Here are all the finished backgrounds bar one which I will try and complete asap (it's the one at the end with the hobo on the pedastal...)
I got feedback from my group to improve most of these; -adding feet onto the disco people -zoom out of grannys house -darken the lighting for the street scene -add a skirting board and more detail to the 'c-box' one and i drew two new ones.. a classroom and a random brick wall for the beginning!
We have been powering through the work this week and Jon and Emma awesomely got the sound done with our classmate Tom Ritchie as the voice-over. I feel as though I need to work much much harder, I'm very worried that I'm holding my team-mates back so I'm doing loads of animating this weekend to make up for it.
We've decided to do 10 seconds of animating each and mine is the first ten seconds so it will mainly be focused on the boy and his facial expressions... Should be good hopefully, I intend to finish by Monday!
I spent most of today working on creating the backgrounds for our animation...
The motorway scene...
Two different shots for the disco.. one for the girls dancing and the other for the main character doing the funky chicken!
Two random shots from the boys house for when he's pretending to play videogames with the box..
Granny's house! for the present scene.
and finally a random street for when the box is used as an umbrella :)
I have posted these images to show my group and after getting their feedback hope to improve and add on these.. I think the designs may be a little too simple in some of the cases like the street and the boys house but I didn't want it to detract from the main animation so I made it simple and had the colours be a little 'wishy-washy' to push the background back a bit.
We have completely finished our work on the storyboards now and are beginning to think about the animatic, backgrounds and character designs!
During our Thursday lesson we started to decide vital information about our characters. About a month ago, Emma attended a Pixar lecture that told her about the use of shapes in character design - comical characters are round, evil characters triangular, and sturdy characters are rectangular.. interesting snippets like that. Taking that into consideration we began designs.. Both the hobo and the grandma are quite comical characters so we made them kinda fat.. The designs I concentrated on were that of the main boy and 3 of his classmates..
Here are some quick sketches of the main boy... He's pretty regular-looking which is the point.. but I tried slightly different styles and showed my group, they seemed quite happy with the designs and I think Emma is going to try and develop them further..
Concept art of his friends... The guy on the left is the main friend and he's a bit 'cooler' than the main character and acts more arrogantly so I tried to get that across in his figure and face... The two girls are going to be randomly dancing at the disco! We have also decided that if we need more characters we might try and cameo some of our original ones made just for fun.. Should be good, we won't make a big deal about that though :)
Anyway, we managed to present our storyboards to the Rave Live team yesterday and they seemed pretty happy with the work. I talked them through it and Jon accompanied by showing images (unfortunately emma had a doctors appointment) but it went very well and the only thing they warned us about was using too many flashing images in case there are epileptics in the audience...
Our aim for the weekend is to finish the animatic and be ready for animating next week.. I am going to work on the backgrounds and have them ready to show.. Jon is going to complete the animatic and Emma is going to further develop the characters... I believe they will continue to do a fantastic job and just hope I can keep up with their enthusiastic pace :)
Over the weekend I worked on developing a storyboard for the cardbox box idea; This is still just quite rough but I got in as many of the ideas brainstormed as I could and I tried to make it comedic... I pitched it to Jon and Emma today and they seemed happy with it, although they had some kick ass ideas of their own and helped me improve some of mine like the beginning, we developed the character more and thought about what kind of guy he would be and how he would react to this mysterious voice-over ordering him around.
All these new ideas we then drew into a final storyboard, wrote the script for and thought about the sound effects we might need. Emma will upload the storyboard in the next day or so (which I will then place a link to) Jon should upload the script and below I've written out all the sound effects; -Speeding cars -Skateboard grinding the pavement -Footsteps -Unwrapping (for the box) -Record stopping -Coughing -Glass Smashing -Rainfall -'Splash' -'Ping!' -static television (white noise) -CDs falling over -Celebratory Trumpet -Gears turning (squeak of the pedastal) -Bag being knocked over
There are a few sounds that are quite bizarre and are hard to describe... for example when people are talking in our advert, instead of speech we thought we would take a leaf out of Peanuts book and have the speech come out like this (trumpet-ish....);
It's funny and it won't detract from the main voice-over.
We also had a meeting with a sound design student today to discuss the creation of the background music and sound effects. I think it went quite well, the only thing is that he will need at least an animatic before he can start work which is another reason for us to get that together as soon as possible.
Unexpectedly we also had to do a presentation to the class on our project. Emma did the majority of the talking while Jon backed her up and I felt like quite the lemon. I'm really no good at presentations.. I could feel everyone's eyes on us and I pretty much just stood there avoiding eye contact. I feel like I let the group down, I'll have to work harder on the animation to make up for it :( On the plus side, Jared was fine with our idea so all that's left to do is finish the storyboard and maybe think about an animatic for the end of the week :)
Sorry for the late post, this covers what happened at the end of last week...
We did a lot more brainstorming and finalised our ideas down completely. Below is my quick brainstorm and development of three ideas that Jon and Emma came up with last Wednesday... The main brainstorm can be found in Emma's journal entry (click to view) As stated in the previous journal we are going to do a comedic advert so I tried to develop some comedic ideas for 'darkness' 'socks' and an 'empty wrapper' but I am not particularly proud of them, I feel my talent lies more in carrying out ideas then generating them, although I have given it a try..
I also did a rough version of our schedule for the next 4 weeks... There's a properly typed up version but its on emmas computer, once I nab it back off her I'll post it up here as well though.
After some discussion we decided to either go for advertising a Hobo or a Cardboard Box, and we left last week each to develop our own storyboards for it.. I chose to develop the cardboard box idea and below are some of the concept sketches and ideas written down for it; The ideas are not all mine and I only developed the ones we were most likely to use... I really like the idea of using the cardboax box as transportation though, me and Emma have discussed the idea over the phone so we plan to develop that a little more and make it more comedic if possible :)
Finally, to end the week we went to the Rave Live presentation and found out we didn't need to pitch anything until this Thursday when the Rave Live team would visit us and view our storyboards. Hearing about Rave Live was interesting, it's pretty cool that it's going to be shown at Matter in the 02, seems like far away but I'm sure the deadline will rush up...
Today we made some great progress ^^ Rave Live got back to us and agreed that we can do an animation, it needs to be ready to pitch on Friday and fully storyboarded by next week Friday.
I also created a schedule for our work which Jon has uploaded and which I will now post to my own blog;
After a short brainstorming sesh in the morning, we came up with a few ideas for what we want to animate... -A serious scene with a humourous twist (for example a marriage proposal that gets ruined somehow...) -A real life occurance (like swarms of pigeons flying and attacking people at train stations) -An advert for a seemingly rubbish product (i.e. dirt, socks, air...)
Eventually we decided on the latter, it would be the most comical and we felt the most passionate and excited about it! There are a few similar parodies we found online for it;
'Ren & Stimpy - Log!' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJSQNOWAvBA Not quite sure why anyone would actually want a log but it was funny :D Something about showing people getting excited by the most random things is what makes it worthwhile...
'The Snuggie'
What scares me the most is that this is a real advert!! It seems like it should be fake.. there's no animation but the stupidity is what we want.
'FarmVille'
This one is the closest to what we want I think... It's a bad product being advertised in a good way which is what we want really :)
'Cyanide & Happiness - Book'
This could be very close to what we want... The animation style is probably close to what we can create and the humour is spot on.
Basically we want to do something like the above but with our own ideas... Some of the ones we have come up with are; air, socks, dirt/dust, acid, a portable hole, darkness, an empty wrapper and hobos. Tonight I am going to brainstorm ideas on a few of these and create a schedule! I will post more of our exploits tomorrow~
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
