Animal Designs

Sketching away i developed some character designs for the animals

Influences

I really wanted to sink my teeth into a bit of character design this week. I designed some animal characters based on reference material i gathered. I started off by looking at images of real jungle animals. But then for style i looked at animations that i really liked .

Colours to light up our life

Week 2 was pretty much the same as week 1. Lots of disscussion. (mainly deciding an ending!) But we were more focussed this week as our BRILLIANT DIRECTOR had created a production timetable for the group which was awesome and you can see it here...

ooohhhh look at the pretty colours! doesnt make the next few months as daunting when there pasted in reds and yellows and blues!

We had quite a few meetings throughout the week and lots of changing minds. Jono, Rob and Giles devised a new scene shot breakdown and presented it to the group. Things we discussed were: improvements to shots and mainly motives! We were concerned that the audience wouldnt identify with the animals so we had to concentrate on what they were doing and why they were doing it. Another big change that was made is that we cut one of the animals... so it went from three down to two!

Start Sketching!

At the start of the week Ben had produced some really nice character designs for our explorers, these were developed further by the end of the week. Jenny had produced some character designs for the animals which were really nice, and the others had concept designs. This week i concentrated on concept aswell. I produced some designs for the jungles and temple scenes.

Reference Material to ponder

Pretty pictures to look at

With lots of talking, and more talking, and more talking and a couple of BLAH BLAH BLAH's with the group. Week one didnt seem very preductive but i know that it is all important and relevant and the early stages of a stories development consists of a lot of discussion anyway. Obviously with Jono's initail pitch some changes were bound to be made. So the six of us in our group discussed the story further and decided on some details.

Lots of research was also done with people gathering images for refernce. collecting images for jungles and temples.

How it went down

Hello and welcome to the very first page of....... MY BLOG! Da Da! This is the first entry to a weekly diary i will be keeping upon my developments of my group film project. It is lasting nine months so i have a feeling this is going to be quite a long blog. To get me through it i may well humour myself and and some jokes in which i find funny at the time but reading back will probably think, 'you idiot'.

ANYHOOOO first week (and a bit) over and it all kicked off with our individual pitches. Listening to others i made a mental note as to the ones i would definately work on if my pitch wasnt chosen........ seeing as it wasnt i had to pick another film i liked the sound of. Having three films in my head i went round and spoke to the three individuals who would be lucky enough to have my super-duper animating powers! I eventually chose the film 'Aztec Escape'. The reason for this is because the pitch was very good and the idea for the film was captured brilliantly in my imagination. The person who's film it was (appointed DIRECTOR) was Jono Price. A lovely fellow who i was very looking forward to spending nine months of my life with. awwwwww.

I had seen lots of people asking Jono to be in his group and in the end he had to turn some people away. So i was very privalaged that he excepted me with open arms. WEach person in the group said what they wanted to specialise in and so job roles were appointed.

Jonathan Pryce: Modeling and Texturing (Big Boss Director)
Daniel Hayes: Animator
Robert Sidney: Modeling
Jenny Morgan: Concept
Giles Pease: Modeling and Rigging
Ben Griffin: Concept

I was very happy when each of us took a seperate role, escpecially rigging as there are not many riggers in the class. So when Giles stepped up it was NICE... HIGH FIVE! As well as these being our 'SPECIALISED' roles we we be undertaking other jobs to make life easier. Obviously with me being an animator my heavy duty job will probably not start untill the second term so if i just stuck with that my blog will be pretty empty. So in the first term i will help with concept and work on the animatic to get a taste of the animation and timing.

FILM OUTLINE
I've rambled on a bit so i'l quickly tell you lovely people who have stuck around and actually read all of this so far, what the story is about. A guy runs through the jungle in search of an artifact (a very intense mood is set up as if we are about to watch an epic adverture) he enters a temple and has to avoid traps. The film switches moods suddenly and gains comedy value as we see that there are a group of animals setting off the traps while overseeing it with a comical commentary.