Character DESIGN!

 Did I ever mentioned I abandoned the whole claymation/downshooting concept? Well I did and am going back to my roots of puppet animation. These are just a few pages that my lovely assistant drew up when we decided to go this route. When I first kiboshed the whole clay emote thing I went back to my original monster and princess concept I had before I started recording Girly. We mulled it over a little but something didn't seem right about a Monster and Princess pairing.

  I wanted my the two creatures to be distinctly connected but in order to be satisfied with the princess thing I could only come up with adding a prince that the monster was eating. I hated the idea and quickly had my character designer go with an idea I had for a smaller version of the monster. (Hence the first picture)

I was hooked on the idea immediatly after she drew the first hairy little thing (the fanny pack is an abandoned concept). We went through I few revisions of her basic set up and I realized I wanted her to be asymmetrical. So the horns were adjusted. Of course once she was uneven, we just had to go back to the original creature and see how he would look next to her. He has changed a bit since his original drawing but I very much enjoy what he has become.



After some discussion about construction, we wound up with the illustration on the right of the two of them. Aren't they just ADORABLE!? I am very happy with this result. There are noticeable differences between the two disregarding the size. The arms are probably the most notable. The elder monster is much more (dare I say) "animated" with the lines from the recordings so I wanted the long arms for that purpose. The junior monster needs to hold more innocence and be as juvenile as possible without breaking away from her counterpart, so she was given smaller arms and her awkward horns to signify a different age group


Construction will begin this time next week. As for this week, the storyboards are being worked on. Now before you go "A week to decide how your visual storyline? are you really doing it justice!?" Because of a certain animatic requirement at SoFA I need to get something on paper and then onto a timeline for export within these next three weeks. It won't be a finalized version but it will be close to the end result. (just a quick thing, my recording is edited to exactly what I want, meaning my story timeline is already concrete. I don't need to work out timing within the dialog or any such thing. It flows better as it was dictated so I am keeping it as such.)

Also, since this is my first time blogging I thought figuring out pictures would be a nightmare but chrome and blogger together now make it infinitely easy. Thanks again google for slowly making me dependent on your software.

I'll post some of the boards next week. Going to go take a test now. Damn all my other classes.  

OIAF

I went to Ottawa this weekend for the Animation Festival. Boy, was it a blast. Seriously. My top pick of the festival is Dodu, the Cardbaord Boy. It was just so Pretty while still being made of cardboard. My Second coming in close would be the feature Colorful. I completely avoided Phil Mulloy's Ending to his tasteless trilogy. I learned my lesson from Goodbye Mr. Christie.

As always it had it's ups and downs and keeps me asking "why is this in here" but as my professor told me, "It doesn't want to be Annecy."(summation of what he said)

I had my girlfriend (and lovely character design and fabricator) along with me. We have some final designs of the characters for my film now. Pictures to come soon. Probably send along some pictures of ottawa as well.

Pip Pip and all that jazz

I'M BACK

HEY THERE!

So, after many many months of not even trying to blog again, I HAVE RETURNED! I was interning in Brooklyn this summer so I kind of lost track of time, even with regards to my thesis... BUT I did get work done on it. Let's crash right past the boring part of how far I came and get to the point.

I HAVE MY RECORDING! I have what I consider worth all those nights I was stricken with panic concerning whether doing recordings with my sister would ever work. I am in the piece now, in fact, I am the other main character alongside my sister. Basically, after I thought I had made a final choice on what I would use for My Thesis I did one last recording with my sister AND BOY! was it worth it. It is basically an argument we had after she accidentally called a bucket a shovel.

Also, lots of medium stuff has changed. I am almost definitely doing clay animation with a lot of replacement work and I might even do clay on glass (little weary of that though). Of course, with Tom on my side giving me pointers, my sculpture skills should progress rapidly. I am struggling with whether to put the nail in the coffin on that though. I mean, originally the whole point of the piece was to do a lot of solid character animation with full bodied humanoid characters. That all changed with this recording. There is just something about it and the ideas I get from it do not equal the blue-print I started with. I feel that I need to express these characters beyond the confines of a body. I want to squash and stretch them as their emotions rise and fall. I want to convey their emotes different from the expected.

I think that is the point of my new vision. I want to move away from the expected and have fun with the animation. I could stress over how this work will be my last chance before getting into the real world of animation, or I could just have fun making a GREAT animated short involving my sister. So to hell with the confines of "reel-worthy" and let's say hello to getting back to the FUN in animation.

TATA!