Extension + Movie Posters

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.

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.