Week 9

This is the final week! The animatic has to be shown on wensesday as well as our main pieces of concept work. Ive spent most of this week helping out with the final animatic. A big thank you to Ben for his lovely storyboard shots. And welldone to everyone else in the group for putting together an amazing animatic. im looking forward to getting started on Modeling once ive completed the model sheets. After all the changes weve had with the story, im much more motivated now we have a final plot that everyone likes.

Week 8

The director likes all my designs i have done for the house environment. So now other members of the group have been told to take my pictures and develop them for the final designs Ive started to plan the layout of the interior house just to get an idea of how the rooms link.
Ive shown this layout to the director and he would lie a few changes which i noted down. its just a slightly different system to the way the rooms connects. he wants it to have to archways instead of one. These archways take you straight through from the lounge, then hallway to kitchen.
The first layout below is my first idea and the second layout has the changes Jono wanted.


Ive spent most of this week working on the animatic. Basically Giles has been scanning in the storyboard. ive then been touching up each picture in photoshop and importing them one by one into after effects. Giles, Dan and i read the script whilst trying to make the right camera moves and and shot with these pictures. Ive only been asked to create a draft animatic but i did this so that we could get a rough idea of the duration of the film and to see if each shot connects to the next, so that it makes sense to the audience. There where some late nights of work, but we now have the animatic ready to pass on to other members to finalise. It was a bit difficult at times to do the animatic when we didnt even have all the storyboard pictures. So me and Giles decided to use some of the original rough thumbnails Rob did for the rest of the animatic, since all we needed to clarify was the a rough estimate of the duration and how each shot connects.
Below is the first half of the rough animatic
wasnt able to load second half





Jono asked me to add Giles bushes, bin, trees and lampost to my original exterior house concept piece to see if he liked that combination. This is what i came up with.

Week 7

My concept work so far for the House enviroment...

Week 6

The PPD lesson was helpful. From it i learnt alot about how to make things run smoothly in a team, which is very useful for this film project. We covered Citizenship as animators, what animators are expected to do? and we came up with a set of rules on what we expected from other animators. Whether these rules will be put into practice, i dont know.
i worried about not being involved so much with story board. but i did a few rough thunbnails for old original story, thumbnails not of any use.
This week i talked to Director about what work I should be doing. He gave me a schedule and a list of everything he wants just me to have done by the deadline (nov 30th).
i did some sketches to help decided the overall style of our new enviroment (explorers house). And so i sketched a bedroom and exterior house in a simple exaggerated curved style. The director seemed to like this style but suggested i make it less exaggerated and maybe slightly distorted. For example, something in the style of the opening scene for Monsters inc.

He also designed a montage with colours that he liked and thought should be used for the explorers house at night. so i extracted these colours from the montage and made a chart of the main colours used.
The showreel i did for a previous project was a short clip showing the inside and outside of a Jam Factory. The director had seen this clip and liked my work. So he has decided that i should concerntrate on the interior and exterior of our characters house. Since Ive been assigned to work purely on the characters house, I had a look through the final thumbnails for our new story to see what the important assets are needed in the rooms. In the story, the character definately needs the following items; book self, Hanging Lamp, chair and an oven. This is why the main areas ive been asked to design are the Hallway, Lounge and Kitchen. Ive also been asked to sketch a variety of Designs for all assets in these specified areas.

More enviroment work completed for cafe de beignet of the outside cafe design.

Week 5

At the beginning of this week i continued to do environmental concept work. Little did i know that later on this week there was about to be a huge changes in the story. During the last few weeks the group was becoming less motivated with the work. So before carrying on any further we thought it would be best to ask the tutors what they thought of the story so far. Dan (tutor) went through our story and said that instead of improving from the original pitch idea , the story had lost its momentum. This happened mainly because the group had so many different ideas for the story, and the director, wanting everyone to be happy, used all these ideas instead of being firm and saying "its a nice idea, but no i don't think we'll have that". Basically to many cooks spoil the broth.
So now the story has been changed and checked through with all the tutors. They agreed that it is much better than the original idea. It is more comedy driven now. The majority of the group are much motivated, including myself. Unfortunately the change does mean the all the work i have done in previous weeks on animal character designs are pointless (no jungle animals in the story anymore) but it doesn't matter because some of the work can be shown in my portfolio. At least my environment concept work can still be of use. The main change in the story is that the explorer in jungle is actually dreaming he is in the jungle and sleepwalking. The movements he makes in the jungle will relate to what he is doing in the sleepwalk. For example, he dreams that he is swinging on a vine in the jungle when really he is asleep hanging, holding on to his bedroom light bulb etc.
My job as concept artist is to know all the changes important to me. We now have second enviroment in the film, which is the explorers house at night. A style for the whole film needs to be thought of this week as well. The Director told me it would be nice for the explorer to have a pet in his house at night. A tortoise or a cat was mentioned. Apart from the pet, we only have one character now instead of five, which is much better for the group. We are all very good at modeling environments, and we only have one competent animator in our group at the moment.
Because of the drastic change, for the past few days ive been working a little more on "Cafe de Beignet". I went into college early and had a look in the libary with Ash for some reference. The group is really concentrating on the whole look of the film at the moment. We researched French Fashion in the 1950's since this is the time period the old woman and man may have grown up in. The 1950's may even be the time period set for the whole film. It was nice to help out my part time group a bit more anyway.

Week 4

Again this week has been purely concept work (above). We did want to get some rough story board thumbnails done, but came to a group decision that because we potentially have alot of external, internal and four characters to cover, developing our concept seems vital at this point. The director was pleased with one of the jungle paintings i did, so he asked me to go away and concerntrate on doing some more, just on external enviroment and the design of the temple outside. I also managed to design some different jungle leaves seperate from my paintings which will help when we come it model out the plants.
Ive had alot of work to do this week. Ive been working solidly and having all the other projects to do, im wondering how i will get it all done. Some time this week was spent on my essay projects which back tracked a bit on my paintings, and my essays still need to be finished.
As a group we made a start on sketching out the internal temple design. We thought about where all the traps might be placed, what kind of traps and how the 2nd explorer can avoid them. The director then sent me a rough birds eye view map of the temple inside. That then ment i could make a start on the outside of the temple knowing what the room was shaped like. Before starting my paintings i needed to ask the director lots of questions so that i could paint exactly what he wanted. There were a couple of things he specifically asked for the temple to have, so i noted them down.
-possible for light to shine through the roof
-not a typical pyramid step aztec shape
-but high enough to poke through above tree tops
-a canopy of trees leading to the temple
-an open area just before the temple
-no rounded pillars
-no very long staircases leading up to temple
-weathered away building with cracks and vines with grey coloured stone.
The jungle trees and leaves and colours had not been discussed so i guess that part was lefted up to me.

Week 3

This week we where ment to be working on the dialogue for our film, but after a long disscussion we all agreed that maybe no script at all would be better. This means that we will have to work extra hard on the animation and expressions for the characters. Having a script is always a safe bet that the viewer will understand what is going on. However our tutor reminded us that an animation with no dialogue can be understood by all nationalities, imagine how popular it could be! it made me think of all the good cartoons and charlie chaplin films that did so well in their time because the story could be understand by different languages.
Not having to work on a script ment we could really finalise the story. More changes where made, such as instead of having three animals of different personalities watching our explorer, we will be having two animals of opposite personalities (one small, excited, high, fast, keeps making mistakes and the other big, slow, but wise, and knows what hes doing). These two animals will be controling the traps of an aztec temple using buttons and leavers. They will be try to stop our explorer from getting the artificate within the temple but somehow the explorer will manage to miss these trap just by chance or funny coinsidence.
Also this week a fellow character designer/illustrator came to give us a lecture. He showed us his work, and gave me many useful tips on designing characters. For example, a good character is one that has a distinctive siolette. This advice really inspired me to work hard on my designs. He had a quick look at my sketch book and incouraged me with his comments.

On Ash's project this week, he asked me to do some different emotions for the old lady charatcer since he was pleased with the design a gave him. However he wanted to change one thing to the design which was to give her glasses.

















More Character Designs for Aztec film

Week 2

This week Ash’s group asked me to do some concept sketches. I had a read through his story and character synopsis’s. I was very happy he asked for my help and pleased to hear that he liked my art work from art work for his film, which excited me since this was the other project I was interested in. I started to do previous projects. But I will only be working part time on this.
For the film I am working full time on (Aztec escape) we worked till late on the story as a group, breaking it down, rearranging parts and changing parts we weren’t keen on, but the main problem we had was thinking up a good ending. After a long struggle we thought of something that made the story complete. We then started working on the characters background lives, there personalities, since this needs to be known before I start designing them.This week we also had time to work out key shots and scenes. I was able to give suggestions of jungle animals from my research material I gathered in the previous week.

Sketches for "Cafe de Beignet" (Ash's film)

Week 1

The chosen film pitches were announced and i was happy to hear that "Aztec Escape" was one of them. I decided on what groups to participate in. I realised early on that my specialism would be an Artistic role, since people say my character designs and concept work is strong. i also enjoy modeling and other areas such as texturing. However, i struggle on the technical and animating side. i will have to contribute a bit in these areas, which is ok as i am good with lip syncing and sound design. I have talked to the Director of "Aztec escape" and he told me to brief myself on the story and as concept artist, start gathering up material on jungles, animals, just research as much as possible.
So i have started working on this film. Straightway ive looked up jungle enviroments, Aztec ruins and animals that could possibly live in the south americian jungle. I will ask the director what kind of animals he is looking for specificly (jungle, common, realistic, imaginery, etc) i've also researched Aztec patterns, colour schemes because even though at this point the story hasnt been finalised, these are areas that i can start working on.

Inspiration from other artists

A good way to get started on sketching concept work is to look up other peoples work that inspires you. My group discussed what different styles we admired, particularlly the
work from a game called “Jax and Daxter” I researched this game further and found some sketches that show the development process of the exterior settings in the game. These early developed sketches can be very helpful to this project Especially since it is also set in the jungle.

While researching this game I also looked at some screen shots from Disneys Tarzan, mainly for colour reference as I remember loving this animation for its bright and bold jungle colours.