End of term one

in the mad rush to get everything finished ready for the summative i managed to animate a really small bit of our 3D animatic although not prefect this is all i managed in an afternoon..

these are some of the blockout characters i made for the animatic, they just didnt get a chance to be animated at this point! below are the rigs i quickly set up just to basicaly move the block out characters.

The new animatic

unfortunaly i left all my essays untill later last week, and i still am to finish, mike hurshes essay so i am panicing slightly! as a group we reworked the story again, and had to work ou the camera shots again too. we have been preparing the characters and enwiroment and camera for the animatic as we want to get it finished by wenesday. i coloured in my character concepts this week too asyou can see above. i really hope i can get the essays finished quickly so we can make the best animatic posible. today i have been rigging the cat for the animatic. i will need to do this for the other characters in the animatic too.

back to the story

This week has been a bit of a mess, we have the problem that now we have made our colour storyboards we keep changing the story because it has highlighted some of the problem areas of our story. we have had lots of disscusions and ideas about what to change in our film, we are realising the need for a new animatic and set of tthumbnails.
I have finished one of the concepts for the interior of the house, i was trying to get the look of the wallpaper and the colours in the room how i wanted. i was not to happpy with the design of the furnature i think we definately need to use reference images for all the furnature in the house. this was quite a long way to go about ding concept, i will problably keep my work more sketchy in the future. i wasted alot of time this week reserching my essays and doing small jobs which needed diong for the group. i should really try to stick to my production schedual.
the rest of the week was spent collecting images to use as research for the furnature in the house, i scaned lots of relevant images from a few time periods we thought the home would be decorated in, i just need to sort them all out now. i also did the final design for the crow and did some animation thumbnails for the cat.

Essays

I spent the begining of this week researching and planning my essays so i have not been able to do much concept which is frustrating.
I eventually got back to doing work on friday althought i did not get mcuh done as we all had a big disccussion about the stlye off our film and its locations. this made me go back again and add more to our research so we have a clear idea of the style colours and period of the home and decoration. i spent most of my time researching the styles of the 50's and 60's.

I was working this weekend as usuall so i didnt get a lot of time to do my work. i spent some of sun evening changing my schedual as i had a few more tasks added, i am worried about the amount of time we have left, i wanted to have more character design by now!

Above is some of my research which i found interesting, i thought the the strong contrast bettween the black and sky was cool, i really like the details in the gravestones and trees. i think i would be very nice if in our film we could get this same detailed interesting look.

more concept..

Since me and John finished colouring at the weekend, we made a basic animatic with sound.
I was still concerned about the amount of concept we had for the interiors and i was having trouble getting the style right.
I was not happy with most of the ideas i had when i drew them, I wanted to make the interior of the old peoples home look dated, with a collection of different themes and styles which dont really go together.
As a group we decided thet we definetly didn't want the room to look neat or have any of the models to look perfect and plain, which is something easily acheiveable in Maya. I feel i have alot to think about regarding the interiors and colours.
I scanned one of the drawings and decided to colour it in in Photoshop to get a feel for the colours and textures.
It took me most of the weekend to colour the drawing in, i have learnt not to take so long doing concept as my ideas change so much that i will no longer like the picture once i start to colour.

Anamatic

Over the weekend i had to put my other work on hold as we needed to colour in the storyboard images. I knew this would take a long time so John decided to help me out. I finished the colouring Monday night, it took a long time as there were 87 drawings to colour! i tryed to keep the colouring as simple as posible to make it quicker to do although it still took too long.

Today i am getting back to doing the interior concept and the colour studies as these are an important part of the preproduction which means that when i am happy with the design and colour, John can start to model the interiors.

More Concept...

So far this week i have started to design some crows which we will need for the graveyard. we wanted them to look evil and menacing and slightly deformed looking to add to the atmosphere of the dark first scene.
I had another go at producing a moodboard for the film by collecting images which relate with our film. I am still not completly happy with it as it doesnt give enough idea of the colours i want to use.
As a group we have decided that i should be the art directior so i have decided that i should have more input on the concept art for the enviroments. This is something i will have to fit into my schedual.
At the beggining of this week I collected as many images as i could find to help design the interiors such as sofas, plants and furnature. i colated these into one image to help john as reference when he is moddeling the house. I also did a college for all our film influences.
I have also had to decide on the topics for my two essays this week so that means less time to work on the film. I am a little worried how my schedual is working out because i am fimnding myself not sticking to it all that much. I will have to work on it more so i will have to do what is on the schedual.

Planning.......

This week to help me work out just how much animation needs to be done and who will be doing what, i have used james's thumbnails to make a list of what each character will be doing and also the enviromental animation and effects.
I also had to do some character designs for Jonno's film. I sketched out a few posible ideas for a character based on a south american animal the Kinkajou.Ii attemped to do a mood board this week using the images i had collected for the interior of the old peoples home and also selecting the sorts of colours i want to use in the film. I was not really pleased with the way this looked and i thought it was not very useful to our production. so i decided to leave it until i had more pictures and more of an idea of the concept of the home.
This week i also made a scedual for my work whick i plan to stick to. This took a suprising amount of time to make and took up a whole evening.Ii have felt i have done alot of planing this week which i hope pays off. I just need to produce more concept work now so we know we can start modeling and creating characters.

character design

This week i started doing some character designs for the cat in the grim reaper film. the film is a comedy about the grim reaper going about his daily buissines. one day grim has to visit an olds peoples home, just as he checks his death list for the day on his new PDA, it breaks and grim is forced to improvise. after many failed attempts at bringing death to the old people who seem be immune to death, grim gets frustrated. he walks out of the retirement home and accidently kills the Jahovas whitness walking down the path towards the home.
The cat i am designing lives in the retirement home and is spooked by the death coming to the home. To help my designing i researched both photos and existing designs of cats. after designing the cat i began to do some facial expressions for him.

Pitches

My first week into this term and i have decided on which films i am going to work on. As i want to focus on animation i want to help out the animation for a couple of films.
i decided on Friday that i would work with James on his idea full time and mainly help with the concept work and animating. i have also commited to working on Jonno's film about explorers in the Aztec. I am going to be doing the concept for the animal characters in this film and also helping out on any animation they will need doing. i have also said to Ash that i could do some animating on his film if he needs any help although only if i have any time. In the end i was pleased that my film idea was not picked, i was not sure how my idea would work out as an
animation, it was too long. as for my pitching skills i was really nervous talking in front of a big group i was quite frustrated.
this weekend i have begun to do the character designs for a cat in james grim reaper film. i have collected lots of reference images for the creaures i am designing including a crow, i have also collected images of possible animals i could design for the aztec temple film.