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.