Expermiental Experiments! ^_^

We've been discussing various different opssible methods of making the experimental project, including a few different kinds of stopmotion, and animating in various grain/sand/liquid mediums. There's no final decisions yet, but here's a few things we played with!

I call him Alphonse! ^_^

No rice was harmed during the making of this video. However, one fly named Jeremy did meet with a sudden, newspaper related accident because he kept landing on the camera lens.

11 Second - Basic Storyboard.

Yes, VERY basic, because I am a writer by nature, I prefer to do my planning with detailed notes for myself than storyboards. However, I thought it best that I at least do the simplest of simple ones ^_^

I know, it is not good, but my scanner refusing to scan it right didn't make things any better.

Allow me to detail the frames the way I prefer, with text.

Frame 1: The Masked Aubergine (MA from now on) stands awkwardly on a hilltop, holding the moon up with clear difficulty, and trying to stop it rolling back down the hill. In the background, the night sky has a dark void in it, where the moon should be, and within that dark void is an image loading error. Why? Simply because the dark shape looked completely wrong, and the loading error is simply a geek's joke... consider it my little way of trying to be funny.

Brickface stands at the bottom of the hill, pointing accusingly at the other Villain, glaring, and shouting "You stole it."
At this point, MA notices that Brickface is there for the first time and puts on an afraid look.

Frame 2:

MA defends himself with shifty eyes and a speedy response of 'I thought you put it there.' In the following silence, MA is pushed a ways down the hill awkwardly by the weight of the moon rolling.

Frame 3:

We go to a close-up of Brickface, with an extremely annoyed expression. "Why would I put it there?!" he demands, gesturing his bafflement with angry hand movements.

Frame 4:

Close up of MA instead now, who looks around as if seeking a desperate answer and then cautiously replies 'Kindness?'

Frame 5:

Close up of Brickface again, but now he posesses an insane looking rage-face, with bloodshot eyes, eyetwitch and strangler's hands. He then replies with anger: "KINDNESS?!"

Frame 6:

Brickface points at MA accusingly again, still with his insane face, and shouts 'You stole it.'

As he is saying this, an angry mob, complete with torches, pitchforks and angry fiery-glow begin to rise over the crest of the hill behind him.

Frame 7:

Brickface, now EVEN ANGRIER, and still poniting at him, looks to the side, as if to part of the mob, and proclaims with fury 'He STOLE it!'

It is presumed that Brickface does this partly to make it clear that he wasn't responsible, and partly in the hope that the mob will kill off his 'competition' the other villain. Also it is possible he is simply in a blind rage.

Concept Art - 11 Second.

Okay, so having obtained and pondered the November 11 second project clip, I have finally decided on an idea that I feel fits it with a reasonable amount of origionality to it.

The idea is this:
On the outskirts of some kind of city, two rather bad villains (Yes, cliche, pants-over-trousers, silly costumed, silly named villains) stand. One is pushing the moon (Yes, out of proportion, comedic moon) up a hill, looking rather pleased with himself. The second stands a

ways behind him, poiting accusingly.

The supposed story is that the two of them are in a rivalry over the city, but appear to have both had the same idea. The second one is sore about this and commences shouting accusingly, the other one immediately begins making nonsense excuses whilst still attempting to hold onto his prize. Finally ending with an angry mob approaching, and the second villain shoving all blame at the first, angry that he wasn't the one to get there first, and trying not to get lynched.

It may seem rather silly, but to me it seems a bit more origional than all the other ideas that came to me about the clip.

The two characters I have come up with for this shall be known as:

The Masked Aubergine

And Brickface

I realise they are both strange, sketchy and unrealistic, but in an animation where someone is stealing the moon... I think it could work.

Year 2, Term 1, Week 1.

So after a summer of travelling, drawing practice and more bad horror films than I would like to count, I have returned for another year.

And with the new year comes the first animation of the year.

The character model I made for this one, I have nicknamed 'The Serious Man' Because he looks very serious indeed, especially in his monochrome colours and box murdering ways.

The assignment was to have the character pick up a heavy box or object, and my origional plan for the box was decided to be a bad idea, so I went with something a little less silly and a little more morbid... however, watch this space, because my sillier, more amusing version will be uploaded as well when I get it finished!

Term 3, Week 6.

I'll be honest there isn't much to report this week XD I handed in animal firm, had a big cushion fight with three of my fellow animators, drank a whole lot of tea... oh and finally made friends with my Mechanical pencil... after having one sitting at the bottom of my drawer since the start of the course, I finally decided to give it a chance XD And look what the outcome was! I'm very pleased with it, which makes a nice change for me, it's a lot sharper than a lot of my character drawings as a result of me not having to sharpen my damn pencil every five minutes XD

For the rest of the time between now and final grades and such, I'll most likely be spending my time getting on with my personal writing projects, which have been somewhat neglected the last few weeks, I look forward to having some more time to dedicate to them for a while. I think i'm just going to enjoy being able to write and draw whatever I want for a while XD with no deadlines.

Also. Here is a rat... in fact... here is two rats. Why? Simply because my rats are awesome and I am lacking anything else to say.

Now I am off to doodle and watch Isolation, the Blob and possibly Creepozoids. Ahhh... how nice it is to have time to waste on horror films again :D

The Whatwhatwhat Production Report Entry ^_^

The whatwhatwhat project appealed to me right away, as an option that could really be interpreted in any way by the group, an almost completely blank canvas to work with. The first chance we’d had to really use our imaginations, and do whatever we thought was fitting with a reasonable amount of time to work with.

The actual concept for our group’s animation, I came up with whilst the project was actually being presented to us originally, and though I normally case aside initial ideas for being too simplistic and not well enough thought out, for a thirty second animation, this one seemed as though it could well work. Anything more complex would put serious strains on the allotted 30 second time, and risk rushing the production process, neither of which would be a desirable result at all. So I allowed the idea to stay, pondered it overnight and explained it to the group the next day in class. I was surprised to find the idea extremely well received, and in no time at all the group seemed to have adopted it without question and were pondering all the different variables… characters… settings… level of realism… method of creation.
Right from the start I had imagined it being a black and white hand drawn/flash animation of very simple design, and whilst what we got was black and white as hoped, it was far more complex and pleasing to the eye than my original idea had been.

We went over all the variables numerous times before settling on the idea of two hulking men, or chavs, as we referred to them at the time, since those are the most likely pair of people to meet in a street and not wish to give way to each other. Almost before I knew it, concept art was emerging, and the process got under way fast and smoothly, the storyboarding and animatic being done rapidly and effectively without too many problems at all, the pre-production phase was sadly the only one that seemed to go smoothly however, so the easy time was to be short lived. From the very early stages of production, we were hounded by delays and technical troubles, and the huge workload seemed to have fallen a little unevenly within the group. Fortunately nobody complained, all apparently deciding that if there was any trouble to be made over it, it could be done when time allowed for it and the project was over.

As time wore on still, I became progressively more impressed with the group’s ability to keep working grimly onwards as a team despite the mounting time shortage and workload, somehow coaching each other towards finishing, even when it really did seem hopeless.

Things felt like they reached the peak of hopelessness when we realised the deadline suddenly seemed to have jumped a week closer, though it is totally unknown if it did or not. Then it was all to panic stations as we realised that it was possible that we didn’t physically have time to finish the entire thing on time for the deadline, there being simply such a huge amount left to do. Flash made the situation even worse by crashing every time we attempted to start putting things together in the studio. We had to improvise a way to do the project that was a lot more time consuming, but possible at least.

So having panicked for a little while and had to handle more technical problems, we managed to pull things together, produce one working computer to handle all the strain, and were finally able to get working in a definite progress-like direction after a frustratingly long time of running in circles like headless chickens.

We were lucky to be given a semi-extension for the project, because even after spending the entire weekend sitting working on nothing but the animation, with not enough sleep and too much panic, we barely got it finished… three hours before the final hand-in deadline. This was where my troubles began. Being post production, I was now handed a 1.36 GB file, to compress, edit, put sound to, and do an entire post production process on, in three hours, when the compression alone was set to take at least seven hours. Nobody was to blame for this, having witnessed the events leading up to it I can be sure of that. It was simply the way things happened. So I just had to work to get it done as quickly as possible, making reasonably good time with it, and finally getting to do the sound, which was the part I had been looking forward to all along. I would have liked to spend a lot more time tweaking it and finding more atmospherically matching sounds, at least several days would have been nice, but given the time I had, I don’t think the sound came out too badly. As a first official sound attempt that I’ve had the chance to work with on this course, I am pleased with it.

The credits and such were easily done and attached with the help of after effects, and then after rendering out all of the infernal TIFFS and mov files, it was off to the studio for a DVD burning… which once again the studio computers attempted to sabotage, almost succeeding too… technical errors following us to the end.

Overall though, having finished and handed it in, I feel that the project was a success, a lesson in both teamwork and the whole animating process. I cannot speak for the others of course, but I feel we worked very well as a group and I look forward to continuing to animate with these people over the rest of the course.

Term 3, Week 5.

Okay... so this week is when the shit hit the fan. The deadline seemed to shunt a week closer and we were FAR from being that close to done x_x We had to ask for an extension on friday... until monday... and even then after working solid on it all weekend, i wasn't handed the project to do post production on until three hours before the deadline on monday night. To be clear it was impossible for me to even do the compression of the file within that time XD let alone a full post production, and at 1.36GB for a 30 second file, it HAD to be compressed before i could work with it XD So... I did what i could, and had the damn thing done by midday on tuesday. It wasn't fun to be so rushed on the sound that i had wanted to take time to get really well done, but hey, you can't win them all, i did what i could with the time i was given and the final result was pretty nice overall ^_^

Sketchbook project made good progress in it's last short time now, i seem to have left behind all concept of realism with it, but i don't think that's such a bad thing... in fact i think it has surely improved the situation significantly.

Animal firm is coming into it's later stages now, getting profiles officially written up and drawings properly lined and such, pulling things into some kind of organisation.