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.