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.