Tuesday 23rd March 2010

First day of our new unit!

In the morning Jared walked us through the brief. We need to submit a group film suitable for broadcasting, a journal and an interactive DVD showreel. The last two I can complete easily enough but the group film was another matter.
He explained that there are 3 different possible routes to choose for it;
1) working as a junior on a BA film project
2) working towards Rave Live
3) finding an external client.

We listened to both the BA and MA students pitch their ideas to us after Jared's lecture, but as all of them required 3D work I didn't want to pursue this option.
The external client idea was looking to be the most positive but then we had a lecture from the Rave Live team. They were looking for students to either create some 3D idents (again 3D so I wasn't keen on it..) but they also spoke about creating some short 30 second animations for the 'inbetween' parts of the show and this interested me as we could use 2D!

After speaking with two of my classmates - Emma Wyton and Jonathan Blake, we all realised we wanted to do the same thing - create a short flash animation so voila! We have become a team and are going to pursue this option!

We finished the day by deciding to go away for the evening and think about what to animate as well as look for useful flash videos on youtube that would inspire us.


I've created a youtube playlist of the ten flash shorts I found that might help us...
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E14337D1F2F33FC3

Jon and Emma also posted playlists of short flash videos they liked...

Emma's...http://www.youtube.com/user/wackyemu#grid/user/D0A0837137D7D9BF

Jon's...http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BD4CBF9071EF1DE1



The ones in particular I think are most useful;


'The Man Who Could Sit Anywhere'

This is a funny little parody... It's quite a simplistic style and I believe we're going to try and be a bit more developed than this but the humour is sort of what we're looking for...


'The Dark Knight Meets Superman Part 2'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeT1t0lQn5Q&feature=PlayList&p=BD4CBF9071EF1DE1&index=1
embedding was disabled but click the link to view. This one parodies well known superheroes and makes fun of them. We all agreed that if we're making a short animation it shouldn't be too complicated and should play on something people already know about. We aren't intending to use well-known characters like they have here but we want to do something similar and instead use real life situations.


'Awesome Center: Under the Awesome REDUX'

We loved the facial expressions in this one! We aren't sure how much we want to rely on sound which means the expressions will be important in our animation, and the animator of this 'EgoRaptor' is a master of this! Also the animation has a lovely flow to it that we could try and imitate :)


'Bob and the Apple'
http://lazymuffin.deviantart.com/art/BOB-AND-THE-APPLE-90982924
possibly my most favourite flash animation of all time! Very random, exactly the kind of humour we like and not too shabby animation either :D



So far...
We have sent an email to the Rave Live team letting them know we're interested..
(the email can be found in Emu's blog entry... CLICK HERE TO VIEW)

And we've assigned basic roles to ourselves as well as put up our individual blogs.

JON - Animator, Editing, Storyboard/Animatic, Research, Character Design, Concept
Blog - http://jonathanblaketv.blogspot.com/

EMMA - Animator, Hitler (Director), Storyboard/Animatic, Research, Character Design, Concept
Blog - http://emuindexercises3.blogspot.com/

MICHELLE - Animator, Backgrounds, Colour, Research, Character Design, Concept


I think we're all going to try and animate 10 seconds each.. Either that or concentrate on certain things like one person does the key poses, another inbetweens, another does the secondary animation etc. Although the first option might be more feasible because the deadline is the 22nd of April and I'm not sure how often we can meet and work together at college!