Art Direction

Hey, all!

So I screened a rough version of The High Five Apprentice for a seminar a couple weeks back and, to my relief, there was an incredibly good response from the audience during and after the film. After receiving some critiques from the audience, I realize that the main aspect of my film I need to work on is my art direction, especially that of the High Five Realm, and I agree. It looks a little bland and could stand to use some improvement (though keep in mind that I still need to insert textures into the backgrounds). I searched 'handscape' in google image and got this interesting result:

While I probably won't go as overboard with hands as this guy did, it serves as some really good inspiration in terms of how much hand-related visual images I can extract out of a background.

Also, I've talked with my Directed Studies prof Tom Sito from time to time and he mentioned Pepper Land from The Yellow Submarine, as it carries similar aspects of the High Five Realm except it's about 100 times more absurdly abstract. Here's an example.

So yes, that's the news for now. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

This is getting disturbing...

Hi, all! Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving break.

I decided to stay at SC for the break since I needed to get more shots done. I won't post all the animation I've done, but I'll leave you with this tantalizing tidbit of nightmare fuel.

A couple notes: Blotto's dialogue for this bit will be slightly altered to have a more demonic/otherworldly vibe. Also, this shot was much less fun to animate than I thought, especially trying to do the lip-sync for Blotto's 'realistic' face. Oh well, it's out of the way.

In unrelated news, go see The Muppets!

The Cat-God of High Fives!

My hand hurts. Tail still needs to actually be animated, but the animation is mostly done for this shot, save for a couple lip-syncing tweaks.

Revised Animatic 2.0

New animatic with brand, spankin' new animated shots! Also includes more temporary music!

Eric Bauza did a phenomenal job as Blotto, and about 80% of the takes I used in the animatic will be in the final film (the deadline was coming up fast, so for the last two minutes of the film, I basically took whatever take came first). Also, I'm only doing the stand-in for Ray's dialogue. I initially planned on doing the final voice, but I'm not a very good fit for the character, so the search for his actor still goes on. In the meantime, enjoy!

Blotto can talk!

That's right, folks! Blotto's voice is finally recorded, with many thanks to the voice actor, Eric Bauza! It's so much fun to animate to, and really gives me freedom to play with Blotto's mannerisms... I have another dialogue shot done, but I'll keep that a surprise for my next revised animatic, which will be posted soon...

I don't even... what...

Well, this was liberating.