Wonchop

Some sorta accolade I guess

2010-11-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

I pretty much known noone's looking at this, but for completionist's sake, Tales of Beardyman placed third in the Student Competition at this year's Flip Festival in Wolverhampton. I got a shirt out of it. Woop.

NEW SHOWREEL

2010-06-10T14:28:00.001-07:00

Dunno who's still reading this, but here's a new showreel I made for my grad show.

The animations in order of appearance are:
PokerTime
Mischievious Monkey Magic
Citv - Keep your Computer Happy
Fredbot's Birthday Animation
I love the Internet
Robotnik Destroys the Moon
Flying Squirrels
Children's Animation at BCU
Tales of Beardyman
Energy Stoat (yet to be released)
German Xmas Market
Black Hole Sheep
Robotnik's Beautiful Head
The Big Guy
Date for One
Zombie Supermarket (unreleased)
Dracula
Hot Dog Eating Contest
Cut the Madness
Sonic Shorts
LL-PeachLock vs SBC
LL-Rewrite
Cat Face 20
ZekeySpaceyLizard drinks Tea in Outer Space
The Kevin Bishop Show
Robotnik Fukkireta
Anything
Arrgh Idol
Curly Sam the Arsonist
Guide to Celebrity
Guide to Advertising
Camp Madness
Narwhals
Pico's Bouncy Funtime
What happens to the hedgehog?
Melons
8 Bit Pwny Club
Movin'
Nene's Sorrow
8 Bit Pwny Club 2

Tales of Beardyman COMPLETED

2010-05-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

Once again, my last minute magic has kicked in and I have managed to finish my animation on time (though I won't be going to sleep tonight as I have to get my blog up to date). There's still a good half hour before this baby uploads to Youtube, so let's get this blog rolling.

There were a few last minute changes to do time allowances, this namely being the absence of the 'wife discovering the internet' parts (also because I didn't want to let those sexy map scenes go to waste). This actually works in the animation's favour, as it makes it look less like some cheesy advert and more like a general animation, taking away some of the guilt. So yeah, basically, it's not so much an ad anymore rather than your standard animation with a few flagrant uses of brand names.

My penguin guy, Martin Tierney, delivered on his 3D cyber penguins, delivering his animation on a shiny disk. However, one slight issue I had to work around was the fact the animations used their own backgrounds, which clashed with the snowy background I had gotten from Kieran. To compensate for this, I used some colour keying on one of the opening clips so that I could show the background behind it, and adjusted the colour on the others so that they managed the colour scheme. Once that hurdle was crossed, I managed to take advantage of the scenes to get creative with the story. I also got him to send me some alpha stills of the penguins that I could use for comic flinging. I also threw in some laser sights, which I made by making a long glowy solid and then moving it around in 3D space, which looks pretty badass.

The ninja octopus scene came out lovely, thanks to a combination of rainy stuff, and rocky waves drawn by Kieran. There was quite a bit of After Effects use in this, mainly for moments when I needed some epic effects or such. For simple animations mind, I just stuck to animating it in Flash.

One lil aspect I threw in was a reference to the Avatar DVD Beardyman was questing for. In leu of wasting time doing some gay drawing, I instead took a quick webcam video of me being a twat (I do not know any 'university' alternatives to the word 'twat' so forgive me), and altered it to give me Avatar blue skin. If I had remembered to take my shirt off I bet you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the real thing!

Post production was gonna be a tricky matter given how painstakingly last minute it was, but it came out really well. Editing the video came out nicely with some little fades in and out of the map scenes that were pulled off nicely IMO. As for sound, Deven had given me a health supply of 'Aarrrghs' to accompany Beardyman's battles. Hunting for sound effects was a little trickier, but a quick hunt through FindSounds and SoundDogs turned up some decent clips. Since I clearly had no time to make a worthwhile soundtrack in Fruityloops, I turned to that ever so loveable source of royalty free music, Newgrounds. After going through all the relevant keywords 'epic, quest, journey, etc.) and hit and missing through the iffy techno tracks, I eventually found 'Our Epic Journey' by Zero123Music, which not only sounded great, but synced PERFECTLY with the video!

The end result looks absolutely magical. A combination of smooth animation, high res visuals, top notch voice acting and well layered sound effects. It gives off a level of sheen that's expected of most professional animations (well, in the advertising field at least). For me personally, it's given me that chance to actually take my tutor's advice and animate something that isn't just the same bog standard flash stuff I do all the time.

Without further ado, here is Tales of Beardyman!

More Updates, now with actual evidence I've been doing something

2010-05-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, so in the final week now, so things need to speed up. The hot weather and ever increasing amount of bugs is not helping. First off, here's a couple more of the models I've done.

I've decided to do a lil self insert and cast myself as the HMV clerk. I took a quick webcam picture to use as a reference and used some of the official assets from the defunct contest brief for the badge. The only real thing I'm lacking is a reference for the HMV checkout itself, as google seems to be lacking (and if google's lacking, it probably means it won't be easy to take some pics meself.)

And then you have a generic boat, but the sail does animate.

As for what the Level 5 students have (or at least are supposed to be) doing, some dude named Keiran is working up some backgrounds. They just need a few tweakings colourwise but should be alright.

Another dude named Martin is making something supremely awesome if it turns out well. 3D Cyber Penguins, which should hopefully be turned into a massive army. Here's a mockup model he's made using parts from an Iron Man figure. I've reccomended the final one be more blue tinted to fit in with the winter battlefield.

I've also got some other dude working on the HMV dog, to compensate for my general suckiness at drawing animals. I'm just worried about whether I can get all this stuff in time to do something about it. Not to mention I still have to worry about soundtracks for both this and the monkey short which quite frankly I haven't given a rat's arse about once it was finished.

As for what I've been doing, I've finally started animating and have finished animating one scene, the encounter with the fire sumo. As the process goes, I used the models I created and animated them in flash using good ol' tweenage. (These could technically be tweened in After Effects, but I'm a lot more familiar with this method). Then I imported the animations in their SWF formats into After Effects. After looking up a couple of tutorials online, I made a nifty little fire using CC Particle Systems II and CC Vector Blur, which gives it an awesome 'this is seriously gonna melt stuff' look.

I've uploaded a look at the video here (though I'm not particularly convinced of its ability to show up properly): http://www.twitvid.com/7QVE6

Another animated bit I've got sorted are your classic map travelling intermissions. Since the animation for this was a lot simpler, I could just animate everything in flash and export it straight from there. The lil 2D icon was also drawn in Photoshop since I wanted to practice my Photoshop sketching.

http://spamtheweb.com/ul/s244201088_mapscenes.html (takes a short while to load)

Usually I have to worry about stuff like file size when it comes to sticking loads of graphics and stuff in flash, but since I'm compiling it elsewhere, I don't have to worry bout that.

Wifey

2010-05-19T20:02:00.000-07:00

Just need to make a few more expressions and stuff for her. Decided to go with curly bangs, cos...like...I've never done those before.

And I came face to face with a...

2010-05-17T17:52:00.001-07:00

FIRE SUMO!!!

In other news, I've got the voices in from Deven Mack (Arrgh Idol) and Alison Stark (voices ladies in the Edd Egg series), and they are mighty fine. Just gotta get a few more models done (working on the wife atm) and see what the L5s are up to and I'm ready to animate this thing.

Ninja Octopus Rawr

2010-05-12T15:50:00.001-07:00

Rawr baby.

Viking and Tentacles

2010-05-10T18:13:00.001-07:00

So I've just finished up the Photoshopped model for Beardyman. Will probably need to go back and make some alternate versions, (such as a wartorn Beardyman) but I'm impressed with what I've made. I've done several handshapes and a few eye symbols to show his expression. I've also equipped him with a sword and a shield featuring the design of Wonchomp, a character created by ages ago by an online friend based on a mispelling of my name, turning out to be a cross between Wonchop and a Chain Chomp from the Mario series.

Considering the scenarios he's going to placed in, I've also thought about how to change the colour scheme to apply for various scenarios, such as the nighttime octopus battle or the fire sumo showdown. Here, I've done a little tinkering with saturation and colour filtering to accomodate to certain backdrops. I apply it to each part by using Photoshop's Actions feature to record an action and then replay it for each layer. Also, if you're wondering why there's only half a guy in each of those, it's because for certain bits, such as the limbs of the eyes, I only make one thing for the side, which I can then duplicate and mirror once I get it into Flash.

Next, I'm having a crack at getting the Ninja Octopus down. Regardless of whether I go with the style above for the Viking, I certainly wanna try representing the Ninja Octopus in as epic a manner as possible. Using a technique I learned during my brief stay in Gamer Camp, I used Photoshop's animation feature to draw out a four-frame animation for the tentacle, which is probably more industry like and whatnot. Nonetheless, it looks swell.

As for the unpaid hired help, I've contacted Devin Mack (Arrgh Idol) about doing some voices and he appears interested so I've sent him the script. I'm just waiting to hear from my missus. Speaking of which, I'll doodle up some more designs for her tommorow.

Experimentation (Photoshop characters)

2010-05-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, so concentrating on my Beardyman animation for now, and getting to a point where I should get to animating it. Should be asking round for voices at this point, I'll probably ask Devin Mack, who voiced the pirate in one of my previous animations, Arrgh Idol, to do the voice of my beardy man. I'm also considering asking one of my internet friend's fiancee to do the voice of the wife (who I still need to do a proper design for).

So trying to decide on an animation style for this, I am once again reminded of my general train of thought concerning the past two years at uni.

"ALL MY ANIMATIONS ARE NOTHING BUT F***ING FLASH!!!"

It's a bit late in the day to think of learning new programs for the sake of completing a one minute short withing two weeks. So, I'm trying to think of a method of making this look like I actually tried. I have thought about sticking flash animation in After Effects for some of the scenes, but then it'd still be obviously flash animation.

It is then I am reminded of a FLIP festival lecture from a couple of years back, held by Boulder Media, the animation studio who was working on various animated series such as Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and El Tigre. I remember them showing off some FLA files of the various shorts they worked on, and constantly reiterating the same thing:

"When we make stuff digitally, we want it to look as less digital as possible"

Or something along those lines. Basically, this boils down to taking standard vector stuff and adding a lil photoshop magic to give it a less digital look. In one of the FLAs they showed of their short film, Carte de Visite, they showed how they had animated the thing in Flash, but made it so it was composed of several little photoshopped bits to make it more realistic, such as the shading style you simply can't make in vector without chucking in a crapton of blur filters.

Going on this train of though, I decided to have a little crack at making a model of my Beardyman in Photoshop that I can export into Flash.

This is my progress so far. I have made each part on a seperate layer, so that they can be individually animated in Flash. With good ol' tweens of course. They were drawn at a resolution of almost 4x times the resolution of my animation (standard PAL Widescreen, since I realise now that animating something in flash on a 1080p canvas is stupid)so that I can get some good close up shots without causing any unsightly pixellation. The plan is to draw several different layers to make up the different hand shapes, eye expressions, etc.

With the model I have made so far, I have done a test animation in Flash. There is also the option of animating it in After Effects, but Flash seems to be the more comfortable option.

http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/100510/47_pscharactertest.php

One of the more notable changes of the general design I have made is the replacement of the mouth with a giant moustache. This way, I can simply squash and stretch the moustache to make mouth movements instead of wasting too much time on lipsync.

I'll be working more on this model, designs for other characters and heck, maybe I'll actually get off my arse and animate it. Still waiting to hear from the Level 5 lackeys.

Animation (sorta) Completed

2010-04-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

It took a few nights of consecutive all nighters, but I managed to get something handed in in time for the competition deadline.

Click here to watch

It was a madcap dash to the finish. I didn't even have a final storyline until right near the end. A large amount of support in this regard came from my dad, Steve Smallman, a children's author and illustrator famous for books such as The Lamb who Came for Dinner (which appeared on the show Bookaboo), Smelly Peter the Pea Eater, and the illustrations for the Raggy Doll TV series.

I plan to make some presentational improvements to this before handing it in to uni or releasing it on Youtube or stuff like that.

Attention now returns to the HMV dooflip. We are getting assistance from the Level 5 students in this matter, which should come in handy. I wasn't particular sure what I was supposed to do during that session, but I got approached by a couple of dudes who might do some backgrounds, and another dude offering to make CG models of the cyber penguins, which should make constructing an army of them much easier.

Maracas Monkey

2010-04-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, crunchtime is coming. I've got until Midnight PST tommorow (or today, considering the only people reading this will most likely have normal sleeping hours) to complete this idea and it was only yesterday that I actually figured out a script to tie all this M business together.

The story goes that the monkey finds a magical wand that comes out of nowhere, and finds shaking it magics M things. As you do, he goes mad with power and ends up magicing more than he bargained for.

I am getting there with the animation, about 33% of actual animation, and I'll be allnighting this one to get it in time for the Aniboom deadline.

Btw I started added some stuff to my Aniboom page, which you can find here.

Here's a sample animation of the monkey dancing with maracas. I looked around at a couple of animations, such as one with Sonic characters, but in the end I ended up basing the routine on a fad from a Japanese website called Nico Nico Douga. I ended up setting a seperate minivid set to said fad cos I dunno.

M is for...

2010-04-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

MONSTER!

http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/98d6e02285e62762ab412eeacb4f0c42

Based on an old flash test I did a while back.
http://wonchop.deviantart.com/art/Monstah-Does-A-Wave-72295561

Developing the Monkey

2010-04-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

So as I thought of my 'M for Monkey' thing, (I have to try and think of an alternate title so it doesn't clash with Dexter's Lab's segment, 'Dial M for Monkey'), I did what noone in uni thought I'd do...actually develop several designs. =O

I went and tried various styles, some involving cubish looking characters, some with rather cutesy figures, and others slightly influences by the fact I was watching South Park at the time. However, the one that stood out the most in the end was this one.

The insanely happy motorbiking monkey! His style was something that was striking and original, yet still had a hint of 'me' in there (it's gotta have at least some of that. Asking me otherwise is like getting David Firth to draw anime.) So as I opted to go with this character, I continued to sketch him, thinking of various ways to adjust him, such as trying him out with different M activities (magic, maracas, etc.), showing different expressions to trying not to give him a face that would scare small children.

After about a billion of these sketches, I drafted up a CG look, this one being done in Photoshop.

I had contemplated using Illustrator to make some assests, drawn with a pencily/brushed outline like you see on shows such as Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. However, I can't figure out the best methods of drawing (it is not freehand friendly) and I neither have the time nor the patience to learn. So it's good ol flash for me.

Here is the model I eventually came up with, currently avaiable in cowlick and biker helmet flavours. There's quite a few layers going on here, and various symbols, such as the eyes, mouth and chin, have multiple keyframes that I can change on the fly.

There are particularly specific specifications for the competition, wanting it to be in NTSC 1080i (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution at 29.97fps (since the ultimate goal is to get this broadcast on TV), meaning everything will have to be drawn quite big, and at least have an outline that'll stand out once shrunk to a smaller Youtube friendly definition. Face details were drawn at 200% zoom with a size 3 brush, before going over the outlines at size 4 to give them some girth. The other aspects were drawn at size 3 at 100%, so I can easily add stuff on the fly.

Not quite sure of the best way to animate, but here's an early test. The starry eyed expression was also kinda influenced from Samba de Amigo (or more specifically, it's characters victory pose from Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing).

http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/34a40475101b1424dd7ead39a7e3a25a

Now to work work work.

Monkeeeeeys

2010-04-13T09:31:00.001-07:00

So for this Sesame Street competition for which I'm basing one half of my project on, I've decided to go with a compromise for not doing anything with the Wonchop idea; monkeys.

Let's face it. Who doesn't love monkeys? Y'know, besides people who are over protective of their banana collection. Stupid people, that's what. Monkeys are awesome creatures and more or less essential viewing on any visit to the zoo. The way they move about is just awesome, with each motion seemlessly moving on to the next. They've been a big part of my childhood and are mainly what brought me to my simian online alias.

And that's not to mention how they've appeared in animation. Several cartoons spring to mind, such as Coconuts from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Monkey from Dexter's Lab, Abu from Aladdin and Mojo Jojo from Powerpuff Girls, as well as recent examples like the Jamie Hewlett's Olympic monkey.

And of course, monkeys have made their mark in the videogame industry. One of the main monkey-oritented games I played during my Playstation Fanboy days was Ape Escape, a game that involved catching variously humourous monkeys in a bid to stop them messing with time. Other noteable monkeys in gaming history include Diddy Kong from Donkey Kong Country (Donkey Kong technically doesn't count since he's a gorilla), Amigo from Samba de Amigo, AiAi from Super Monkey Ball, and the various monkeys that featured in Timesplitters 2.

So what do monkeys have to do with Sesame Street you ask? Well, the criteria has various categories including numbers, letters, etc. I decided to go with letters, specifically the most delicious letter there is. M. And what's the first thing you think of when you think of M? Monkeys! Pure science at work! Here's an example of one of Sesame Street's letter-based animations.

About that delay

2010-04-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

Much apologies for the long delay in updating this stuff. Long story short, the fan on my laptop broke, meaning it could only be on for a hour or two at a time before it overheats. I decided to take this opportunity to purchase a new PC. However, when it arrived I had trouble getting on the internet, which was neccessary for some of the programs I intended to use. It took about a week or so to figure out the problem.

So yeah, I'll try and update this now.

Ben, you're an idiot.

2010-03-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

It has not been a good week for me. After a load of social obligations putting off my work was bad enough, but it was swiftly followed by a job for Weebl. A job which took way longer than it should have done, due to a lot of clashing between ideals.
I finally get off it and get round to finishing my animatic for the animation, which can be viewed here:
http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/090310/83091_hmvanimatic.php

For the heck of it, I decide to have another read through of the YCN brief to check on the submission deadline. The main kicker is when I actually have a read through of the HMV brief:

Challenge

Our challenge is a digital one. While keeping within our brand and adhering to the highest standards of usability, design ways for customers to quickly and easily find and buy what they want from hmv.com.

We’d like you to focus on improving user experience within some specific parts of hmv.com - product detail pages for CDs, DVDs and games, search results, and our homepage.

Ah. Reading through this in detail, it seems that what the brief is actually asking for is not a means of promoting attention to the hmv.com, but for designs that improve upon the website. Basically, it's web design and not commercialism. Thanks to my inability to check things thoroughly (I was always the guy who ticks the box without reading the terms and conditions), I have spent the good half of the last 2 months planning an animation for something that doesn't even require an animation.

Well....bumcakes.

Right now my brain is overflowing with problems, alternatives, counterarguments and fear or tutor ownage. Considering how much I've already done (at least in terms of thought and design processes), I don't really want to abandon this project, but it no longer fits the YCN brief. On the other hand, since the YCN brief isn't particularly relevant to the uni curriculum, I could very well just continue development of it outside the brief, kicking the nagging two week deadline away from it. But then there's issues of what to do to extend the module filling, whether I should move away from the HMV branding and try something else, maybe even a fictional brand, and how much all this is going to effect my overall marking.

One thing's for certain, my tutors are gonna be maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. X(

In term's of what else I could be doing, one thing that's caught my as of late is a competition currently running on Aniboom in which animators must create an animation suitable for young children, the grand prize winner of which will have his entry shown on the long running children's TV show, Sesame Street. The submission date for this is April 26th. So what I may do instead, tutor depending, is whilst I work on the Beardyman animation for the university deadline, I can also produce a short animation for this contest. One idea I have so far is a monkey who encounters various things beginning with the letter M, such as Mangos, Marracas, etc.

Again, it's something I'll have to talk to the tutor about. That is, if I can actually get round to confessing my screwup first. X(

Rewriting the script, what to do afterwards

2010-02-25T18:11:00.001-08:00

Okay so the first script I drafted up went with the basic idea of a beardy guy telling his epic tales and being told the painful truth by some smarmy git sitting near him. The script went as follows.

INTRO SEGMENT
EXT. Rusty Sea Shanty
It is a stormy night filled with thundering clouds and fierce waves. We zoom up on an old fashioned rusty sea shanty.
INT. Sea Shanty
Warrior is sitting over a lantern lit wooden table, surrounded by a few nervous sailor types. With a beer clenched in his fist, he regails his tales, unnerving those that hear it.
WARRIOR: Oh aye, I’ve been through various treacherous trials on a quest frought with danger.

SEGMENT ONE: Penguins
EXT. Ice filled mountains
WARRIOR (v/o): I fought an army of Cyber Penguins!
The Warrior can be seen standing at a top of a snow filled landscape, looking down upon waves of penguins equipped with cybernetic armour and laser guided machine guns. Brandishing his sword, he screams and charges into the crowd, lasers shooting out everywhere and several penguins being flown across the air as he makes his way through.

SEGMENT TWO: Manegg
INT. Laboratory of Blatant Evil Doings
WARRIOR (v/o): ... battled wits with the insane Professor Manegg!
We see the Warrior approaching Manegg, who turns around to see the Warrior in an ‘I’ve been expecting you look’. We zoom out to see a giant Egg Mech preparing a Gatling Gun to fire at the enemy. The Warrior brings out a convenient ‘Box of Hedgehogs’. Whilst Manegg laughs maniacally, Warrior throws one of the hedgehogs at the mech, causing it to explode a second later, engulfing Manegg in the blast.

SEGMENT THREE: Octopus
EXT. Ocean
WARRIOR (v/o): ... tangled with a Radioactive Ninja Octopus!
Warrior stands on a rock in the middle of the ocean, rain pouring on his face. As thunder roars, tentacles rise up and a shadow looms over the Warrior. We zoom out to see the Radioactive Ninja Octopus, glowing with a green aura and brandishing a kunai in one tentacle and a shuriken in the other. Warrior leaps towards the octopus with a scream, ending in a flash of light.

SEGMENT FOUR: Fire Sumo
EXT. Unknown
WARRIOR (v/o): ...and found myself face to face with a Fire Sumo!
Warrior stands in the middle of an inferno, the centre of which a giant sumo wrestler ablaze with fire. As Warrior shields himself from the heat, the Sumo takes a big breath and blows a big blast of fire which engulfs the Warrior for a few seconds before he slices it in half with his sword.
OUTRO SEGMENT
INT. Shanty
WARRIOR: But it was worth it to get the ultimate reward...The Complete Scrubs Blu-Ray DVD Boxset!
Warrior says this cheerfully as he brings up the DVD boxset. Just then, a casually dressed smarmy git, who was on the table next to Warrior’s crew, butts in.
GIT: Oh yeah! I’ve got that boxset too! Except I just went onto HMV.com where I used their easy to navigate system to get the latest dvds, music and games delivered straight to my door!
As he says this, cut to a simple office where Smarmy Git is cheerfully browsing the HMV website on his laptop. View of laptop shows various different segments of the HMV website, ending with a ‘You’re product is on its way’ type screen.
Cut back to Shanty, where Warrior is frozen in a state of disbelief over what he just heard, with the Git just standing there with an oblivious look on his face.
EXT. Shanty
Warrior’s screams of despair can be heard from outside whilst Nipper can be seen sitting next to a discarded gramophone, slightly distracted by the noise.
CUT TO LOGO
HMV.com – Get Closer (without needing to go anywhere)

When I showed this to my tutor, he suggested that I alter it so that whilst the flashbacks are epic, the dialogue was just describing menial tasks (ie. dealing with traffic = cyber penguins). However, I just didn't see that working in the context of the whole tale telling thing. I then considered given Beardyman (let's call him that for now) a day job at the office, where he talks about the hassles of daily life (represented by the epic battles). However, in this contest, it'd be silly to think that he'd be working in an office complex and somehow not be near any multimedia stores.

So, foregoing the whole dialogue context thing, I thought up a new concept that manages to improve the message of the story. Basically, this involves giving ol' Beardyman a wife/girlfriend.

This new variation, to sum it up quickly, involves Wifey sighing about a film she wants that she can't easily get, due to living several hundred miles from the nearest shops. Beardyman offers to go on this quest to get said object for her beloved, and heads off on a journey frought with danger. Meanwhile, Wifey discovers an ad advertising HMV.com and goes about ordering the thing online. (I don't think the viewing public will question how a house in the middle of nowhere somehow has broadband toooo much...) The hero, clearly not enjoying his quest, arrives at the HMV to buy the DVD. By the time he returns with the gift for his wife, she is already happily watching it, having gotten it delivered straight to her door. Enter witty line involving going back to exchanging it, throw in manly weeping and you've got yourself an ad.

Inside a generally lower-middle class home, a generally semi-intelligent woman (something like that chick from Braveheart) is looking through a magazine of the latest filmy releases. She catches the eye of a particular new DVD release (example used: UP). (Dialogue optional)
WIFEY: *sigh* I would love to have this DVD.
Warrior, picking up on her wife’s sighs, boasts loudly, brandishing his sword and posing magnificently in some random light source.
WARRIOR: Fear not, my darling wife! I shall make my way to the nearest HMV and obtain this item for you!
Warrior rushes out the door of the house, which is situated in the middle of nowhere, as a map pans into view showing the long journey Warrior needs to take to reach the nearest HMV. (Hint: it is very long). The map comes up to a shore line.
Cut to Warrior manning a dinky little vessel through a stormy ocean, only to be abruptedly stopped by Radioactive Ninja Octopus, who brandishes a kunai knife and gives the hero the ol’ ‘Neo gesture’, citing the Warrior to pull out his sword and charge at him.
Cut back to the Wife who, still looking at the magazine and sighing, notices an advertisement at the bottom of the page for HMV.com, giving a decidedly ooh-ish response.
WIFE: Hmmm, HMV.com?
Cut back to Warrior, who is now in a snowy landscape charging full speed with a shield, screaming as rams into a crowd of several Cyber Penguins, who try to shoot at him with his lasers, only to be knocked into the air.
Meanwhile, Wife is sat at the computer, browsing through the website and using its navigation system to find the UP DVD, to which she gives a smile.
Cut back to the Warrior, looking a little ragged and dirty following his previous battles, and finding himself up against a Fire Sumo, standing in a sumo pose and breathing bursts of flames from his mouth. Warrior is not pleased.
WARRIOR: Oh you have GOT to be kiddi-
Before he can finish his sentence, Warrior is engulfed in a crapload of fire.
Cut back to the Wife who, after an obligatory close up shot of a keyboard press/mouse click, is presented with an ‘Your order is on its way’ message on screen. She gives a relieved smile and a small clasp of hands.
Cut to a typical HMV store, where one of the clerks has just cheerfully served a local customer. As the customer leaves, the clerk is a little disturbed to see a skulking, panting, drenched and all together disgruntled looking Warrior coming up to the counter with UP DVD in hand.
Cut to a while later back in the house, where the Warrior, looking somewhat crazed in an ‘I was almost killed but it was totally worth it’ way, bursts into the door brandishing a HMV bag in his finger.
WARRIOR: I’m back! And I’ve got the DVD you wanted!
His look suddenly turns aghast, as we zoom out to see Wife casually watching UP on the telly.
WIFE: Ooooh, sorry hon, I went and got it online whilst you were out. If you’ve got the receipt you’re free to go back and exchange it.
The Warrior, overwhelmed by the bombshell of the pointlessness of his epic journey, burst into loud manly tears.
We cut to outside the house, the crying still audible, where the HMV mascot, Nipper, is casually sitting outside his kennel, with the classic gramophone next to him. The logos fade in one by one.
hmv.com
get closer...
without going too far.

This new script gives the story a lot more substance. In the first variation, Beardyman was all mighty and powerful, but here I'm giving him limits to his strength, adhering to Ed Hook's rules about giving people obstacles that get in the way of their goals. He's not a guy who can slay a ninja octopus for the sake of it, he's a guy who has to slay an octopus to carry on his journey. He's not one bit happy, but he'll endure it for the sake of his love. It also gives the underlying purpose, promoting the HMV site, more exposure.

So yeah, now I'm reworking Beardyman to look a bit more human. For starters, this just means giving him a beer belly. One of the main problems I'm having drawing is his huge-arse muscly arms. I either have to tone them down, or look into ways I can animate them easier (and before you ask, no I blatantly can't reference myself for it).

The Wife, is another aspect I'm looking into, mainly in determining what kind of wife she should be. Given the general trend of adverts, I want to make her a rather pretty woman in mid to late twenties. One dilemma is deciding what she should wear. I'm currently torn between whether should be addressed more adhering to her husband, in some tattered dress of sorts (much like Braveheart's hot girlfriend), or if I should stick her in a nice jumper and make her a bit more modern, providing contrast to her husband and making his entrance more of a surprise.

Another dilemma is deciding the hairstyle, since when it comes to me, I always end up drawing the same few hairstyles pertaining to some of my existing characters, and I know if I do that I'll get the whole 'you're sticking to what you're comfortable with' garbage from my tutors.

So yeah, in order to get this done for the YCN deadline, I'm gonna have to pull all the stops next month.

As for what to do afterwards, it's generally been suggesting I should try and extend this idea into something more meatier for the final deadline (the assessment for uni). Since this new variation doesn't particularly seem like the kind of thing you could extend much, I figured trying an additional theme would be nice.

One thing I was looking into is the idea of promoting the one aspect of video games that never gets enough airtime: digital downloads. Services like Xbox Live, Playstation Network and WiiWare provide various original titles that can be downloaded for the fraction of the cost of a full retail game. These games include retro remakes such as Mega Man 9, Bionic Commando Rearmed and the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 4, original titles like Castle Crashers, Shadow Complex and Splosion Man, to the really experimental stuff like Flower, Braid and bitTrip that wouldn't stand a chance in the retail world. Right now, the only real games that have gotten any on-screen mention (at least in the UK) are the downloadable episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV (Lost and the Damned and Big Gay Tony, both later released in retail) and Bonzai Barber for Wiiware (in one of the their boring as heck 'celebrities play games with old ladies' ads. *groan*)

Since I'm very much an Xbox 360 man, I figured if I do go with this, I'd make something advertising the cool stuff you can find on Xbox Live Arcade. It'd adhere to the classic concept of young british male narrating the wonders of the service whilst going through the motions. In the example of this, it would involve me explaining the various types of games, acting them out as I'd go along. For example, I'd start off with a typical green screen of myself doing the intro, then enter into a 3D model of sorts (need to learn how to rig argh) for one game, then shift into flash animation to represent one of The Behemoth's stylish games, such as Castle Crashers, then go into pixel art (which can be done in Flash using an extension) to represent the 8-bit Mega Man titles (Mega Man 10 is released in March so it'd be good timing too), and I'd end up turning into one of the Avatars that are used for the Xbox 360 menus, and are also implimented into some games such as Bomberman.

Hi me.

Course the main issue would be figuring out how copyrights would work for that stuff. Even if I don't make money off it, using existing characters and game footage without the correct permissions would be tricky (though since I'm somewhat friends with Tom Fulp, co-founder of the Behemoth, I may get permission to use something along the Castle Crashers theme). Also for authenticy, I would need to have one of the official avatar models, as well as the splash screens from the commercials, and I dunno if there's a bit of cash handling involved in getting those assets.

But yeah, that's something I'll worry about once I get this HMV Brief sorted.

More sketches

2010-02-17T19:37:00.001-08:00

Warrior Designs

Pop Sirens

Alternative design of Warrior for his day job

More sketches + early storyboards

2010-02-11T18:00:00.000-08:00

A few more designs I've drawn out for my project. This week's new addition: CYBER PENGUINS!!!

This takes influence from various cybernetic things and penguins, which vary from Teen Titan's Cyborg and Star Trek's Borgs to Madagascar's penguins and various other generic penguins.

Epic sketch of RNO versus our hero. Kinda which I had more felt tip colours at my disposal. Btw the katakana in the moon is 'n', the one I'm most familiar with.

To the left, a go at the dragon, kinda influenced by the big furry one from Neverending Story. To the right, a vampire wizard, a mash up of the current crazes of Harry Potter and that fish lipped guy from Twilight. Also featured are some cracks for the foil character who I'm just calling 'Smarmy Git', and a few attempts at the Warrior showing his emotional response.

Left: Professor Manegg once again. Here, I've done another throwback to the Sonic games that influenced his design by going through their logic of 'hitting things with hedgehogs makes them explode'. Right: Lil sketches of Warrior, Manegg, RNO and Fire Sumo.

I've made a start on a few early storyboards. I've also drafted up an early script.

Left to Right: Warrior vs Manegg, Warrior vs RNO and Warrior vs Cyber Penguin Army

A Look at HMV

2010-02-01T12:53:00.000-08:00

So, to make an animation for HMV, I have to get a somewhat decent understanding about who it is I'm trying to appeal to (which would probably work better for me than when I went into doing a thing for a poker company with zero poker knowledge).

HMV is something of a multimedia store. Represented by it's well known logo of a dog named Nipper perked in front of a gramaphone, it's initial focus was as a record store. The name and mascot come from Francis Barraud's painting, "His Master's Voice". Nowadays, the stores sell the latest music, dvds, blu-rays and video games, as well as certain bits of technology such as headphones and iPods. Their competitors in this regard would be Zavvi (formerly Virgin Megastores), and various other online stores such as Play.com or Amazon. In regards to videogames, they also have competition from various game outlets such as GAME, Gamestation and GameStop. The website is also currently working on a download section, which I assume pertains mostly to music, but could also offer downloadable game titles similar to the Steam distribution service.

At current, their brand look features a lot of rounded fontage and focuses around three main colours; black, white and pink. Like it has done over the years, it also features their mascot, Nipper, in the logo. Oh, and there's usually some cockney geezer working the voiceovers. With what I have in mind, finding a way to incorporate the brand trademarks, which are generally futuristic and bold, into my epic adventure kind of theme, would be quite difficult. General protocol for adapting logos into these scenarios generally involved a patchwork or metallic theme, so if I saturate some of the colours I could make it work. Although dogs you can stick just about anywhere and they'll fit.

In fact, looking at various adverts for HMV, they're pretty much nothing beyond a trailer or music video with some logos and a price tag slapped on top sandwiched between some fancy transitions. In fact, this was the only advert I found that was any different.

What I plan to do is radically different from all of that (particularly cos I can't be arsed to go through all the legal brewha of sticking movie/music video footage into the thing). I want the advert to say, 'Come to HMV, we rock', as opposed to 'Oh hey this new thing is out and I suppose you can get it at this place'. It's all about making HMV a preference, not simply an option.

As far as determining a target audience goes, one thing to immediately point out is this is an online shop we're promoting her. To buy things from online shops, you need credit or debit cards, something I'm pretty sure noone under the age of 16 has, so we can cheerfully strike that age group out of the picture. Going with what they generally show on adverts, there's a lot of the latest actiony movies, interspersed with your generic X-Factor shit, which puts the average audience somewhere in the early 20s. If we take into account the media hungry university student, you're looking at a target audience of about 18-25, give or take a few years. Sticking in a lot of movie-like stuff into my animation should appease the young adults. ;P

Some more concept art

2010-01-31T16:43:00.000-08:00

Been mostly sorting out my tax return this past week so there hasn't been too much time on this thing, but I have done a few more doodles.

I get the feeling I should watch Beowulf at some point

Knowing I have a general habit of coming up with one character design and more or less going with it (it comes from a job where you don't have time to waste on concepts), I decided to have a crack at some various designs, although they generally stuck to the beardy muscly variety, with the exception of the top left, which is influenced a little by Kratos from the God of War videogames. For the muscly designs, I tried thinking about how I can compose the dudes out of various shapes, mainly triangles and squares.

When thinking about the epic battle montage (what I may do is just produce one or two 30 second animations for the contest brief, then use the remainding time to make a full version for uni), one of the things that popped into my mind was the opening one and a half minutes of the ever-so infamous episode of the Super Mario World cartoon, Mama Luigi.

With 'Fire Sumo' fresh in my mind, I thought to myself, 'hey, there should BE a fire sumo'. Who's gonna make the connection? >_>

Fire SUMO!!!

So what you basically have is what it says on the tin, er, paper. A sumo, that's on fire. I drew it out with my fancy felt pens, starting with the orange outline, throwing in some yellow shade, then some more orange shade and finished off with some red highlighting to bring out the outlines. Marvellous. If I do go with Fire Sumo, I may present his scene in a traditional Japanese style (ie. not anime, think more that BBC Promo from the 2008 Olympics).

Also feature, an idea for an iPod-based badnik that never really caught on.

Since HMV sells its fair share of video games for sale, I figured it'd be fair game (sorry) to give that side some representation. When you think videogame nasties, a large number of people would most likely think of good ol' Dr Robotnik (aka Dr Eggman) from the Sonic games. And thus, came the creation of Professor Manegg, who represents the dark side of all things...erm egginess, sporting an easter-style pencil crayon face and a lil bread soldier sticking into his gooey insides. As well as the obvious Robotnik influence, I thought about the old-school videogame hero Dizzy, an egg who also sports red gloves and boots. This reference stuck out due to recently working on a Weebl series called '8 Bit Pwny Club', of which one of the characters also parodies Dizzy. I also drew up Professor Manegg in flash for the lulz.

The brown chequered background is a reference to Robotnik's ball of doom from Sonic 1.

Will post some more concept art, and maybe give a little thought into research, in the next post. Stay tuned!

The idea that will happen

2010-01-26T17:17:00.001-08:00

Whilst contemplating the idea of the clockkeeping mouse (note to self: learn to title stuff better), the tutors brought up the idea of submitting competition briefs for design awards, something everyone participated in last year for the D&AD Awards.

'Black Hole Sheep' - my animation for Motion Graphics. It didn't win the D&AD award.

With the tutor generally deciding this year's briefs for D&AD were rather crap, another source of competition briefs were shown via the YCN Student Awards. This had a more appealing range of briefs, ranging from Cartoon Network to Monster Munch (the latter of which is surprisingly enough to be targeted at 18-25s, for nostalgia and student munchies I guess?)
The one that struck a chord with me was HMV's brief in which participants had to design something to promote their supposedly easy to use website. As I thought about what I could include, I thought...ADVENTURE!

Before you ask, yes, I am completely bonkers.

The main pitch I had stuck in my head, which would be about 60 seconds in length, or two 30 second TV spots, was to have a brave warrior, the most clichéd money can buy, go on an epic quest, fighting all sorts of horrific demons and monsters from legend, fiction and my spur-of-the-moment attaching of adjectives, all to get that one thing who truly desires.

A Scrubs Season 7 Boxset (or whatever's the commercially hip product of the time of release).

That's when we kick in the narrator, who tells us that the alternative is to use HMV's website to get the latest DVDs, music and games delivered straight to your door instead, to which our hero responds with a daytime friendly alternative to 'FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-!!!'

Some concepts for the idea, featuring Mr Burly (we'll just call him that for now.)

I pretty much just started the concept artwork for this project right in the middle of everyone else presenting their idea pitches, but the general idea was to have this rather OTT viking type dude with bulging muscles, tight leather trouses, and an ultra sexy beard. The influences speak for themselves, but since we apparently have to go about 'explaining' this stuff, they include Eddie Riggs from Brutal Legend, the Scotsman from Samurai Jack, Prometheus from Disney's Hercules, Gimli from Lord of the Rings, and more or less any large bearded person from a DC cartoon. Will look into over influences, as well as experiment with more designs, later on.

A fun aspect will be trying to come up with various threats that stand between our hero and his Zach Braff fix. It'd have 'parody' written all over it. Legends talk of a fierce dragon, I drew a fifty armed dragon. Those sirens Homer went against in Homer's Odysee? Let's remodel them into manufactured pop-sirens. The fearsome Black Knight of...y'know screw it, let's just throw in a Dragonball reference. And a giant killer octopus not good enough for ya? Three words.

RADIOACTIVE.
NINJA.
OCTOPUS.

Oh dear god, YES

Having pitched this idea as a back up for my clockkeeper idea, my tutor was quick to notice that I was a lot more enthusiastic about this kind of idea than the other one, to which the other students unanimously agreed. HMV ad it is then. And since I technically work in advertising (I do the occassional promotional tidbit as part of the Weebl's Stuff team), it'll be great experience. Naturally, there is that whole comfort zone thing to generally worry about, but I plan on going beyond the general use of flash, most likely implimenting the use of After Effects and Photoshop as well. I also recently downloaded some music creation software called FL Studio, so if I can figure the workings of that out, I might even be able to supply my own epic soundtrack instead of mooching off the various royalty free sources.

The flipside is that due to the competition's earlier deadline, I need to get the main beef of the animation completed by mid-March (the main module's deadline is in May), but it shouldn't be too much of an issue, as this is the kind of thing I'm good at, and I have a bit more motivation going for me. I know my general hope for this degree was to develop my skills into epic festival-short making proportions, but if I can apply the stuff I've learned into a kickass advert, that's bound to be a good push in the good ol career direction.

The idea that didn't happen

2010-01-26T16:42:00.001-08:00

Okay, so following on from Rob Sprackling's talk, I got thinking about how I could put his advice to good work. Having heard his bit on creating a world and adding a contrasting element, and hearing one student say 'grandfather clock' I thought a contrast to a grandfather clock would be a digital LCD clock. So I thought about there being wise old mice living in a grandfather clock, who gets visited by LCD shaped aliens from a digital watch ship. My general thought was to keep it to one, elderly and probably lonely old mouse.

Mockup of Clockkeeper. Lineart in Photoshop, CG in Art Rage 2.

I thought of a mice for the main character since, as any fan of Hickory Dickory will tell you, clocks and mice go hand in hand. Influences for the character design above can attributed to typical kindly sage type people, as well as various animated mouse features such as An American Tail and The Tale of Desperaux. The staff thing can be attributed to many staff carrying people of all kinds, particularly ones with magic powers such as Mumbo's wand from Banjo Kazooie, and I think Clank uses one in Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time.

Quickie mock up drawn in Flash.

When it came to his alien friend, I took inspiration from LCD digits you find on alarm clocks, although the main issue came from trying to figure out a look that both represents this and would animate well. The most common design was a simple body and head piece, with blue backlight (inspired by my old digital watch) for its eyes and a number on its front. Not particularly sure what it would have been for, but it could've been used to show expression or, in the case of multiple ones, as an identifier. The general look is reminiscent of Eve from Wall-E, with a little touch of Mr. Game and Watch, the hero of various LCD games (this was also a type of animation I considered for it). A general problem would be how he would interact with things, since the cubic nature of the character is rather restrictive.

The main, and probably fatal, issue was trying to come up with a story that links the two characters together and gives it meaning. I was hoping to aim for one of those buddy movies much like the majority of Pixar animations (Wall-E, Up and Finding Nemo ring bells). One plot point I considered was for the mouse to have a grandson who was unfortunately killed by a mischievious cat, leading the elder mouse to become lonely, scared of the outside world and untrusting of others. His design is a little reminiscent of one of my own characters, Bunnycat, who like my other character, sports a pair of goggles, though his pair would be more fitting to the timeline.

When I showed this idea to my tutor, the idea of a grandfather clock scenario was well received, but there was general criticism over the necessity of the LCD alien, my inability to fixate on a story and the general overhyping of things (a problem that bit me in the butt during Date for One's production).

And that's when I showed them my other idea.

Experimenty stuff, Rob Sprackling

2010-01-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

After talking with one of my tutors, who also does a lot of flash stuff, I decided to try out some experimental animation tests.
First off, I tried a little rotoscope animation, mixed with some keyframe animation. Basically, tracing over my head as I make swift movements as a start, then keyframing various bits near the end for an original effect.

Next, I tried using live reference to try reference of my hand and mouth (which isn't easy when the only reflective thing in the room is a clock), and keyframing inbetween it, in a vain attempt to get better at hand and mouth drawing.

Next, I practised some morphing skills. Using a photo of MrSimon as reference, I traced over it, and then modified the drawing at each step, similar to how one could stretch Mario's face in Super Mario 64.

By the fourth experiment, I had more or less completely lost it. I took a picture of myself, drew over it and made me look like Dr Robotnik of all people, and then lipsynced it to a 'nutshell' audio clip.

So yeah, I hope to experiment with various different things. Question is, what?

Today, I went to a talk by Rob Sprackling, who wrote the screenplay for Mike Bassett: England Manager (he showed clips, it was funny shit) who was hosting a talk on how to write funny stuff. To my surprise, it was a lecture I was not only able to stay awake for, but took an active interest in.

He talked about how you go about generating original ideas, a skill this anime obsessed dork really needs. One of the key starting points he mentioned was to start off with a world for your idea, then throw in an element that clashes with that world. For example, for one of the movies he is writing, Gnomeo and Juliet, he's taken the world of cheeky garden gnomes and thrown in the total contrast of epic romance. This is proving to be an interesting starting point for coming up with ideas, as when the world of grandfather clocks were brought up, I silently thought something along the lines of digital watches representing an evolved alien species, an idea I may expand upon.

When talking about characters in funny films, he mentioned there will be one or two 3D characters that the story revolves around. This character would develop over the course of the film, learn something that changes his personality or something (a good example being Kuzco from The Emperor's New Groove, who goes from egotistic emperor, to caring friend.) Then, there are the one-joke characters, such as yes men, flawed geniuses and plain goofballs, who don't particularly need any long journeys or backstories, but have an impact on the central character which brings out his facets. (Like how an annoying character brings up the agitated side of someone).

Storywise, he said there should some self-contained stories in the movie, but mentions they should join with the other stories to keep the overall narrative flowing. One example that springs to mind is 'Phineas & Ferb', where the adventures of Perry the Platypus somehow end up effecting what Phineas and Ferb are doing.

He then talked about theme, where he said a film needs to be going somewhere and have something to say, a rule I generally break with my animations, since I just tend to focus on making it for the sake of making it. Lastly, he talked about how the structure should have a beginning, middle and an end, and that within the first 10 minutes of a film, you should have a good idea of what will happen in the last 10 minutes, give or take the twist in the middle.

All in all, it was an interesting talk, and I hope to gain something from it.

Date For One released!

2010-01-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

Well, my movie's all done. Was going to make further additions, but I was just totally zoned out and anything I would've done seemed a bit forced, so I simply fixed up some small bits and called it a day.

Newgrounds: Vote 5 Please
DeviantArt: Here

Almost Done

2010-01-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

Anonymous guy and his hot date (left)

Took a lot out of me, but I've managed to get the animation more or less done. It's a little rushed towards the end, but it's at apoint where it should suffice for uni submission. After a few visual tweaks, I'll submit it to Youtube, Newgrounds, etc.

In the meantime, time for some last minute writing material.

Hot damn.

The above shot is one that I've been meaning to use ever since I thought of the idea of Date for One in 2007; the 'sex' scene. This is where the originality starts to shine through. Coming up with a good way of expressing this scene was a lil difficult, given my general inexperience in both lady wooing and mime arts as of late, but going with what's popular in artsy type films (ie. gross stuff), some breast groping and external tongue touching seemed to do the trick here.

In terms of the layout and colour scheme for this shot, I looked at a flash animation called 'Jerry' by Max Gilardi. It's a series of animations about a typical guy who does menial tasks all the time, goes to bed with a few ladies, has a generally rotten life and ends up hanging himself, as well as some of the characters around him, such as his Dad, his son and one of his girlfriends.

'Jerry' by Max Gilardi

In the nighttime segments of Jerry, ie. whenever he's either sleeping or pulling the moves on a lady, the animation uses various shades of blue, better representing the nighttime feeling than if I had simply just thrown on a black gradient over the top of it. Similarly, I decided to have my guy presented in various shades of blue.

'Jerry' by Max Gilardi

I had generally planned for my main dude (still very much lacking a name) to live in a terraced house to do his...doings in. I kinda left out any segments of him leaving a house of any sorts due to time restrictions. If I find time, maybe I'll do a shot of his house. Anyway, I felt that if I'm going to have a bedroom scene, as well as use Jerry as an influence, I might as well stick a moon in there. When creating the backgrounds using Photoshop, the 'Burn' and 'Dodge' tools became very handy at creating light sources, shown in the relevant picture. When it came to adding some shading to the character, I didn't really have time to do some light shading, like I've done with the cinema scene at the top, so instead I used Flash's bevel filter to add a bit of lighting to the whole animation.

And whilst we're onto backgrounds, here are some of the others I made for the animation.

The external shot of the cinema is one of the more landmark shots of the movie, so I had to put a little bit of effort into how it looked. My main point of reference was the Odeon cinema on Birmingham New Street, albeit heavily simplified (ie. no Ben & Jerry's sign or neighbouring Gamestation). I still used a few key features, such as the glass doors, the overhanging...balcony whatsit (I don't know what you call them), and the rectangular movie posters. A few in jokes to be found there, from left to right; Mecha Carrot, the film featured in the movie, Curly Sam, one of my early characters, a stickman with a blonde afro, Wonchop, my personal character who I was planning to animate before hand, Sexual Harrassment Wigman, whom I've featured in the earlier film posters, and Hitmantis, the guy who I animated during Gamer Camp. One of the key things you'll notice is my reliance on Pattern Overlays, which helped speed up the process, although it looks a bit crap on the buildings.

I kept the restaurant scenario fairly simple, generally using the flash animated parts as a reference to drawing out the tables, with the classic gaussian blur and Burn tools used to good effect. To make it look like I put some effort into it,I had a lil try at making the lights look decent, though they still look a little crap, the shadows look alright. One technique I tried out with the pattern on the carpet was to apply it to the layer (which Photoshop doesn't make easy if you just want to do it on one layer btw), and then use the Distort tool to give the carpet a bit of perspective.
I kept the cinema interior fairly simple, as I was more or less approaching my limit, so there isn't really any big features like arcade games or ice cream parlours or whatnot. I did, however, manage to get a good lighting effect coming through the glass doors. One particularly neat tricked I learnt whilst doing this scene was to duplicate the carpet layer, apply a gaussian blur to it, and then used a gradient mask, giving the impression that the carpet is getting blurrier the farther away it is, adding to the perspective.

Finally, to add a little more girth to my presentation, I'll just add a little bit about my general animation process.

Unlike all the industry professionals and whatnot who draw out their storyboards on paper and then scan them to make some animatics, I draw my animatics straight into flash as it gives me a better sense of what to do with the timing (although that still tends to suck if I don't have any sound to work with at the beginning, years of collabs and Weebl songs have made me feeble =(.)

Above: Sketching, Below: Final

I draw the rough layout, be it as part of the animatic, or if I want to draw something pretty, using the brush tool in a light blue colour, which makes it easier to trace over (even if I don't, I can just turn it that colour later). Once that's done, starting on a new layer, I zoom into double what I draw the rough in (for this 1024x575 movie, I drew it at 200%) and draw over it with the black brush, being careful to smooth out and rough looking lines with the smooth tool. For any circles I draw, such as the eyes, a draw as good a circle I can, highlight it, and press the Straighten button to get a good round circle. I most points I try to keep the brush size consistent, though for some bits where drawing too far out leads to bad results, I zoom up again to get a better accuracy. Simply put, the smaller your guy is, the harder it is to get the details right.
Once I got the lineart done, I stick in my fills and such, et voila.

Well, I've hoped I've managed to write enough stuff to accompany the practical element of the thing and slip through the thing. Once I've tweaked it up a little, I'll release it on Youtube/Newgrounds/DeviantArt/etc. where I'm sure it's kudos will be overlooked by some videogame parody of sorts.

Chao.

Sound Design

2010-01-05T21:37:00.000-08:00

Long time no update, I know. December involved a lot of urgent commission work, semi-forced socialising and bloody puppy surveillance, so I haven't been able to get a lot done over the holiday. However, I'm pushing it in this final stretch of a week. Serves me bloody right for being too ambitious and going with 'super awesome student film shiznite' instead of simple TV stings and stuff. Hey, how was I supposed to know we'd be doing two of these specialist study things? >=U

Here's my current progress. That's another 3 and a half scenes to do in under a week. Eep!

Given the time restraints, I'm mostly going with flat shading, except for times where lighting is required, such as in the cinema.

Animation wise, I've gotten in the habit of converting my motion tweens into twos, so that it doesn't clash as much with the frame by frame animation, also done in twos. I do this by setting up the motion tween and applying the desired tween effect. I then highlight all the relevant frames and select 'convert to keyframes', since doing them individually can mess up the easing. Whilst they are still selected, I right click and select 'Remove Tween', removing the motion tween, and then I start removing every second keyframe. Et voila, twos.

One aspect I've been focusing on is the sound, a vital aspect for any silent protagonist film.

As far as setting the ambience goes, I've looked at sites like SoundDogs for relevant files, such as crowds and bus noise. I've also looked at Freeplaymusic.com for some royalty free music tracks to use.

For the background music in particular, to get a good acoustic effect, I edited the music files in a program called Goldwave. By using the Bandpass/Stop tool and selecting the 'Voice Hum and Hiss Filter', it helps give that low quality feel you get from stereo speakers and the like. I also used this for the movie dialogue. Why is Jeff Goldblum there, you ask? Well, why wouldn't there be Jeff Goldblum? There's a giant dooflip destroying the world, of course he'd be there.

My family watches a lot of Independance Day okay?

Of course, when it came to those sound effects I just can't find on the internet, I've had to record those myself using my recently purchased Samson C01U microphone. As a guy restricted to the groove his posterior has made in front of the laptop most of the time, I don't particularly have the luxury of going outside to get relevant things, so I've had to improvise. For example, the popcorn noises came from me scoffing a packet of Skips I had conveniently brought upstairs for my late lunch. I used a lil scrap of paper I had at arm's reach to perform the slight noises you get from the note rustling. When it came to the flowers bit, I was a bit stumped as there were very few things I could use to replicate dropping a bunch of flowers without buying a fresh pair and messing up the floor with them. Conveniently, Mum had this rather twiggy decoration dooflip downstairs that gave a satisfactory rattle, which made do quite well.

I tell you, once this is all done. I'm gonna kick back and settle down with hot british nannies wielding guns on their feet.

Extension + Movie Posters

2009-12-08T04:49:00.000-08:00

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.

More concept artwork + some rough animation.

2009-12-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Maybe more later, chao.

Gamer Camp (the briefer than I would've liked version)

2009-11-20T16:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Back in action

2009-11-16T16:32:00.000-08:00

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".

Watch Arrgh Idol here.

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. >_>

Why I haven't really updated much

2009-10-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

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.

It's generally just....urgggh.

A New Showreel

2009-10-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

An up-to-date showreel I made for the portfolio review segment of the upcoming Flip Festival.

Very very rough animatic

2009-10-15T18:22:00.000-07:00

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.

http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/2609/8525_d41animatic.php

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.

Date for One - Character Designment

2009-10-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

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

Final Audiences and Communication Bit

2009-06-18T05:30:00.001-07:00

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. =(

Some character art

2009-06-17T17:55:00.001-07:00

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.

And here's some character sketches for Wonchop.

Portraits (aka OH THE HORROR)

2009-06-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Couldn't resist.

Idea 2 - Wonchop pilot

2009-06-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

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).

A bunch of art of the characters can be viewed here: http://wonchop.deviantart.com/gallery/#Project-Wonchop

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.

Idea 1 - Date for One

2009-06-12T07:04:00.001-07:00

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'.

(This is an injoke of this game btw)

As for animating the little devil, there are several ways of approaching it, due to the character's simple design (though I've yet to determine if he should be clothed or just naked all the time, although I particularly wanna see him in a pair of boxers).
*2D/Flash - Which is my main forté, though this is, how my tutor would put it, sticking with my comfort zone, so I'd possibly need to break out of this zone, or at the least, do it in a novel way. Thinking about it, I've always wondered what programs all the regular cartoon people do when doing the classic type cartoons (ie. your typical rough -> line -> colour -> screen).
*Stop Motion - This would be an ideal way of presenting it, given the nature of the characters. The main issue I have with it however is that I'm, obvious to anyone's who's seen me in a stop-motion workshop, very bad when it comes to building stuff for stop-motion, particularly when it comes to things like wires (sensitive pinkies you see =( ), but that's probably one of things I'll have to suck up.
*CGI - In leau of Stop Motion, CGI is also possible, and would probably be a bit easier to model (give or take learning how to rig bones properly (example of fail here)). The main problem is, judging by the majority of student films I've seen using CG, unless I can texture it right and find a good method for animating in twos, it wouldn't give as epic a feel as the other formats.

So yeah, I'm mostly hovering on this idea at the moment.

Rocket Rabbit

2009-06-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Watch ooooutt!

He rocks and you know it.

Teacher for a Day

2009-06-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

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.

All in all, definately an interesting experience.

Audiences and Communication

2009-06-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

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?

ps. I hate this blogging format so much. D=

New Showreel

2009-06-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

I've just made a new showreel of my animation up to now, featuring a culmination of my personal, uni and commissioned projects from the past few years.

Vote 5 on Newgrounds too: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/498000

Here's my previous reel from 2007:

Pre Production for Specialist Animation

2009-05-31T07:31:00.000-07:00

Some sketches drawn in preparation for my final project next year.

I'm mostly juggling with two ideas at the moment.

One is something involving this big fat guy.

The other is a pilot of sorts for my Wonchop series, which I've been meaning to do something with for ages.

It is also totally littered with random doodles of Wallace and various videogame characters.

Also included is notes from a talk from The Brothers McLeod, I suck at notes though.

Oh hi there

2009-05-31T07:06:00.001-07:00

Tutor said I should make a blog, so I made one. Once I figure out how everything works I'll be posting stuff related to my Animation course at uni, as well as other little dooflips I'm working on.

For now, here's some cake.

Test

2009-05-31T06:58:00.000-07:00

test