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.

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

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

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

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

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

Very very rough animatic

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

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