’s essay in A Reader in Animation Studies because I already own these books and therefore it required the least effort to find. I went to the library today to get the others and came back with The British Avant-Garde Film and a book which I thought was From The Mouse to The Mermaid but is actually completely the wrong thing altogether (its not been a good day). The other books I couldn’t find but as I have to take that other book back I will have another look tomorrow.

And finally, my other little assignment for this week has been to try and second-guess the next project, a decision I will probably live to regret but I will carry on nevertheless. So what have I done? Well, I shall tell you… since I know that the next project is a 90 second film I have started to develop a possible idea which I have adapted from an exercise Kathy gave us last year when we had to story board a poem, my poem was The Dog by Ogden Nash which I turned into a cheerful story about an old lady who through puppies in a river. My plan was to plan on the character designs as well as trying to bulk out the story, which I have done mentally, but the only actual progress I have made has been to come up with a soundtrack for it, which at the moment consists of me making lots of funny noises on the guitar which by sheer luck rather than skill sounds ok when its all layered together although I think it could do with some kind of percussion baking and maybe an overriding harmony, so I will get on that.

Short and Sweet

I’m sorry if this seems a bit rushed but I am bit pressed for time this week but I might have some time to add some more to it tomorrow.

Stop-motion has been a little frustrating this week; I tried to re-shoot it, twice but I still can’t get it right and the first one I did is by far the best so I’m just going to have to submit that one. I have prepared for you a lovely montage of all my animation tests and whatnot that I did with the puppet (the lip-sync stuff I did in flash is on my missing USB pen and the files with the hand drawn animation on have buggered themselves sidewise and refuse to play and have therefore been omitted from the montage). The first little bit shows some basic keying out that I did of the main poses just to get the timing sorted out and the rest is just experiments that I did to try and work out how to animate the puppet. I think it is safe to say that I was a little rusty on animation theory when I started the project and it shows, thankfully a lot of the kinks where worked out in the tests but there are still some issues with the hands in the final one.

As promised I have the colour test that I did of Jesus here for you all to see, my finished storyboard actually looks completely different to this; it is a lot darker as I wanted it to look more moody and I haven’t used any ink splats as I have here because it just looked like Jesus’ hands had exploded.

The storyboards are now finished and I am reasonably happy with them, they are a bit hard to follow and ideally I would have spent more time developing the story and tweaking a few drawings but bar that I hope its all ok.

What connects ZZTop, Jesus and Me? Read on to find out!

Here we are again, another week, and another blogg. Right, where to begin? The lip sync project is as good a place to start as any because it is more or less finished, I have even remembered to bring a copy of it home so that I have posted for you but the sounf dosn't sem to want to work, apologies. For the mean time I can sound pretentious and talk about acting theory! Ed Hooks’ book Acting for Animators talks bout a lot of different acting methods but two that stuck in my mind were, one: feel the emotions of the character and two: what was the character doing before the scene started (or something like that). At first I found it quite hard to do any of this but after a day a very frustrating animation tests where nothing seemed to be working I was feeling pretty miserable and I think that this helped when I came back to animating the next day.

From a more technical perspective it was quite hard to do more subtle animation and as a result I don’t think that I did enough animation in the tests and it all looked a bit lifeless and mechanical. Eventually I started to use a bit of exaggeration and this looked a lot better. I would like to think that I have got the balance between exaggeration and subtlety about right, there are a few bits that could be tweaked; the blinks are a bit fast and I think the pull at the end could do with some more tweaning. There is also a rather annoying band of light across the puppets face so if I have time over the next week I will try to re-shoot it.

My attention this week has also been focused on getting on with the storyboards, which are now all roughed out and just need tarting up. The song I have chosen to interpret is ZZTop’s Jesus Just Left Chicago, a proper blues song, not the crappy pop stuff that they did in the 80’s. Anyway, I have turned this into a charming story bout a drugged-up, womanizing rock star, a sort of Jesus of the present day, if he where famous, definitely not for anyone who is religious though. Here I have for you some character sketches of Mr. Jesus, this is pretty much how he appears on the story boards, I am still not too sure on a finished style, I quite like this biro look but I have also done a test with watercolors, that’s on A3 so if I remember to scan it in the studio you can see it.

Until then I shall bid you farewell.

Ye Olde Lipee Sync

Greetings and salutations! And once again may I welcome you to ye olde blogge! This week I have been focusing mainly on the lip-sync project as I’m struggling to come up with ideas for the storyboarding thing and my way of dealing with that is to ignore it and hope a good(ish) solution presents itself.

So, lip-sync, well it has bean chuntering along quite smoothly; its all now drawn up. Initially I had put quite a lot of tweaning in as it all looked a bit jumpy with just the keys but I did a bit too much, making it look like the mouth was jittering about. So I have subsequently taken a lot of it out again, hopefully striking the right balance. My next job is tart up those drawings and mount them on card so that they can be fixed to the stopmo puppet.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of the animation but I’m toying with the idea of playing on the fact that the mouth is stuck on. Although it is possible to use the eyes on the puppet I think I might draw those too just because I think drawn ones would look better with the mouth.

Before I go I will give the storyboarding project a brief mention, I did have a song that I picked but I fell out with it and as of yet have not found a replacement. However, whatever song I pick I think I am going to have to use fairly simple character designs as many of the more complex characters I have tried to use look different every time I draw them but If I can find a song where that sort of style would work then I’d be set.

Hurrah!

So here we are; my first blog of 2009, what a momentous occasion, hurrah! First things first, a leap back to yesteryear and the Exeter ident and apologies for the lack of the videos that I promised, they do exist, I promise but unfortunately blogger does not seem to want to let me post them, so if anyone out there is really desperate to see some candelabra things and the spinny floor let me know and I can show them to you. As for the run-through on the lighting, which I promised I would post (I lied), I can copy it from my production report.

Now back to the present and the brand spanking new project, which I must say is making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside as it will be a chance to do some stop-mo by myself and really get some character into the performance. In the finest uber geek traditions I have dome some background reading for this project; Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators (with multimedia CD-ROM included!) and Acting in Animation, which have both been very useful if not slightly confusing at times. So hopefully reading them will pay off. I am still trying to come up with ideas for a scenario for this project but ideas have not been particularly forthcoming; the best I have so far is a guy in a Pot Noodle factory but that idea would have probably changed completely by next week. As for tackling the lip sync I was thinking of “borrowing” an idea from Tandem Films Flatworld (1997), which uses 2D characters animated traditionally but put into a 3D environment and filmed as if it were stop-motion. My plan is to use traditional techniques to animate the face and then just blue tack each drawing to the armature, I will need to do a couple of animation tests to get it right no doubt but hopefully it will work , fingers crossed.