A Montage!

New montage! I showed this in class last week, but figured you were all ready to see it. (For those who saw it in class, I improved the first shot of Ray's silhouette... the planet looks like it's in the distance, now)

Did a few more shots this week, but they're pretty out-of-context, so I won't put them up quite yet.

A Rube Goldberg Machine of Good Faith

So, this has been one of my main tasks this weekend. This is sort of a mini-montage within the story that presents the domino effect of high fiving... one act of kindness leads to another! This will be presented in a slideshow format, and I hope to give this part a vintage look through the wonders of AfterEffects. So, these will all be stills, and not actually animated in the final film. There are two more finished drawings, and one more I still have to crank out.

You may notice that I chose to ditch the black lines, and went for a more mask-like, UPA style of drawing. (Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about UPA, for those who are unfamiliar.) It actually felt pretty relieving to work in a different style, and maybe down the road, I'd love to animate something with this sort of aesthetic.

Here's some more UPA-style images, that better represent the influence on this sequence.

I make stupid faces!

So this week, I decided to experiment further, and actually film myself doing Blotto's expression for shot 73. I put an hour aside, went on into Photo Booth, made sure I was by myself, and then did several takes of me doing rather silly expressions. My main challenge was animating Blotto's face to go from over-exaggerated joy to crushing disappointment. Here's the video, with the end result included!

The other challenge I realized I had to overcome was Blotto's ears, and what happens when he turns his head, while his body stays in place. His ears would have to come over his shoulder at some point. So I just had it sort of catch on his shoulder and then flip over to the other side. The video explains it a lot better than I do.

Did a couple other shots, and now working on rewriting my script.

Look everyone, new things!

Brand new footage is up!

New shot! 

So, this next week or two is montage week. I'm currently getting Ray's walk cycle done, so I can insert it into the following shot. Maybe I can have a full scene to show you by this evening? Who knows...

Update: An extra shot has been added!

Hooray, my hard drive crashed!

Last night at 1:47 AM, my macbook's hard drive crashed, taking my boards, character designs and BGs with it. Thank god I have most of that either uploaded online, on a flash drive or on the school's server, plus I have hard copies of the script. I am so thankful I decided to go with Toonboom and do all my animation on a separate computer. I don't think my 3-year-old macbook would have been able to take the workload.

So, this is just a reminder to everyone working on your film, as well as everyone in general.

BACK.

UP.

YOUR.

WORK.

Don't think your computer will be the one to pull through. That's what I did (even though I was told a million times to back everything up to an external hard drive, which I did, but last time was a year and a half ago). I foolishly paid the price. Maybe once I win the lottery, I can get someone to go through the pain-staking process of retrieving the data from my old hard drive. It's possible, just really expensive... somewhere in the realm of $1200.

Didn't hear me well enough the first time? Fine, I'll say it again. BACK UP YOUR WORK!

Revised animatic!

HERE IT IS!

So, a couple things; aspect ratio in the animatic is messed up. The boards are in 4:3, but the final film will be in 16:9, so each board will adapt as I focus on more and more shots.

Secondly, there's not really much music in the animatic, except the montage. Believe me, there will be a lot of music in the final film. And speaking of sound, Ray is accidentally missing a scream at one point in the film.

And thirdly, I still might tinker with ending (when Ray ends up back at the bus stop). It's not quite to my liking, yet, so I'll figure that out as I go along.

Anyway, now I can go back to animating!

Background (in progress)

This animatic is not going to be up until later today, so to tide you all over, here is an in-progress background. The blue sketchy bits are the unfinished parts. Also, Ray and Blotto will be standing on top of the hill in the foreground.

Board teaser

This is going to be an incredibly fun shot to animate.