New schedule and a welcome

Well here is the new schdeule, all of the pre production is done as well as the production stuff. However Lewis and I were wandering when percentage we're at with the animation. Since we've done all the 2D animation of the audience, we now only have the 3D part to do, so we decided that it's about 20% done. I have to figure out how to do this running cycle which is proving to be quit an itch in the butt, but I found a tutorial that seems good enough. Next after that I'll need to find a way to create a water droplet which will act as a drool from Durg....should be easy enough I hope.

This rave on air thing is worrying me a bit but I ain't that worried about it, but it's the fact that I got a crack version of DVD Encore 2.0 and it doesn't work! I can't even uninstall it, repair it or modify it! Those damn error messages keep popping up! Sigh anyways I'll break through it one way or another, but on a happy not I was able to complete an animation for Durg. It needs tweaking but I'm really happy with the movement. A couple of guys from class, looked at it and laughed, so I'm glad I got the appeal down. That's it for know I'll be sure to post up Blots running sequence, see ya!

Storyboard Redraft

This is the redraft. Jared said that we need to incorporate the 2d into the 3d more effectively. The vector render seeme like a good idea, but it would cause some complications with the look and we simply don't have the time. After racking my brain to no success Lewis came up with the idea of making the audience somewhat fake, like they weren't really there but on a TV screen. So, when Blot comes to throw the knives he can't find them, so he goes behind the television to get them. This is when we switch to the screen of the audience and slowly zoom out to reveal that they aren't really there, but on TV. So Blot then gets back up on stage and the storyboard resumes normally. Now this is the version I drew yesterday but I think Lewis demonstartes the actions way better than mine. But I put mine up still so you yourself can compare. That hat's off to you Lew, now let's finish this off!

Refence, Stage Action!

Well here's our stage Lewis's is more complete however for some reason the version he gave me doesn't have all the textures. I think the lighting is overall good, except I think it can be tweaked even more, which is why I put up some references. Anyways Jared said the vector rendering is a very creative idea except it may not be the way to go, if we wanna get that quality of animation from our 2d. This is something we have to be cautious about.

The Vector Render

Here is an example of intergarting 2d into 3d. This is vector Render. I spoke to Tom Stockeright about this and he suggessted this. David Ross hepled me with the settings on our maya enviroment stage howver it messed up and closed. So Tom decided to take his own model and turn it into what you see before you. I personally think this looks really cool, however. This Vector render doesn't support any textures you put in the enviroment, you need something another for it to support the textures. Tom only has colours on it, he also has glowing but again it's not supported. Anyway give me a shout and let me know what you think. I also give credit to Tom for making this 360 short animation.

The four animations...wow

Yeah I decided that I'm not gonna do something rediculous and upload 15 animations. I'll just upload my best 4. There was a 3rd character that I did but, his animation actions are the worst out of the two. Only show the best of your work, that's the golden rule in your showreel, right? Anyway in our next post it will hopefully involve some, pictures of the stage itself and hopefully some animation tests as well so stay tuned!

Check my schedule

Well this is my schdeule if you can tell, here's things so far. Lewis and I have pretty much done all the pre production stuff, designs, storyboards animatic and the like. After staying up till 3:30am inking all of the audience for Daryll I'd say that I've finished it too. The deadline for it is today, so I'm glad that me and Lewis are done with that. Just as a side note though, I don't think I could be a 2D animator, I mean as fun as it feels for the first 3-5 pages, it just gets downright BORING! drawing the same character over and over again. In fact it's funny because when it comes to illustrating characters, drawing the same one over and over again trying to figure his, her or its personality, then it's cool.
Anyways, back to the audience drawings I've make some less than a second quicktime movies of animation and I plan to post all 15 of them....yay. We plan to fit these into our film, which lasts 17 seconds according to the animatic. Back on Friday I believe Jared told us about using the toon shader, however due to Lewis losing his texture data on his usb I'm not sure if we are going through with that still. Though it would be nice to animate using that style. As for the animating there are essentially 2 characters to animate, Lewis was trying to find a way of changing the colour of the Max for Maya rig just to tell the difference between the 2. However I was thinking that we coul use the Moom rig to make more of an impact. I've spoken to Dan Dalli he states that it's possible to scale them however, there is a danger that it could mess up the rig completely and you'd have to go in and disconnect the rig. He said you could do it by finding the main handle which is at the bottom of the rigs feet and scale it. However I really don't think Lewis and I will have the luxury of compliacted problem solving at this point, time has gotten even shorter.
I'll discuss it with him for sure, but I think it will be a mutual agreement to just play it safe.
Oh yeah, on our schedule, the production section we don't have to worry about...my bad yes we do, but the modelling is done mostly only one aspect remains, the texturing. That's coming along fine so far, we just need to go in and ensure everything is cool, the time for play time is finished.

Right now the major thing is animating and putting the sequences together, in Premier or After Effects. As for today we'll do some scanning, discuss and update our schedule, complete the texturing then start animating.

Things Have changed

This is a quick post after Lewis and I discussed about wether or not we should go 3-D instead, we decided that it would be a wise decision based on the fact that we simply do not have that amount of time. We both have tasks assigned to us, Lewis has already begun animating with the default character, (can't remeber his name) and I intend to start doing the animatic, I've already cut out the neccessary pictures. This will be a good way to see if our animation really reaches 30 sec or not. As for Daryll's animation I have finally done one of the actions for the for my baggy caharcter. However, there was a problem with the line testing and I couldn't seem to login to test so that didn't work. Hopefully this week will turn out to be a little more successful Since I wanna get it done ASAP. After the animatic I'll go staright into the animating, oh yeah and I have to deal with PPD, Contextual and my show reel....Blah!

Final Storyboard

Well here it is the final storyboard. Not much to say about this here, but I figured that since we'll be doing an animatic I might as well add some notes on the actions, Lewis can have the say of course if he doesn't agree with anything or if he can come up with something more effective.

Shot 1: The lights click on followed by applause.

Shot 2: Blot comes in from the right, whips his left arm acoss pointing to the wheel. Durg laugh in the background.

Shot 3: At this low angle front shot we see Blot take out two knives.

Shot 4: We take a 3/4 close of the knife coming out.

Shot 5: We see Durg slide onto view from the right, laughing again.

Shot 6: Blot jumps in air and trhows knives.

Shot 7: Side view wide shot of Blot speeding past the knives.

Shot 8: Close up of Blot's eyes focusing on the wheel.

Shot 9: Durg, taking deep heavy breaths and strange grunts begins to drool.

Shot 10: Close up of saliva building up and spilling over the tongue.

Shot 11: The drool becomes big and splashes onto the floor.

Shot 12: Blots spots the puddle and begins to panic. This shot will zoom in and rotate a bit with focous lines in the background, (see shot 17 to know what I mean by the lines.)

Shot 13: Blots foot slips on the puddle, this will be a brief close up of the action.

Shot 14: Blot goes flying towards Durg, wide shot.

Shot 15: POW! words get bigger and smaller.

Shot 16: They bot get up Dazed.

Shot 17: Knives coming at them, from a front view, with focus lines.

Shot 18: Blot and Durg stare at the knives, then fade out with sha-wing SFX.

Storyboard decision complete!

Well me and Lewsi had a discussion about how the storyboard looks and we both like the look and feel of it. Since both our boards looks mostly the same, we decided to do with what we have. We've picked out what shots will be used and thrown away, so I'll be in charge of creating the final storyboard. This thursday I will starts the animating of Daryl's audience animation. Lewis also said that we can pull it off by animating straight onto Flash by the WACOM Tablet. We discovered one in the 2nd year CVA room, howvere we don't know where the pen is. But Since Lewis has Flash at his house I can go there and complete the work if need be so we'll see how it goes.

Storyboard Version 2

Well after me and Lewis had a talk on Thursday. We thought about how the storyboard should be since we thought that it mght be a little too long. Now I know that the cartoon is meant to be like the flinstones you only see the characters from one angle most of the time and its very rear that you see them from the front. But I think that it's always boring and it get'd repetitive, of course we both discussed this too. We thought that we should keep that sort of 3/4 veiw for the most part, but we did some exaggerated shots with the revealing of the knives and when Blot is running. Anyways this is how it goes down.

1. Blot is reveled byhe spotlight.

2.Blot introduces the wheel and his dumb counterpart, Durg.

3. Blots takes out two knvies. The camera is at a low front angle wide shot.

4. He takes out a third, through his mouth. Close up shot Front.

5. Durg slides on to view.

6. Blot throws knives.

7. Blot sprints past knives to get on the wheel.

8. Close of Durgs focus on the wheel.

9.Durg drools.

10. We follow through as the drooling becomes a large spit puddle.

11. The spit splashes.

12. Blot sees the spit and panics.

13. He slips.

14. He flies through the air.

15. Blot hits Durg.

16. Blot and Durg get up very dizzy.

17. The knives approach them.
18. The get stare helplessly.

That's about it I'll see what Lewis thinks of the this.