Well, things haven't been moving so quickly, and I got the feeling that trying to get this done within a week, as well as write a frikking essay about it, would be nigh on impossible without it looking heavily rushed. So I've asked my tutor for an extension and I now have til January to work on it. Which is handy since I'm also currently doing a commissioned piece of work for Weebl and I wouldn't want to disappoint him. Hopefully, this will allow me to have a much more polished final result.
I drew up a few more mock movie posters for the lobby scene the other day.
The first one is of a guy I affectionately call 'Sexual Harrassment Wig Man'. He was created for the flash game "Poke Me!", an interactive live action game in which players poke me. If they poke any 'sensitive areas', Sexual Harrassment Wig Man shows up and does his sexual harrassment dance.
(warning: above video is rather loud) The character was drawn in flash, first roughed in brush and then traced over with lineart. After removing the lines, I applied inner glow to each of them to make it less flat. After that it was just a matter of sticking it in photoshop, blurring a few bits, adding some gradients and giving it the old 'Dodge + Burn' treatment for filmic effect.
I didn't particularly have any ideas for the third movie poster (hey, there's gotta be three, of course), although my original idea was just 'The Procrastinator', a representation on how frikking lazy I've been. Taking some pictures using my laptop's built in webcam (which is rather tedious to use, since it requires opening a program and then right clicking something on the sidebar), the original plan was just to have me lazing about whilst various other mes just look down on my with disappointed faces. Once I started playing around with some things to make the crops less obvious though, I started playing around with colour overlays and dodge+burning, and I got this really nifty looking scifi kinda stuff. I then threw in some smudging, so that the other mes look like their some spritual race of sorts, and then I added a pattern overlay to give it a lovely finish.
Here are a few more concept designs for Date for One. Due to a lack of time, I'll probably forgoe any further concepting and get cracking on the main thing.
First up is the waiter of the restaurant who gets subjected to our main guy's demands. When it came to putting him in colour, I originally tried having the characters in a greyish outline, as opposed to the usual black. However, when it came to this guy, I had to make the jacket lighter than the outline, and it became a bit too light and dull looking. I'd like to say his design is influence by the stereotypical french waiter, but then no specific ones spring to mind. If I absolutely have to find an example to link him to. I'd suppose we could go with the dude from the recent Go Compare adverts.
Well okay then...
Here we have the cinema salesman clerk (I dunno wtf you call these people). His design is influenced by one of my internet friends, MrSimon, with your stereotypical acne thrown into the mix. One issue I'm having is what colour to make his garb, since everything I pick seems to clash a bit.
This guy's one of the people watching the movie our hero picks, and has to deal with some of his antics. This is more or less a charicature of myself, since I tend to look pretty neat wearing a scarf and I'm a procrastinate little bugger.
Here we have the girl that our hero encounters at the end of the movie. I tend to keep forgetting what shape to make her head but oh well. I decided to go with a quiet shy type girl, and she kinda has elements of previous girls I have drawn before, such as one girl who is blonde and tends to wear blue, and another who is shy and wears a scarf. I've also got an affinity for those large bangs that cover one of the eyes, seen in a lot of anime and manga series.
The movie that our character goes see is a monster flick that I decided to base on a character I thought of called Mecha Carrot. If I were to inevitably make him into its own seperate animation, he'd be one that hosts a gargantuan sized cooking show (trees for veggies, humans for stock, etc.) He initially had these giant mecha arms, but in the interests of time, I'm leaving those out. In the brief clip we'll see in the movie, he shoots down a couple of helicopters with his laser eyes, so I did a few sketches to get a feel of how they'd look. And an unrelated doodle of one of my old tutors who had grown a curious moustache. I've also gone and made a mock movie poster that will appear in the final movie, made using photoshop.
Coming soon to a theatre near nowhere
I've got a week to finish it so it ain't gonna be easy. I also have to type up an essay about how this links to traditional whosits and wotsits. Here's the current rough animation status. I'm going to be generally making on the spot changes to what I have storyboard wise, since that's just the way I roll. For example, in the cinema scene, I added a little bit of the guy trying to decide what movie he wants to watch. http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/051209/72717_DateForOne.php
I've also ordered myself a fancy new mic, complete with stand and noise reduction panel thingy so I can provide a few additional sounds to the dooflip.
Yeah, about the 4 week Gamer Camp dooflip mentioned before? Well it turned out to be just the one week for me. Apparently I lack a bit of focus and sticking me on a game development team would be too risky. Laaame. =( That's not to say the week was a total waste mind, and for the interests of student blogging, I may as well post about it.
The training week for the Gamer Camp (which I had managed to get into thanks to one of the previous members dropping out last minute) was held at the NTI in Birmingham. We had a couple of tutors from the games industry, including one guy (I think his name was Guy as well) who had worked on the Colin McRae and Sega Rally series, and another who made a fair few iPhone games, including one involving Santa shooting elves.
The course was revolved around the development of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, with the hope of getting a finished product on the App Store (and I was gonna make a real cheesy trailer for it too =(.) I'm not sure if I was particularly gonna head towards iPhone development, since I have an affinity towards Macs, but I was keen to look at how these kind of games are made and what restrictions were involved.
The first two days mostly involved reviewing various iPhone games, such as Jelly Car, Edge, Geo Defense and, most reoccuringly, Flight Control. I think it was quite evil that they also had Peggle installed on their Touches, so damn distracting. We also got an insight into the development cycle of how this stuff gets on the App Store, going real deep with icons and screenshots and stuff. I was kinda accused of looking disinterested during these sessions, but that was mainly because I had suddenly shifted from a late morning, late night routine to a 6:30 wake up and a 9 to 5 straight working, which took its toll on the ol' body.
The third and fourth days were focused on the art aspect of the stuff, and there were quite a few things to learn from this, such as the Actions and Animation uses in Photoshop, which I'm sure will come in handy. During Wednesday though, one thing was clear. Macs + Flash CS4 + Drawing with a mouse = FAIL One of the tasks involved drawing graphics of a road that could be repeated. It was only after I had gotten a good deal through a hot piece of secks road at a sort of Excitebike kind of angle, did I turn my head and notice everyone else was doing top-down roads. This was one of the apparently fatal reasons according to the course dude.
Thursday was focused on drawing animations to be packed for the software. Thankfully, I had managed to get the tutor to lend me his Graphire, though it was still a little hard to draw due to its small size versus massive Mac resolution. I made a semi-decent Cap'n Zappy walk cycle, followed by a pretty neat arm cannon blaster, which looked neat, but again it was used as critique cos I wasn't focusing on one thing. We were introduced to a packing thing, where we get to see where all those Sonic Sprite sheets come from. There was much internal sniggering everytime someone mentioned the word 'p-list'. The second task involved drawing a character doing idle, walking and death animations. I originally planned to do the thing in Flash, but I was too self critical about my drawings to go with it. Instead, I did what everyone else was doing and tried making my animation in Photoshop. The character I used is an assassin named Hitmantis, from one of my personal projects. Using the sprites from Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth as a guideline for height, I gave the stuff a go, with flapping cape and scarf and everything, and the end result was pretty neat.
Despite this, come Friday, they stuck me in the awkward room and said they don't think they should take me on for the next few weeks. They did mention that I did pretty well to get this far, considering most of the people on the course were postgraduates and stuff (evident by the fact I could not understand anything they were talking about). The rest of the day involved looking over Flight Control and listing all the assets including in it, which turned out to be lots. These things tend to look much easier when you just wing it. There was apparently a chance to talk it over at lunch, but I was very hungry at lunch, and at the end of the day, it was pretty much broadcast that I wouldn't be staying. Would you like some wound with that salt?
So yeah, much suckage, but at least it frees up my daily schedule to concentrate on getting Date for One done. I get the feeling my head would've exploded trying to juggle both that and the Camp, and it probably would've definitely exploded if Weebl randomly decided to throw me some work in the midst of it. I'll still take to heart the stuff I did manage to learn, in case someone approaches me for this kind of work in the future.
K, well I'm done sulking over the earlier mishaps and I'm slowly getting back to working on this. Which is probably a good idea, since I'm also currently participating in a 4 week Gamer Camp thingy, so yeah, best make the most of my free time.
I more or less finished up the storyboard (which may eventually get scanned...I don't have a scanner hooked up to this laptop so er.... yeah). I've revised some bits, such as the debate over whether the 'girlfriend' should have a plate of dinner at her table or not. I've also cut out a good chunk at the start, since I'm running short on time. Initially I had this whole 'preparation' build up thing, that also doubled as a title sequence, with credits imprinted on shampoo bottles and the title coming out of the drawer (think something along the lines of those mysteriously appearing text in games such as Grand Theft Auto IV or Splinter Cell Conviction.) A simple title card, however, will suffice the audience.
Right now I'm drawing up the characters digitally in Flash, to get their final look down. Starting with my still currently nameless dude right here. There I drew his body, 3 views of his head, a zoomed up head with some features and shading added to it, and another one using lineart and gradient fills, which I probably won't use since it'd take too long to animate, but it makes for good comparison. I then garnished it with a few oddbod poses and expressions, just to get a feel for how he'd be acting.
I decided to give the guy this curly hair look (see below posts for other haircuts) since I felt it would stand out more compared to all your generic scruffy people (one of my habits being I tend to draw stuff with lots of corners, etc.) and would look nice in animation. Since it's a rather modern day romcom, I decided to forgoe your typical tuxedo/bowtie combo and go with a nice shiny purple shirt. Namely cos my Dad used to wear a purple shirt and it kinda fit the dork nature. As for the eyes, as a change of pace from my usual Cartoon Network sized monstrosities, I'd go with nice small circular ones. A recent example of me using this would be my September animation, "Arrgh Idol".
The main question is the type of animation style I should use. Frame by frame (traditional) or motion tweening. Personally, I want this to look good, and want to go for that fbf look, but again, it's one of those things that are time permitting. Then there's the matter of how to go about the backgrounds. May need to get myself a decent camera and get some shots that I can trace over in Photoshop or Art Rage or something. As for music, I've got a fair few contacts I can ask around for some musical accompaniment. Who I ask depends on how the animation (or at least the animatic) looks. Oh yeah, and apparently I need to write a script or something. >_>
Project's kinda hit an awkward standstill based on some critique last week. I dunno quite how to explain it, but thefirst 40 seconds of this Um Jammer Lammy video should give some explaination. Think of Parappa (the hat wearing dog) as me, PJ (the bear) as my tutor, and the guitar as my plot.
Yup. God damn bear. =(
Basically, he wants me to take out any reference to the fact the main character's going on a date by himself until the end of the movie, but I cannot in any way think of any way that's gonna work. The fact we can see there's nobody there provides pretty much the entire basis for the visual gags in this thing. Apparently, I'm supposed to compare it to films like Shallow Hal and Fight Club, but the more I think about it, the more I believe this project has very little to do with those things, in the way their perception of vision is implimented. If I were to compare it to anything, I'd go with sexually depraved mime, except his girlfriend's the only thing that's invisible.
So yeah, I'm currently stuck in a slump with a half-finished storyboard. I can't think of any reason to go with his idea, though the entire class is supporting it, meaning there might be a bit of potential grading damage if I stick with the idea that makes sense.
And by rough, I'm talking extra sandpaper, zero lubricant kinda rough. There's no sound or even any timing on this because it was a rush job, but it more or less gets the plot across.
Thanks to Kyle Carroza (creator of the Nick short, Moobeard) for his suggestion on the restaurant scene. I'm currently bothering him on how to improve on this, as well as giving me lessons on how to pitch my ideas across so I can get advice from other people.
OK, new uni year's here, so time to pick up this blog again.
Since I last posted, it was recently decided I should shy away from the whole Wonchop idea for now, since it's something for more later down the line.
So, I'm proceeding with the idea of Date for One. Step one is to decide on a firm character design. Initially, I started off with the rather bulbous looking style from the posts below. After generally nagging from tutors about how I stick to specific styles, I tried some different methods. Somehow Tonic Trouble, a game that came with our PC billions of years ago, came into my head, and I tried experimenting with drawing long heads and applying characters to that.
It looked particularly interesting, and showed a fair bit more expression than the last design, so I decided to go with it further, tweaking it with different hairstyles, and eye shapes.
Some various attempts at the style, including one of the more amusing aspects of my idea.
The eyes eventually got smaller and more rounded.
Various designs lined up, including the old design, all in their pants.
Some designs for the other characters who may show up during the toon.
So yeah, much as I hoped to be a bit more experimental with how I went about my animation this year, the fact we're doing two projects lasting about 8 or so weeks each instead of one big one with months of production, it's same ol flash again. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF Now I need to try and get an animatic done, and maybe do some of this 'research' stuff I apparently have to do to make me sound cool.
Ps. Blogger Image Uploader, you still fail bucketloads
Here's the final dooflip with all the individual animations put together. My part comes in at 0:33.
In my harsh criticism mode, I'm a little annoyed that my suggestions for a more zoomed in view fell on deaf ears. Apparently it was kept at a fixed angle to replicate the experience of sitting in the theatre, but I'm pretty sure all video/tv/dvd representations of theatre productions had different camera angles in order to keep the audience engaged. This just feels too zoomed out and, since additional crazy elements such as Rocket Rabbit couldn't be added due to time constrictions, it just makes the thing look that much emptier in my opinion. It's also a shame that my little dude's colours got a bit washed out in the After Effecting process. =(
A few pictures to round off my RVJ work. Apologies for the quality. Here's one of Date for One, which should give a good explanation of the general plot.
One of my main weaknesses that my tutor pointed out is the way I always tend to draw massive eyes that are taller than they are wide. To remedy this, it was suggested that I try doing some portraits of people to get a better idea of what the eyes would look like. Since I have an issue with myself about not bothering people by randomly drawing them, I decided to use photos taken by my camera phone. Thus we have a mix of a few recent ones I took for reference, as well as various pics from meet ups I've been to. Warning, results are pretty scary.
The second idea is slightly less geared at your general festival audience and is more a project I've been meaning to do for a while, an animated series for my Wonchop character. As opposed to my general goofy stuff, it would be more in line with your Saturday morning superhero cartoons (even though I'm pretty sure noone my age wants to wake up that early on a Saturday anymore). As far as target audience concerned, I kinda want a wide audience, but I want to keep in some mild violence as well as references to death, so it'd more on the Avatar kind of audience as opposed to your general 4kids dub.
The main story revolves around Alec Littleman, a goggle-clad guy who will always try to help people in trouble, even though it usually ends up with him getting pummeled. One day he chances upon a secret experiment and accidentally gets fused with the DNA of a rare type of monkey, giving him the power to transform into the more agile Wonchop. Realising these powers can finally allow him to help people properly, he decides to become a superhero. Of course, he soon gets involved other 'animutes', element-wielding girls and top secret agencies, the top agent of which turns out to be his childhood friend. Naturally, things get darker as they progress, as bonds get tighter, lives are endangered, and the consequences of Wonchop's transformation start to show themselves.
From left-right/top-bottom, Wonchop, Amora, Ruth, Alec, Elly, Wez and Alec again.
Other characters include Ruth, Alec's friend/secret agent, Wez, the first to know of Alec's secret, Elly, a shy girl with a secret, Amora, Ruth's figurative aunt and head of aforementioned agency, and Flint, a sword weilding animute with a mysterious link to Alec. Villains Wonchop would face include such foes as Muggerilla, Reggaemeleon, The Elly-Mentals, Lepricarnivore and Retrote Con Mole (puns ftw).
There are a couple of routes I could take with this. One would be a simple pilot animation, showing a typical encounter Wonchop would have with the forces of doing bad stuff. This would involve Wonchop taking on a group of thugs who had taken some people hostage, before facing off against their leader, one of the animutes. After a prompt butt whupping, the victory will show up in a newspaper our hero's alter-ego will read the next morning, and complain about how they mispelt his superhero name.
The other, slightly riskier option, is an actual pilot episode, kicking off the story. This would introduce us to Alec and his friends and explain the origins of how Wonchop came to be, complete with curious exploration, temporary 'AHHH WHAT THE GOD IS HAPPENING AHH' moment, and his first encounter with the baddies where Wonchop learns an important lesson: gaining super powers =/= instant kung fu knowledge. This would be a bit longer than the former idea, which would obviously be a lot of work for me and my short attention span (I tend to make a lot of short movies barely breaching the 3 minute mark).
Of course, forgoing the above, I could just do a sort of pilot set to some music, in the vein of Sav the World's pilot animation for Oban Star Racers.
This would allow me to set the overall tone of the story and show a variety of scenarios with the different characters. (Not to mention it would save on lipsync ;D) So in the events that the top two become unlikely, this would be a good choice.
Other options include backstories to some of the character's pasts, such as Alec's friend Ruth, who had a pretty glum life before she met him and was able to smile again due to a pineapple related scenario.
Yup. Pineapples. You'll see if I ever do something with it.
As far as animations concerned, 2D is most likely the best option, since I can't really see it being pulled off any other way (except maybe 3D in a Storm Hawk's kinda way, but I'd have to improve my 3D skills a lot for that.) I'd probably use a variety of programs, such as Flash, Photoshop and After Effects, possibly a little 3D for things like motorbikes or cityscapes, though I will have to look a fair bit into how they are all used to bring stuff together. For voices and possibly soundtrack, I have a few contacts across the internet I can ask about, and I can always ask some people veeeeerry nicely for additional voices.
It's gonna be tough deciding between whether to go with these ideas, or Date for One.
Like I said, I am currently musing on a couple of ideas for my final project for next year of university. The following one seems more like the stuff of animation festivals and what not.
This concept is called 'Date for One' (or possibly 'Valentine for One') which is basically a combination of your typical 'hopeless romantic' situations with the concept of imaginary friends.
The main character (big white guy, pictured in earlier post), who I have yet to name properly so we'll just call him Bob for now, who is going on a date... with himself. Unlike most single people who just walk around at night, sitting at a table for one and wallowing in his own self pity (ie. me), Bob goes about his 'date' like he is actually dating someone, despite the lack of physical presence. This includes activities such as buying two cinema tickets instead of one, pouring wine into a glass that isn't there and, erm, bedroom activities involving squeezing certain parts of the air. How would it end? That would be spoiling.
This is a little idea that I've had for a bit over a year now. I came up with it when it came to our first Stop Motion module, before everyone decided to be generic and do Dracula. Like most popular student films of the norm, this would be without dialogue, except for voices coming from radios, TVs and a certain film Bob goes to see with his 'partner'.
Last Friday was a special day for us animation students (ie. the three people who actually attend and didn't go off to Turkey in the middle of the term). Students from Hereford Cathedral School, aged about 14/15 I think, came over to university to have a look at the animation course.
After the tutor gave the kids a tour around the place (during which I acquired a sandwich for needed energy purposes), we got into the meat of the day, the Stop Motion class, in which we were the teachers. It was great to get a go at stop motion, which I hadn't touched since my module in the first year. After getting a quick briefing on what buttons did what on the software, I got right into it, showing the kids how to do the animations. After a few little demos with my hand and a nearby pen, as well as a little demonstration on easing/cushioning, we got into the real fun aspect, modelling clay.
We started off by doing a little animation of your basic stick figure, with me suggesting elements such as easing in the waving motions, moving the little dude backwards when he's doing his kick and finally...erm... exploding.
By the time we got into the next animation, the kids really started to shine, animating a little robot that, after some random suggestions from yours truly, takes a rather disturbing path. They were really getting the hang of things at this point, even throwing in little touches such as the rabbit doing a little hop and twitching his ears. Needless to say, it's one of the more hilarious things I've seen/made this year, and the way the kids responded to the improv was swell.
After lunch came my time to shine; a flash masterclass with yours truly. I didn't have a massively huge timeslot to do it in, so after a quick explanation about the stuff I do, and a quick showing of my showreel, I got into the class, showing off the basic tools and how to tween objects. Teaching is definately a challenging thing to do, as a lot of the time I would point to the screen at some points, instead of demonstrating it with the mouse so it would be shown on the projector. Another aspect I had to consider is that these kids don't know what words like 'tweening' means, so slowing down my pace to fit theirs was challenging stuff. Still, when I hear a collective 'wow' from when I make something move across the screen, that sure is something. Particular given how tweening is generally whined about on the websites I usually go onto. It was a fun experience and, had I a bit more time, I'd certainly like to go into it a bit more.
At the end of the day, we decided to do some last minute stop motioning, and by this time the kids had really gotten into it and didn't even need my assistance in making their new animation involving a burglar escaping from jail, only to trigger and alarm and get squished by giant fist before his entrails are eaten by a frog (which I forgot to snag on my flash drive >_>). Said frog then exploded in a mass of beads, but that's a tale for another day.
One of the modules we currently have to do at uni is Audiences and Communication. The main task for this is a group animation, advertising the animation side of the university, but pitching it in a style that would be appealing to 7 year olds.
We first thought of mind charts about what being 7 is about. It is clear from this that my memory sucks various spherical objects.
For the animation, we thought about doing something that involves a variety of different animation styles (eg. flash, stop motion, cgi, etc.) and tried to design a plot based around that theme. Whilst I came up with ideas of a kid travelling through various worlds, or pushing a button that changed the style, those were shot down due to their complexity.
We eventually decided on a theme of wizards. The basic plot being that the wizard is attempting a magic trick with a hat (ala Presto), but it all goes horribly wrong, and he keeps getting zapped by the hat and transforming. I came up with a few designs of how one of the designs would look, taking into account successful wizards like Harry Potter and Magical Trevor. I eventually came up with a simple kid, whose clothes changed from casual hoodie and shorts, to a slightly oversized robe. I liked the idea of having a starry pattern on the kids shirt. I also thought of various objects that could fly around during the chaos.
I have so far, animated my wizard segment, in which the wizard gets blasted by the hat and transformed into a kid, noticing the chaos around him, getting mad at the hat and then getting blasted by it again, going into the next animator's segment. It's a little tricky since I can't really tell what the start and end frames of the other segments are, but I like the animation. I might animate some other elements to throw into the visuals. Bunnies riding rocket powered characters per instance?
The first one is of a guy I affectionately call 'Sexual Harrassment Wig Man'. He was created for the flash game "Poke Me!", an interactive live action game in which players poke me. If they poke any 'sensitive areas', Sexual Harrassment Wig Man shows up and does his sexual harrassment dance.
