Neil's Flash Test

This is just a little something that last for about....well a a second. This was done on Flash, today. It's been years since I used this program but I'm just now starting to learn a bit of the basics. Hopefully Lewis and I can beome more comfortable with it to do our animation, however we need to decide on what scenes to use for the storyboards, but for now let me gloat at this, fantastic A* animation.

Rough Storyboards

Man this cold or flu that I have, really isn't making things easy. But here it is my rough storyboards. It starts of with a front shot of the stage with the curtains seperating, revealing a figure. The camera switches too a close up of Blot and we then swith to a 3/4 close up shot of Blot revealing the wheel. (The wheel as a woman on it). In that same shot we seen blot walk or run in front of the wheel and stands straight. We then zoom out to a low angle 3/4 shot of him taking out 2 knives raising them above his head. The audience are in suspence. He lowers them both mid way and proceeds the throw three of them stylishly. When the 3rd one is thrown his counter part Durg runs in front of them. We see Blot look shock and horrified and so does the audience as they see him get stabbed. We don't see but there is a SFX. We then see the back of Blot with blood in front of him, he then turns and smiles embarrassingly. This is it. I think that there may be things that no doubt need to be taken out of this but if we combine my own and Lewis's version it should come together nicely.

TEAM 9!

A my favourite character Baggy or maybe douche bag...I'm not sure. But he is a swave, cool laid back kinda guy I mean bag. Something is always telling me he should be holding a tray on his right hand, but let's just say he's striking a pose for the cameras, cheese!

This is Green Bean the uncle of the red bean. He's always trying to set his hyperactive red beaned nephew straight, since he has a major screw loose....well to me anyways.

Bob the Builders cousin I suppose. I just called him builder or a farmer since he looks like one, I like the fact that I gave him a hat, it's gives some sort a character like he might be shy and withdrawn, especially his eye.

Oh yeah baby this babe here has three ears so she can litterally hear you from a mile away. She is voloptuous, sexy, seductive and looking for a man that can sweep her off her feet. She and the main character of Darylls show has a crush on the main character, maybe even on the female hostess too....lol.

This is Fuzz maybe he could be a distand relative of the snake guy, anyway I making stuff up here but I'll keep going. He has a bad temper that's all I can say about him and he can create a static shock, so watch yourself.

LOL I was influenced by Ryans Stiles from Whose Line is it Anyway. His name is of course Ryan and I can never forget when Ryan Stiles wore those snazzy blue shoes. I wonder how many smurfs he stepped on to get those?

Here is Seal, I was influenced by Pokemon I think it's polly whirl that did this for me. Anyway I think those two would make a great brwal, don't you think?

This is the furry snake....I got no idea what I was thinking when I drew this, this is just a spur of the moment drawing. I was influenced by Sonic the Hedgehog.

This is Ted happy go-lucky bear with a smile. When I drew the basic shape of the head I started thinking of Mickey Mouse in that old film Steamboat Willie. Which is where the eyes come from.



Well I finall did 9 inculding the duck makes ten. I doubt if any of these will make it to the cut but hey, that's show buisness baby. This took me about two days to complete and right now it's about 23:01 earlier today I started at like 2:00pm and had a hotdog break at 4-ish. When I got the info from Lewis, he told me that his bro wanted something out of this world and wacky. So when I started drawing, I rememberd Scotty Young saying "I like to make shap decide the character..." So that's what I did just drew some random head shapes and let my imagination take it's course.

Now the next step is storyboarding, since we are planning to start animating on wednesday and the concept drawings were supposed to be finished on a tuesday, but now that's a load off since I've finished early and I can now direct all my attention on that. We only got 30 seconds, this will no doubt take careful planning, timing and cutting things we want in there. Anyways right now I gotta do something for Dan well mostly for my own benefit so stay tuned.

Ivan Urban Action Figure, Dangerous man and Mr. Flexible

Well we have agreed on some one man acts, so then I remembered Ivan and an act I've never seen before, but I'm sure you know what takes place with Ivan and I'm not gonna ruin what the other guy does so sit back grab a coke and a smile and enjoy. If I find more vids I'll pst em up, because I wanna storyboard as soon as possible.

The Master

These are from Glenn Keane the animator master I though we could use these as reference to character designing and animating. His characters are so detailed and full of character and life, (sigh) but for newbies like us SIMPLICITY IS KEY!! Must not forget that.

The Project, The Ideas and the Headache

I should of done this in the beginning but anyways here it goes. Lewis and I both thought...well I though that it would be enough to do just random squences of the audiences reaction. But we were wrong, after speaking with Jared we realised that we had to create some sort of narrative to the project.
Lewis came up with the idea that we can have a character do things that would normally take two or more people to do. We started thinking of magic tricks, such as a character sawing himself in half and then the lower torso would sprout a body and a head making another person on stage. The othere one with just the upper body would sprout legs and so there would be 2 characters. Lewis also thought that since 30 seconds isn't long maybe he could do some knife throwing. We could make a 3-D object in the shape of an X and have the character throw the knives then he would quickly run and tie himself on the X and have the knive miss him. We considered that yesterday, using the duck as a character choice. I'm cool with it but I'd still like to create more character possiblities those that aren't chose cna just go to the audience. We also intend to use this software called Toonboom, apparently Mike Smith knows a lot about it so we have to find or e-mail him as soon a possible. We only got 6 weeks to do this in so we have to move fast and be decisive about it, the idea that is.

More Inspiration

You know I've also been thinking that maybe to two or one characters that we're doing can be spoofs of all the characters that we have seen on Cartoon Network, Toonami or anime or whatever. I was thinking how funny it would be to make the duck character act like and make fun of Johnny Bravo or Angry Beavers. Although I just remember Jared saying that it should make sense....not random, but what if it could be random and make sense? Unfortunately I'm unable to get Angry Beavers intro because of copyright, which is a real pain.

Inspiration!

Yup on this road again, I'm having quite a hard time coming up with a range of funny performances that's only gonna last for about 30 seconds!!!! So I got thinking about Mr. Bean. All his old time shows, always had a very always simple story to tell and it was always made up of simple yet funny performances. Like every thing that happened in the show there would be a miniature story of all the funny things he did...I guess what I'm trying to say is scenarios. Take this video clip from above watch what happens to this guy.

I know this seems obviouse most comedy shows like Whose Line is it anyways, Mr. Bean, Kenan & Kel, My Wife & Kids, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, etc. All these shows are made up of funny small scenarios that hepl to make the story progress smoothly and easily for the audience to follow. We need to a story that will make it easy for the audience to comprehend and ain't easy we on ly got 30 seconds including audience time. So I think probably at the most it will probably have 2 scenarios in our animation. But anyways this pos is purely meant to give us an energy boost in our creative thinking.

The UGLY

Well here he is, one of the possibilty characters that might appear on our Lewis & Neil Show. This is Duck brother 1 ugly brother. I figued that the original one that you created would be yellow or a lighter colour, so I made mines darker with a red tie since it seemed to stand out and suit him more...sort of like an identity statement to say "I'm the uglier one!" Anyways just look at Angry Beavers and you'll see my point. Not really proud of the line quality of my characters, but I'll improve, I it's because I used the wrong brush. However there will be more to come so stay be on the look out for more.