FIRST ANIMATIC

This is the first animatic of the idea for our film. As a group we still need top finalise the designs for all the environments and assets and then the modellers in the group will start the huge task of modelling the environments over the christmas holidays... while i will be helping with some smaller modelling i will also be practicing animation with pre rigged models.

This is the animatic of our new story as i mentioned last month our story changed dramatically from the idea with all the crazy animals to the idea of the character sleepwalking. This animatic has been handed in on the last day of term so we will get feed back on it when we return next year.... soooooo..... for the time being we will just have to keep our fingers crossed, hope the tutors like our new idea and then take on board their feedback and make any changes neccessary.

In the mean time i shall love you and leave you because i am off to have a very merry christmas... i hope you have a lovely christmas aswell... or should i say HAD (depending on when your reading this) and i shall probably post another comment sometime in the new year.



GOD SPEED :)

Colour Scripts/Mood Boards? Whatever the weather

Colour by numbers

Kitchen Developed

This is the developed design of my kitchen idea. our group decided to go gor a specific style. (which suits my retro designs well) we have decided that the design of our house should be very stylised by having lots of angles in its design. (which i had in my initial assets sketches anyway, i think i may have been a big influence on houses style... wink wink). But anyway, the director really liked this design so i experimented with colour to see what worked well......

Room Designs

Throughout this week i have been busy taking my original sketches from last week of assets and developed some room designs for the bedroom, living room and more kitchen designs for the house. Because Giles and Jenny are designing the exterior of the house i can just concentrate on the interior. I produced them in illustartor to give them a clean look.

First Kitchen Design

Taking the design of my assets, i developed the fridge and cooker further to create ideas fo what the kitchen could look like. Here are two examples which show different colour schemes. I think that they work really well but i will continue to produce more designs, which you can see when i post them next week...

...I know the anticipation is killing you!!!

It's all about RETRO

This week i was designing the interior of the house. Because Giles and Jenny are working on this aswell we thought it best to design the assests and rooms in different styles and have a meeting after to decide what worked best. I really like retro furniture and so i will design my rooms based on this idea.

Asset Brainstorming

THE BIG CHANGE!!!!

Well....... Where do i begin! Seriously! What a week!!! Basically in a nut shell. NEARLY THE WHOLE STORY HAS CHANGED. But may i say its for the better. The news was bought to my attention at the start of the week after a meeting with the marvelous Dan Dalli (calling him marvelous was no intention of bum sucking, i do respect him highly as an animator and tutor and his opionions to are development are priceless).

It started with doubts in our group. We had our story set out but we could all feel that there was something that wasnt quite right. We were on our third scene shot breakdown and we thought it was time for some advice from the tutors. We arranged a meeting with Dan Dalli which Jono, Rob and Giles attended. Our work was pretty much slated to put it nicely. Jono quoted to me some of the things that Dan had said

"your pitch was good, but you've seemed to have gone backwards with it"

He suggested new ideas and angles to view the story, i think that Jono really benifited from the meeting as i director. Because of Jono being such a nice guy he was afraid to hurt people's feelings. and in the development of the story he was asking for everones input and wanted to make everyone happy. Dan said that only 2/3 of the peolple in the group should work on the story with Jono ultimatley having the final say. The end result was that we finally realised why we didnt feel our story was quite right was because of the initail development, there was too many ideas, too many disagreements and with all the compromising the story got lost.

BAD TIMES

So with the idea of 2/3 of the group to develop the story, with their meeting with Dan fresh in their minds, Jono, Rob and Giles went away that nite and developed a new storyline. which they told to the rest of us the next day. As the lead animator i must say i was more than releived !!!!!!!! and another !

If i was honest with myself i was a bit scared with all the work that i was goin to have to do as there was a total of five characters in the old story. I knew i had my work cut out but at this early stage i tried not to let it bother me too much. BUT NOW!!! YYAAAAYYYYY!!! I am jumping for joy. In our new story the animals have been scrapped completely and now there is only the explorer. This gives me more time to work on the animation on one character and get it spot on. With this new story it is clear that the group is revitalised and motivated again. The work load has been reduced drastically with fewer characters so this gives us more time to make our new story the best it can possibly be!.

GOOD TIMES

Basically our new story consists of the new character still running through the jungle and temple but instead of the animals controlling traps we see then explorer jumping and avoiding obsticles. But with a comical twist! These twists come aparant in the middle of the film where we see in the temple a pillar falling on our explorer. The scene cuts the the character asleep in his house with a book shelf falling on him. The story is set deep within his subconsious, where we follow his quest to locate the ancient artefact. The combination of his dream and his sleep walking habits, leads to the dustruction of his apartment.

With this new story, a new environment has been established. This is the characters house where he sleep walks in. So now designs have to be made to determine what it will look like. This job has been given to Giles, Jenny and I. Rob and Jono will work on the temple designs and ben is creating the storyboard.

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.