More Stuff

Hi there

My animatic is finished.  It needs to be rendered, then I'll put it on the blog!

Sound is edited.  The minions are higher pitched.  Lucifer is lower pitched.  I went with a Bill Clinton-esque voice for The Inspector.

It's all basically done, just a little more!

BYE FRIENDS!

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3!

Hello.  Here are some nice little animation tests for you.

This first one is the flailing arms for the Minions when they're on the roller-coaster.

This next one is a stick figure Lucifer slamming his foot down.

This final one is a cleaned up version of that one.

Bye!

And I Would Write 500 Words, And I Would Write 271 more...

Through out semester one, I’ve been getting all my pre-production stuff done for my animation, ‘The Inspection From Hell’.  It’s been tough work, but I’m making my way through it.  I’ve had issues, and I’ve worked through them and in a matter of a couple of weeks, it should be pretty much ready to go…

My ‘uh-huh’ moment for this animation was about 3 weeks before the start of semester one.  I was sitting at home on my laptop, with my Wacom, playing around in Photoshop, with the sole intention of deciding what my animation would be for the year.  I had been looking through some animations on my hard drive, and one was The South Park Movie.  The film heavily features Satan, and I decided that could be pretty funny.  The original idea was that Hell couldn’t pay its gas bill, so the fire was about to be shut off.  That lead to the idea which I’m doing now, which is Hell is being inspected by OH&S, and is deemed to be unsafe.  It gets shut down, but Lucifer ends up killing the Inspector by accident.  His ghost then comes back and shuts Hell down.

A huge problem I had at the start was designing the character of Lucifer.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t quite get him looking the way I wanted him.  In a class a week or so in, someone (I want to say Josie, but I could be wrong) had the idea of making Lucifer a barely seen character, with just his legs showing, and making him really tall.  That totally made sense, and then the character design of him wasn’t an issue.  The Inspector was a totally different design to what he ended up being.  His original design was much more ‘Simpsons’, and he looked much younger.  Darren showed us a technique of character designing, which was drawing random lines in Photoshop, and then finding a character in those lines.  I ended up with a character far more like the Inspector I have now.  I didn’t like the design at first, so I sat one day and drew around 10-15 designs for the Inspector.  I remembered the Photoshopped character I’d done and drew a character that looked a bit more like him.  That ended up being the Inspector you see today.

Backgrounds have not been an issue at all, because Darren will be doing the majority of those for me, and he has a lot of ideas.  He and I have been discussing them every week, and he’s done incredibly well so far.  I designed the break room, but it was incredibly 2D and flat.  Neale did a quick sketch of it and made it look much more 3D, and I re-did that image in Photoshop.  That background is now complete!

Layout is a bit of a bitch, because the scanning quality isn’t always the best.  In a couple of pictures, the colouring quality isn’t great because the paper colour hasn’t necessarily come out entirely in Photoshop.  But in one image, it gives a nice two-tone effect to the ‘sky’ in Hell!

Voices were recorded yesterday, bar one.  I am doing the voice of The Inspector, Satan, Dr. Phil and the minions.  Josie played a minion known from now on as “Cake Minion”, and my sister is playing the minion who does a bad Dr. Phil impression, but I am yet to record that voice yet.  It was a really fun couple of hours in the recording booth with Josie, Bruno and Tai.

As for non-uni-work-related issues, I have some issues regarding this class which all the teachers know about, it’s not really a secret.  But I’m working on ignoring that issue because it shouldn’t distract me.  As for out-of-uni-issues, I work 3 days a week between 5-9 hours, meaning I can’t do the work then.  On Wednesdays, our day off, I have to go to my uncles house next door because my grandparents are in my house babysitting my niece, and so I can get a bit of work done there.  But they leave early because their old so I spend generally about 2 hours looking after my niece.  And I can’t do any uni work during those 2 hours because she’s 10 months old and she’s all cute and stuff and she just learnt to walk so we have to watch her and stuff and yeah.

So look, it’s all getting there, and I’ll definitely be done by the end of the semester.  Sorry I haven’t blogged in so long.  I am ashamed.

Josie is the best, chuck out the rest…

Jarrod.

Covers, Comparisons and Movement

I've got the production bible sheet on my hard drive, and I've started going through it, crossing things off.  I've done the cover sheet, it looks lovely with the characters on it.
I did a comparison sheet as well.  It's pretty much the same size differences in the storyboards etc.
I did the minion movement board.  I need to do an expression sheet for The Inspector, but that'll only have 3-4 things on it.  Jack gave us an awesome file on facial expressions.

In the next class I'll ask Neale about the couple of shots in the storyboard I'm having trouble with.

I wanna go on holidays now please.

Rough Voices, Storyboards and Model Sheets

I've actually been productive!  That never happens!

So this week - besides my lovely sleep in on Thursday, which I'm not even sorry about - I've been productive!
I've done a rough voice track.  I played all the parts.  I liked The Inspector's voice, and Lucifer's ended up sounding a lot like Sam The Eagle from The Muppets.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB-wmOYelnM

I've done some Storyboards.  I havn't finished yet, but I will hopefully over the next couple of weeks.  Here's a quick preview.  They're done digitally.  

I've also done the Model Sheet for The Inspector, and I've also been doing movement sheets for the Minions.  Here's The Inspector.  

I was meant to have some lip-sync tests done by today for Daz-Dawg, but I forgot how to work with sound in Toon Boom.  I just downloaded a few pdf's, and I bought my laptop with me today, so hopefully he can give me a hand today.

I looked at the stats for this blog.  Apparently I'm getting traffic from America and Russia.  Now, I know a few people in America, so that doesn't surprise me.  Russia was a shock.

Have a nice day.