inspiring...

i missed this when it was broadcast over christmas, but have finally watched studio a.k.a's lost and found, based on the picture book by Oliver Jeffers. 

Heres a few notes i took away from watching this piece:

character design: true reflection of jeffers designs, showing that 2d concept should not lose its charm when transfered to 3d....there may be additions needed...but overall your design can be achieved. Simplicity! What these characters cried out was basic blocked out shapes...there was no essence of reflecting realism which gave it a distinct style

colour palette: the piece is a charming story for children (though who says adults cant enjoy it too!) and as such the colour palette relfects soft use of clours, pastels to create a world that has no definate location. The colour palette adds appeal to the piece and again has transferred wonderfully from the books illustrations.

story: simple...the story of friendship, two characters...the journey of their relationship even though it didnt seem obvious to both characters initally.

environment: the set and characters gave a coherant look making a believable world for the audience...again very appealing and true to the book by jeffers.

production design was completed by Armandine Pecharman whose job was to realise Jeffer's illustrations into the 3d setting...there are books upon books of her drawings, everything from buildings to the designs of the forks! 
I've lent Dan the DVD and literally ordered him to watch it as well as the making of as i think this could be a key inspiration for our piece this year especially in terms of trying to make our piece stylised.

sultans lecture the first

we had a really useful technical lecture today on UV mapping with Sultan whose autodesk accredited. I found this extremely useful as my use of UV mapping has been limited. Sultan showed us a couple of methods for mapping characters faces. I found from the tutorials i have been reading online...they were guiding me in the right direction...using the correct tool etc, but Sultan's knowledge provided a brilliant guide for managable mapping. Im very grateful for the college providing this opportunity as i beleiev it will be most beneficial for this project as well as future projects. Sultan also left us with a step by step guide of his notes from the lecture, so i will need to hunt down dan dalli soon and get myself a copy of them.

Thank you!

At lunch time, dan and i exchanged drawings and thoughts on what we had completed last night. I ran through my thumbnails of how i imagine the scene to pan out to which Dan agreed with the camera decisions though it could be subject to change along the way

Within these thumbnails i have roughed out a version of what our annoying child could look like, we both agreed it had potential and i will develop this furterh tonight. I have also gathered some Circus style text after stumbling across a blog where an illustrator had collected links of free downloadable fonts. The presentation of the fonts seemed an appealing colour scheme as well although were not 100% on this at the moment....its still early days. Never too early to be researching text though. I've downloaded these fonts and all are working, so at least were prepared when creating titles/dvd ready for hand in...best to be as prepared as possible.

Here's a quick text test, just to see which are actually legible! 

The afternoon was spent on our showreel unit including Dos and Donts and covering the learning outcomes of this unit...all in all....we have a lot of work to complete this term...and very little time to do it in.....ah well :)

Kid Concept

so we need a kid...a child that is both the vision of the sweetest kid in the world but yet the complete bane and annoyance of John's life....a child whose innocent, loveable but yet who John feels must pay the price for his innocent chortle that very day. I say his...i never imagined the child would be a little girl...me and dans discussions were always circling with a little boy so i guess i now go on the instinct. Heres my concept work the little one...

Again, i think i've been able to demonstrate some good variations of shapes and looks for the character, however i still feel the one i drew for the inital thumbnails...well...nailed it. Benny is essentailly a mute and with less than 30 seconds of screen time, his character needs to be conveyed effectively to the audience so that John seems even more dispicable...yet...you laugh along too! I shall show Dan my designs and get his much appreciated feedback so we can press on.

welcome to scheduling

today we were introduced to microsoft project which allows for easy setup for planning out projects....or scheduling. The software allows for jobs to be sectioned, linked, assigned to resources as well as displaying percentage complete and the duration the task should take. As one of my targets is to have better project planning, this is an extremely useful resource to learn and will especially help for the third year film. Its also an interesting tool for working out the value of your work, obviously its not a definite calculation, but it allows you to be more aware of the true value of work you undertake.

The afternoon: myself and dan prepared our schedule, listing out the jobs in order and under the headings of pre production, production and post production. The jobs allocated are colour coded for either myself or dan so we can clearly see whose undertaking which task and so we can re-allocate if needs be during the term. The schedule will need to have updated versions handed in over the weeks that shows the teams progress...this will also be good for our reflection to see what spent the correct amount of time on as well as where we could make improvements. 

For now...heres a screen print of how its looking:

But back to the idea and after going over our schedule with Jared we briefed him on the latest version of our idea...mr and mrs clown. Its funny how carried away you can get with an idea, but when its presented to someone else, the flaws are immediate. Well...i say flaws, what i actual mean are points that would not meet that of the brief. Our current domestic situation with mr and mrs clown would require much more build up than time allows, and cutting down the story would therefore lose its impact

we may need to lose the clowns

suddenly we were back the wall again

and after a huge piece of paper and a sharpie marker came our way, the brainstorms begun again and after watching a bit of spy vs spy, we realised we needed the two charcters to have some sort of conflict in order to bring a short snappy story to light. As we only have 30 seconds, the idea needed to be gag based and not have such a narrative. 

time passed, and we'd listed ideas that involved conflicting farmers and builders, and the clever sheep who outwitted mr fox but with such similarities to tom and jerry, we werent feeling the excitement with these ideas...

dum, dum duuuuuum!!!

success!

after remembering a clown character i had drawn years and years ago (i actually used it as part of my portfolio to get a place on the animation course) it twigged. The clowns juxtaposition could be that hes really not that funny at all....infact...he hates the sound of kids laughter...its grates at his brain like metal on a cheese grater. So here we have it...John the clown, who...if laughed at by children has to get his revenge by some hilarious clown consequence. The idea was then presented to Jared and was approved....yipee

our brains hurt

so for now, Dan is sketching basic environment concepts whilst i will be returning to my clown designs and starting work on designing the bane of john the clowns life a.k.a the child. I think the design of John was already there within my collection...staring disdainfully back at us

...i might go back and tweak him but overall im pretty happy with this design and i dont want to lose the impact of it.

back at home...i jotted down a few ideas to happen to our duo...

concept ahoy

the weekend.

i have been using the weekend to draw some designs for our mr and mrs clown scenario...bearing in mind i want to bring a simplistic yet stylized design to the project. i still have the idea in mind that they are squishy sort of egg people...sort of humpty dumpty esque. Part of my targets this term is to improve my conceptual design in terms of its experimentation with shapes etc. I feel the class has some real talents when it comes to conceptual who i see as a bench mark to aim for....these include the talented mr phil brooks and dan edgely who demonstrate a lot fun in the creation of their characters as well as quantity of experiments.

Anyway....without further a do...here are my designs:

Im pleased with my generation of ideas here and i think ive explored a lot of different possibilities. Overall, i think for our mr and mrs clown idea i like the last page of drawings involving the two egg characters (drinking tea...dont ask why they are doing that, its a strange scenario that came from my head to the paper) Anyway, i shall discuss through these drawings with dan tomorrow at college and see what he thinks. 

end of the week...

end of the week and dan have settled on an idea involving clowns. After what seemed like days of staring at a blank wall, i think we may have something. Our story involves Mr and Mrs Clown and the domestic despute between the two. Were not using any voice over as such and instead want to use squeaky toys to convey the emotions of the characters e.g when Mrs. Clown is having a go at Mr. Clown for being late. The scenario is as follows that Mr Clown arrives home late for a anniversary dinner with his wife Mrs Clown. As soon as he steps through the front door she gets cross...pointing at the dinner which deflates where its ruined...pointing at the clock which shows how late he is. Every time Mr. Clown tries to interrupt, she takes no notice and ends up storming out of the house. Mr Clown reveals a flower he's been hiding for her the whole time which in turn wilts to a comical sound. The rough story board is below...however it is rough and may not be completely legible:

Below is a list of modeling for the project which already is quite high so we need to cut certain elements out in order to not bite off more than we can chew.

Over the weekend, myself and Dan have agreed to look over the storyboard further and try and develop it, see if we can get it to fit the 30 second target as currently, im worried the idea will run away with itself. I suggest we approach Jared next week and pitch our idea to him as well to make sure its acceptable for this project. I will be working on character concepts and Dan will be working out the layout of the environment so we can focus on the necessary and not build parts that wont be in shot etc.

Im pleased with solidified an idea now and have something to work at now, obviously we'll have to see how the weekend goes and come together next week with our thoughts. We cant spend too long on this though as we'll lose too much time on the actual making and finessing.

the halloween tree

Today me and Grigsby came into college to collect The Halloween Tree book. Unfortunatly Jared was delayed in London but whilst we waited Grigsbys starred in the colleges perspectus...hes an actor dont you know!

Dan then had to leave for work but I agreed to stay on and wait for Jared. After colleting the book at lunchtime i left to go read the world of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. The book contains illustrations completed by Joseph Mugnaini which already give a big hint to the style of the book (included below). The drawings depict a very detailed set of characters which is not where i would want to take this project: the characters and the events would need to be simplified massively! 

Friend or foe? Mr Moundshround is an ambiguous character throughout the book, although he seemed to help the boys, there was no doubt he was powerful.
Moundshround's house along with the Halloween Tree abundant in pumpkins each carved with a new face or figure

The kite the boys and Moundshround use to fly to the different countries and relive the various celebrations of Halloween.

The explanation of Witches were that they were hated purely because the were the most intelligent people and therefore suspected. An interesting idea in itself. 




The story details the journey of 8 young boys who travel the world along with the illusive Mr. Moundshroud to find the meaning behind Halloween. They're also in search of their friend Pipkin who was taken from them during the night and who they fear is dead. Moundshroud takes the boys from France, Mexico to Egypt, learning new ways of celebrating Halloween, the fear of the night, the rememberance of the ghosts and the celebration of the sun and life.

Overall...

This book is fantastically detailed, the description is wonderfully rich and very dark. However, in order to do this book justice, i don't feel there is a specific scene or chapter that can be taken from the book. It would require a lot of rewriting of which Im sure we'd lose the quality of the story. With a minimum of 9 characters in a scene, it would strike an impossible job for a 2 membered team to model, rig, animate for a scene of 30 seconds. The only possibility i saw would be completing part of the chapter where the boys approach Moundshroud's house and are introduced to The Halloween Tree which would be fun to design and make. Moundshroud himself is never seen apart from his glowing eyes...which could be completed by simple lighting. We could also reduce the amount of boys to one or two and really simplify their design according to their Halloween costume e.g witch, skeleton etc. My only other suggestion would be to make a 30 second trailer of the book for a television series. Trailers require a lot of information though which would mean we would need to make a lot of sets to give a true taster of all the book offers....

In short....i think we should abandon this idea and look for something much SHORT SHARP and SNAPPIER

I will discuss our options tomorrow with Dan, there's no final idea at the moment, but at least were not choosing to complete something on an epic scale.

brainstorming...mindmapping...researching

Introduction to CVA_206 brief today in which we will learn how to create a DVD show reel. If completed in time for ROA, it could be shown at the 2nd year animation exhibition where members from the industry will be able to view the best work we've completed over the last 2 years. Rave on Air provides opportunity for getting your work out there and getting yourself known, and of course the unit opens up good practise for selling yourself, your specialties as well as having a critical eye of your own work. Its a good opportunity to look back at past work to improve on as well as utilize Jareds 205 unit so that additional work can be added to the reel.

This unit also goes hand in hand with PPD this term which covers CVs and covering letters. This morning we looked at examples of good and weak CVs and took note of what we should include in ours and the difference between covering letters and CVs.

That afternoon...

Myself and Dan were back to the drawing board trying to come up with a scenario for our animation. I had noted a few ideas which i presented however we felt that taking an extracted from a childrens book would be more successful. This terms project though must meet certain copyright requirements so we decided to speak to Jared to see if it would be possible to do this. Jared said it would be allowed, so long as we contacted the publisher and said we were students and wouldnt make any money from it. This is of course would not be workable for one of the big named stories such as Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket, so we would have to chose our material carefully. Jared then gave us a few names to research including Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake, Calvin and Hobbs as well as E Nesbit. Bradbury had written The Halloween Tree which Jared gave us a little background information on and said he would bring it in for us tomorrow, i have a feeling that this could be our idea if we can find 30 seconds worth of animation within it. As for the other names, their stories involved castles, kings and in depth battles which didnt take our interests. We then found a painting by Ray Bradbury which instantly appealed to us. This term, i've expressed interest on creating a piece with a distinct colour palette and this painting had a distinct orange palette that got myself and dan talking about adopting this colour scheme within the piece. Dan and I also discussed possible texturing ideas with using scanned book pages to texture the leaves or the characters in order to bring a handmade look to the piece. 

Ray Bradburys painting created in 1960 for The Halloween Tree
Its nice this one painting has spurred so much discussion as recently its felt like idea generation has led to us banging our heads against the wall. Im keen to get my hands on the book tomorrow and have a read through so we can press on...however i shall stress again we will NOT be using the material if it is not suitable. We only have 30 seconds with 2 team members and not an entire crew to make an epic movie.

That evening i looked into other animated shorts and took some notes...just for research, idea generation and possible back up plan incase the halloween tree isn't suitable.

The Pixar Shorts: ok a professional lot and more than 30 seconds BUT the summary of the stories is one to take into consideration 

tin toy - simple environment, alternate perspective - seeing how the child looks to the toy, fright at first but flips around at the end

luxo jr - inanimate objects given human characteristics. Again simple environment, child and parent relationship, interaction with object

red's dream - inanimate object with aspirations, dreams, desires. the object used by clowns wanting to be the clown...purpose for the object.

knick knack - the grass is always greener on the other side, juxtaposition of living in a snowglobe but feeling trapped...audience enjoyment at his attempts of escape.

boundin - the ups and downs of life. animation based around a song/jingle - a different approach to narrative

mikes new car - audience enjoyment out of characters frustration. duo character dynamics and the relationship between the two - frustrations of one to the other

for the birds - no use of voice, instead use of squeezy toys to convey voice of characters...creates humour, two forces coming up against each other, the attacker gets their comeuppance.

jack jack attack - role reversal the horror for the babysitter vs an innocent baby. good contrapuntal use of classical music vs babysitters breakdown

lifted - role reversal - an alien not being good at abducting, sort of a driving test. Audience entertainment from characters mistakes/failures. Character duo...the opposites in characteristics. appeal to audience - learners/beginners, trials/mistakes, the lessons/growing up.

One Man Band - competition between two characters...the same status but each trying to outdo the other. competition to win the prize (money) from the innocent, turns around at the end and she ends up making more money than the pair of them. role reversal - how a little girl can do the job better than the musicians themselves. Audience enjoyment at characters struggle/frustration. 

Aardman Animations 

Purple and Brown - no set, simply based around the event of the pair, no speech, silly gags that occur to the two of them...allows nice build up of anticipation e.g. blowing up and swallowing a balloon. 

Pib and Pog - again minimal set - only a few props. story is focused on the two characters and the dynamics between the two. dynamic of a narrator accentuates the silly events that occur. no real dialogue.

Studio AKA- this company is a particular favourite of mine, mainly because of their distinctive style used in their works.

Lost and Found - haven't seen this as of yet but the story focuses on two characters and their journey together. Based on a childrens book

Jojo and the Stars - distinct black and white look - opposite as the story is focussed around a circus. Themes of being trapped, forbidden love.

Varmints - change, the move of urban into the countryside, restriction, preservation of nature, freedom, individuality. 

All in all it seems that comedy duos make the best for short gag pieces. Indeed its a recurring theme throughout TV with the likes of morecambe and wise, laurel and hardy. Animation has seem is share of this dynamic too with popeye and bluto.

 

If Halloween tree is not suitable, myself and dan need to decide whether to do piece based on narrative or gag. How many characters are manageable and allow us to concentrate on getting a professional piece of animation complete. Ok...i think ive researched some alternates if The Halloween Tree isnt acceptable...tomorrow all will be revealed.

first things first...

Monday 20th April

First day back and were straight into the new brief for CVA 205

There is a lot of choice including working with product design students to produce an advertisement for brands such as Burtons, Dove and WKD, collaborating with Musion Studios or an animation of your own choice. You can also choose to help out the 3rd years with their final films if you wish. One final option would be to help produce animations for content creation students, though this option is subject to what is needed and how many wish to pursue this route. 

This term i would like to advance the skills i learnt in term 2 in terms of character setup and create my own animation. There is the option to import a pre-rigged character into the scene, but currently i would like to create my own to show the range of skills i've acquired during the course. Although the pre-rigged character would allow more time for animating, the down side is that you need to find one that would suit the scene and even then pre-rigged characters are base in terms of their style, so it would stand out from the set etc.

For this term i will also be working as part of a team. I feel i achieved a lot on my own last term, but i feel in order to gain a rounded piece for showing, working as part of a team will be more beneficial. I enjoy the dynamics of team work too, as it allows you to bounce ideas off of one another, theres a good support network between individuals and the chance to teach and learn from one another. This term, i will be working with Dan Grigsby.  I've worked with Dan before and believe we have a good level of trust and understanding of one anothers ideas and thought processes. I feel that this term we'll be able to learn new skills off of one another in order to produce a professional piece overall. Individually, I feel I would like meet the targets I learnt about my working methods from last term

Dan and I both wished to undertake the animation of your own choice brief and have expressed a few ideas which include basing our 30 second piece around a children's book, however we would have to look into the copyright issues facing this if we pursue this path.

With 6 weeks to complete the project for ROA its a tight deadline (3rd June), however i believe if we create a feasible schedule we should be able to meet this target. Next week were being introduced to Microsoft Project which should help organise our time more. 

Anyway, its only day 1 of the new term...the next item to be completed will be brainstorming.