7x7 | Friday 1st October 2010

Nutshell - Started putting everything into aftereffects.

(if you click on the pictures and scans, the more stressful the brief gets)  

This text is from the above scans...

Started to put everything together in aftereffects, I made Imported all the files for the fallshot (the arms & man) & also started to animat him. I will be able to move the animation to the right time once all the other shots start getting imported.
I also made the three silhouettes needed for the animation in three different positions for each shot.

Luke made one of the backgrounds, the one needed for the last shot, it looked really good but once he gave it me to put onto after effects we realized about the snow and that in the animation its snowing, meaning we need snow on the top of the backgrounds (its a skyline) so snow needs to be on the top of the buildings. I did that quickly & it made it look really Christmasy, awwwwwwww....

Any way, next tueasdy, just going to keep on animating & making backgrounds....and also keep thiking of sonds which we might start testing. Luke also said he'd do some of the stairs over the weekend, so hopfully we might have some more stuff to animate straight away on the tueaday!
I's going to do somthing towards the fall...the shot before it, where he trys to balance himself.  

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 These are the silhouettes which I drew then scanned in and added a pattern from the patterns we got the other day from the wallpaper store...

Then this is them with the pattern... the one on the right has been flipped because it worked better for the shot...

Look...

this (above) is are 'final' storyboard, he's walking, on the first frame, with the camera on his right shoulder, then on the third shot its on his left hand side....not good, never cross the imaginary line. That's why I changed it.

7x7 | Tuesday 28th September 2010

Nutshell - Made a test of the character falling, didnt like it so worked harder. Luke made a list of sounds and recorded some cereal for snow.

(click to make it larger....the scans and pictures)

This text is from the above scans...

Started off the day by showing Luke a test I'd done at the weekend, of the shot where Edward Foster is falling down the stair case.
I knew I didnt like it because the arms were not animated well at all, but i wanted his oppinion on how mant frames it should be (I had done three) Luke thought it needed to be smoother and also animated again, i totally agreed, so thats what i did for most of the day.

Luke put a list of sounds we may need for the animation together and tried to start recording them. He had the idea of the foot in snow being the sound of crunching cereal (Kellogg's crunchy nut) but it sounded too glassy. I suggested crushing the 'crunchy nut' to a fine consistency then trying that. That sounded better.

We were hoping for (off the illustrators) backgrounds and stuff, we got e-mailed some patterns off one of them (nuttall) and one came in and gave us a photoshop file of a watch we needed (which would, at some point be animated ticking round) so that was helpful, but we were hoping for stairs and backgrounds skylines as well, which we didn't get. Luke put aside the sound making and started on making the backgrounds/skylines.

I'd done a much smoother and better animated fall sequence which we were happy with, and once we had the patterns off the illustrators i started colouring the character with those patterns.
Lastly we thought the amount of patterns weren't enough (we got two) so we went to the wallpaper shop and got some patterns from there, which we then scanned in. from that we got some better patterns and an idea for the blood stain at the end of the sequence ***It was Lukes idea to get more patterns which wored out very well for us***

Next Friday, get animation shots on the go and get the final set peaces done. And just carry on like that till the end. also thinking of sounds as well!

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This is the crap fall test, it wasn't thought out well enough...

This one is much better, and I'm pretty proud of it.....all my work over the summer, practising animation and its principles is paying off...

 Here's some Kellogg's crunchy nut

 
This is what we got off the illustrators....we were hoping to get stairs and backgrounds remember...

These were made by Luke which we really wanted (the top isnt meant to be gray, it is transparent at the moment)...

7x7 | Friday 24th September 2010

Nutshell- ill most of the day.....all day.....so not much was done, talked to chris and changed some of the storyboard. went to buy some snow and did a test, but ending up doing it on the computer. Nothing off the illustrators. that is all.

(the more you click on the images and scans the runnier my nose will get)

This text is from the above scans...

Not alot was accomplished today (being ill didnt help). we had asked the illustrators to give us anything they do before the next time we meet up, which would be tuesday, hust so we could start doing stuff, but we got nothing.
So we carried on doing tests and drew out a neat storyboard of what we think is are final one ***it turns out it was***

Befor Luke got in, I had talked to chris about how things were going, so i showed her the animatic which we'd done. from this we came up with two changes...

1. we had kept going from sillouhett to detaled shot of the character, chris thought it might be a good idea to keep the character sillouhetted untill the fall, then show his face.
2. still keeping with the 'sillouhett to detailed character problem', a shot was thought up of having him coming up the stairs as a sillouhett then fading into a detailed illustration as he starts to fall.
it was a good idea, but I was thinking of time and how little we had, so i made a desission to leave it out. Luke arrived after this.

We'd gone and bought cotton wool for snow (it snows in are animation/story) we were going to green screen it then put it over the top of the animation in after effects.
the tests were awful, but extremely entertaining to do. Still, we had to find a way of making snow as the cotton wool didnt work (too heavy and blurred)

I was thinking of layers and having snow closer to thw screen falling fast, and also bigger, and snow in the bacground falling slowly and much smaller. So we tried somthing out in photoshop and wacked it inot after effects and tweened it to make snow!

I thought it looked good, Luke was a bit apprehensive and thought it looked a bit wooden. We have kept with it for now tough.

Next tuesday we will 'hopefully' have all the stuff we need off the illustrators and we will do somthing are selves, then start animating!

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 This is are neat storyboard with the changes which I talked about with Chris...

This is a flash animatic with the new shot in...

This is the cotton wool...

After the cotton wool didn't work (we lost the footage of the test, which is a shame) we did this test on the computer, it looks really good, but obviously were have given in to the computer :(

These (below) are later snow animations, ones we used for the final animation, which luke did...

7x7 | Tuesday 21st September 2010

Nutshell - Made an animatic in flash during weekend, showed it to Luke and Rick on the Tuesday and changed it accordingly. Showed new animatic to the illustrators in the afternoon and they liked it. we got the combined character of them......but it wasn't combined.

(clicking on the images and scans makes it bigger!)

This text is from the above scans...

We were going to be showing the illustrators are storyboards, but on Sunday 19th, I was imagining are storyboards in a 20 second clip& thought that the amount of shots we had would mean that on average each shot would get, like, two seconds and seems as thought some shot need more time. others might get half a second!
So on Sunday night i made an animatic on flash, and from that we could see if shots may need taking out if some shots don't work.

Back to Tuesday, I showed Luke n' he liked it, we thought that maybe it would work as a peice of moving image. but after speaking to rick we thought that maybe we were trying to tell too much of the story in such a little amount of time.
so we cut out some shots (ones which were happy with!) and seems as thought we took shots out, we made the remaining shots last longer making the speed of the piece much slower which is  more in keeping with the atmosphere of the story

The illustrators liked the storyboards and animatics, (the slow one with less shots).........then we got to see what they had done, which was going to be the character which appears in the 20 second clip. they said they would combine their two styles to make one character, but what they did was assign themselves different parts of the body to draw in their own style, which we now have to work with (reluctantly)

One of the shots we got rid of, to make more time for more relevant shots was one which we talked about in the least meeting (the first one) and it was going to involve a walk cycle so the character the illustrators gave us were cut up into limbs so that we could animate it. Now we don't need the walk cycle and other shots are needed of the protagonist we asked them if we could draw the rest of the character in the shots we needed. They were ok with this, which meant that we could get rid of bits we didn't like! ***we started on drawing the character in the new positions we needed in their style***

One last thing about the animatics we showed them which were made in flash was that we could easily show what background shots we would need of them, so that helped to communicate  what we needed with out having to try and explain thorough still images

We're hoping for some of the stuff off the illustrators before next Thursday Tuesday or on the day.
On Friday we're going to green screen some snow! we got the snow from the £1 shop today!

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This is the flash animation I showed Luke, then rick...we worked off this and made it better and more solid...

This (below) has alot of shots missing which is after Me, Luke and Rick had a talk and decided not to tell the whole story and make the more relevant shots last longer...

After showing the illustrators are animatics they showed us their Character design...

The first lot are Dan Hodgkinson's...

These's are Stephen Nuttall...

This one below, has notes and suggestions for future reference & also a new shot which gets rid of the close up of the dreaded boot.....!

Lastly here are my drawing of the protagonist which I did after we asked them if it was ok to copy their style for other shots...

On the bottom one, you can see me trying to plan out how to animate the guys hands while falling.

Colour Exploration

When it come to colouring stuff in, like a drawing, I'm awful. I don't mean I draw outside the lines! I mean the colours I choose are shit, they don't mix/ work well together which, as a result, makes the whole drawing look crap.

I wanted to do something about it, so I'm starting to mess around more with colour, doing quick stuff which might help me learn more about what works well etc...

I wanted to just draw stuff of Google with nice colours in them, because usually you see stuff on there or in book like 'the art of whatever' or in films you see colours which work well together and i say to myself either "there nice colours I'll remember that" or "that's easy to do"...........
No Tom, its not easy to do and you won't remember, when it comes to your own work it ends up looking like shit because you haven't thought it through.

So what has nice colours? I thought clouds do. There's loads of different kinds and they come in different colours, some are red when the suns setting, some are dark gray with a 'silver lining', theres all sorts and also the sky changes colour which is nice as you have a different background to work with each time which blends well with the colour of the clouds.
So i typed 'clouds' into google and grabbed ones i liked and put them into photoshop, then opened a new document and by taking the colours off the cloud image I was able to see what the colours where which made them look so good.

Heres three i did...