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…
