The final stretch

This is it, fellas... animation will be done be the end of this week, and from here on out, it's colouring, compositing and god knows what else. I'm not going to put up the animatic because most of the shots are animated, and I don't to spoil the whole thing... yet.

My brother David recorded a voice for my film last week, and here is the result. The infamous 'hit my face' shot is now complete!

Roll on, April!

Shots, shots, shots.

So, I tinkered with my schedule and decided I should focus on smaller shots this week. With March upon us, I figured it may be good to have a week where I get a lot of shots done, so I feel a little better about the amount of work I've gotten under my belt. Since last class, I've gotten 5 shots done, and I should be on track to have 2-3 more done by this Wednesday, bringing the grand weekly total of shots animated to a whopping seven! (or eight).

I do have newly animated shots, but a) they're not very interesting as standalone shots and b) they make better sense within the context of their scenes. For this reason, I'm not uploading any videos today... but rest assured that once I get back to some of Ray's more intricate shots, you'll be seeing plenty of new material!

I'll be tallying my list of completed shots later today, which will help figure out March's schedule a little more clearly. In the meantime, please enjoy this image of a real-life high-fiving cat!

More Ray!

Yeah, so, my blog posts are becoming less frequent, so apologies for all that. Here's some Ray!

Right now, I'm just going to focus on simpler shots before tackling the heavy duty animation ... I feel the more shots I finish, the better I'll feel about myself. Roll on, March! (Eeek!)

Blotto's done! (sort of)

So, over the weekend, I finished off all of Blotto's animation, except for shots in which both he and Ray talk. So I'd say his animation is about 90% complete. Hooray! Meanwhile I got started on Ray. Check it out!

 And just so you know, Kate's voice will be altered to sound more... um, phoney? I'll distort it in post-production.

Ray shouldn't take more than a month to complete. I kind of have no choice anyway... I need the remaining two weeks before the lock to animate the ending and refine some bits and pieces.

Meanwhile... I need to hire colourists and a sound designer. As a reader of this entry, it is your god-given duty to nag me into oblivion, until these tasks are completed. NAG AWAY!

A little bit overdue

Sorry I didn't have my work posted up on Monday. I wanted to finish this sequence before presenting it to the world. Behold!

Once again, the box seems to get  in the way of the animation, but this will all be resolved once the colouring begins.

Goal for this week: all of Blotto's lip-sync will be finished... though this doesn't count shots in which both Ray and Blotto speak. Oh, speaking of which, Ray is recorded, as you can hear in the clip!

Now, it's time for more working! Roll on, March 31st! (For those who aren't in the know, the 31st is ANIMATION LOCK... all of the animation WILL BE FINISHED BY THEN. Happy times!)

Heeeeyyy! Check it out!

Did a couple new shots and cut them together. Short but sweet. Behold!

EDIT: I just noticed after watching the clip that the box's colour makes it hard to see Blotto's face, especially in the first shot. Once the animation is coloured in, this should hopefully be fixed.

 In other news, we're closing in on the two-month notice before animation lock. There's still a lot of work to do, so I'm feeling a little swamped. Not to mention that I have loads of work to do for other classes.

On a more positive note, Adam Williams is providing the voice of Ray, and we'll be recording everything on Tuesday. Happy day! Also, I'm meeting up with my composer afterwards (the talented Dustin Painter) to start discussing the first pass for the film's score.

Boat Sequence!

So, I cut together a rough version of the hand-boat sequence. Some of the timing and sound still needs work, but it gives you a better sense of the complete scene.

Back in business!

Back from Winter break! Oh dearie me, I have work to do...

Got a few shots animated during the break, as well as roughing out the boards for my final act. I'm not feeling particularly talkative right now, but I will post this video consisting of two brand new animated shots!

Right now, the backgrounds need a little more detail, but you get the general idea. Also, properly animated hand butterflies (or... butterfingers?) will be animated in. The one you see is a stand-in.

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.

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!