I did actually mess up the colours of the girl's clothes - the hoodie colour was meant to be her trousers colour, and the hoodie was supposed to be green, but the client said they actually preferred the accidental colour combo, so decided to keep it. Alls well that ends well!
I recently received a small commission request from someone for a couple of characters to go on various backgrounds and graphics for someone's personal YouTube channel and related bits and pieces. I'm yet to see the art in use on their page, but other than that it's worked out pretty well.
I did actually mess up the colours of the girl's clothes - the hoodie colour was meant to be her trousers colour, and the hoodie was supposed to be green, but the client said they actually preferred the accidental colour combo, so decided to keep it. Alls well that ends well! Another Sprakle comic, and another animatic! I'm almost certainly going to be trying to make time to make these properly this summer between the BBC Listening Project and the one-minute film in September. And in terms of the one-minute film, I've come up with another possible concept for it involving a couple of arguing astronauts on the International Space Station. So I'm probably going to be developing that further over the couple weeks or so, so there should be some related art up here at some point.
I've been doing more work on the BBCLP video over the past couple days, and I'm now roughly 1/5 of the way through. I've been starting from the longer and more difficult shots and working down in order (but also doing the opening shot just cos it felt like the right place to start) to help keep motivation and momentum throughout this part of production. I know as work carries on quality tends to slip, so by saving the smaller shots for later, they'll feel like less work so I'll be able to do them just as well as I'm doing the rest of it so far. I was going to aim for the October deadline, but at this pace, I could easily hit the June 30th deadline instead, so let's see if I can keep the momentum up!
Three shots are now completed, and another is currently in the works, meaning 14 seconds of animation is completed, and another 14 seconds is nearing completion. 2:52 to go! Here's the opening shot of it as it stands: This'll be edited and mixed with some live-action footage at a later point in production, but for now, I'm really happy with how this is looking and will continue on to the remaining work.
Here is the first piece of completed animation from the BBC Listening Project! 3 seconds down, 3:17 to go! Ok, so for a while now, I've had an idea sat on my harddrive waiting to be used or developed into something more. The idea was basically a single character - a happy-go-lucky, utterly innocent and naive, immortal, childlike unicorn with no concept of death - done in the style of those pre-school "learning to read" type of books with minimal backgrounds and simple character design. This one comic has been sat on my computer since last summer, and I figured it was about time to put it to use. And while the Doctor Chaotic short would be quite good for full blown storyboarding and development into a proper short film, Sprakle definitely suits the bite-size sting style of content that's popular on the internet at the moment (ie - Vines), and the simplicity of it means that I could easily pump out either 5 animatics, or one completed 30 second skit within the time left in this term - and could quite easily be extended to fill 60 seconds if I wanted to adapt it for the one-minute film brief we're likely to be set for over the summer. Here's the animatic for one possible short: Picture that, but with an explosion sound effect at the appropriate point.
I already have ideas noted for up to 4 more shorts, and I doubt it'd take that long to brainstorm more ideas for him. The comic and this one animatic have already generated something of a buzz on DeviantArt, proving more popular than some of my fan art postings in terms of views, comments, and favourites, so I'm pretty excited for what the reaction would be to a more complete series run of these little bite-size shorts. This new showreel now includes most of the stuff I've done for Dead and Breakfast, as well as removing one of the outdated first-year exercise portions of it. I should be able to update it again by the end of April with more stuff, such as (hopefully) some completed shots of the BBC Listening Project work, as well as another idea I've been having recently that may be easier to come to fruition than the Doctor Chaotic short. We'll see how it goes.
Finished the latest shot on "Dead and Breakfast", and I've already been assigned another shot to do - I'm just waiting on receiving the symbols necessary to do it. I've also made some modifications to my CV based on the feedback of Sarah Cox (director at Arthur Cox) and Mark Taylor (director at A Productions), so here's the updated version of that: So Sam managed to get me the next shot for me to work on, and I've made decent progress in it so far. After a few hours work, all that needs doing with the central character of the shot - in this case, the duck - is to animate his legs. The animation's symbol based, but I roughed it out first using Flash's brush tool to help give me an idea of where to put the body and what I'm going to be doing with the legs in the finalisation of this particular element of the shot. It should look pretty awesome when it's done. Ok, so I'm having a go at redoing my business card and CV to be something more professional looking, and it's led to some interesting experiments. I figured it'd be useful to have a version of my CV that worked in black and white for cheaper printing purposes, so I had a go at sketching up a picture. I then had a go at painting it in Photoshop just to see how it looked in colour. The greyscale one looks neat, and I'm considering it, but the Photoshop coloured one doesn't look up to snuff, so probably not going to use that one. In terms of business cards, I've found that putting it together in Flash with a basic idea of the theme leads to a lot of quickfire experimentation - meaning I haven't actually saved a lot of the test versions I did, but what I did save you can see here: I'm trying to stick to the blue+white theme so that it matches this website. Y'know, consistent branding and all that. I'll see if I can get any feedback on these to help decide on one of them. Vistaprint's currently having a massive sale, so hopefully I can jump in on that and get them from there.
So today, I put together a draft of my creative work CV. It's incredibly basic, and pretty much looks like a normal CV right now, but is a good start, and gets all of my experience so far on a document that I'm not going to lose in a stolen bag or leave behind anywhere. Now that I've got this, I feel I need to do more design work on it to make it start looking less amateur than it does at the moment. But still, now I have something I can present in university on Friday if I don't manage to come up with something I'm happy with, so this'll be a "good enough" backup if I don't get my head around InDesign in time.
I finally managed to get the animatic through to the BBC contact without it being sorted into their Junk box and they approved it without asking for any changes, so now I'm getting ready to move it forwards into production. I've worked out how many shots I have an noted how long each of those shots are, and also ranked them by difficulty. It's a pretty non-creative job, but given the whole load of creativity that basically surrounds every other bit of work I've done, it's almost nice to have a break and focus on numbers and grids, and get really analytical for a little while. The ranking by difficulty is mostly to help me decide which shots/characters can be given to other people to work on to help speed the work along.
I'm probably going to start working from the larger shots and work down, while giving out the shortest/easiest shots to people who may volunteer to help out. Given the large number of shots, it may well be that I'm working on this into the summer holiday. Hopefully that won't detract too much from trying to get a job or some work experience in that time - the simplicity of the film means that it's feasible to work on in spare time. Put together a quick business card design. Something simple and greyscale so I can print it off at university. If it comes out well enough, I may well take this design (or perhaps a cleaned up take on this design with some colour) to get some business cards on proper card. But for now, this'll do.
Ok, so I've started fleshing out the story of the Doctor Chaotic short, to the point where I'm confident that it's not going to change massively anymore so I can start to work out jokes and gags for it. At this point, with "Dead and Breakfast" and approval from the BBC still pending (I think my e-mails may be going to their junk box), it's hard to tell if/when the short will actually be completed, so I've got a rough guestimate of sometime next year, just to make sure there's no rush. With that, I made a tiny teaser thingy to show off to people and build a little bit of hype. The cape wave animation isn't as good as I'd like, and the background is absolutely not representative of what would be in the finished film, but is just there to give the basic idea.
So while waiting for another shot to do for "Dead and Breakfast", I decided to use the base of the generic wiggly-tailed ghost to make one of Sam. He seemed to like it. Another ghost for "Dead and Breakfast", this time a nice generic wiggly-tailed ghost which I know will be used throughout the film. The line consistency around the right eye's already been sorted out, and the arms are likely to be a touch shorter in the film, but it probably won't be massively noticeable.
Designed and animated another ghost for "Dead and Breakfast". Don't yet know if it'll be used in the film, but good practice nonetheless. Also related to the project is this little doodle:
Ok, so on Friday, a whole bunch of my stuff was stolen - a bag I'd had to import, 3 sketchpads and a notepad full of work, and a Christmas present. Luckily, my portable harddrive wasn't in it, so I didn't lose any work that had already been digitised, but unfortunately, this doesn't include many of the thumbnail storyboards I'd done in preparation for the Doctor Chaotic short.
So I went to a couple of my normal online hangouts and let them know that I needed some cash to replace my stolen stuff, and got a huge response. With individual commissions varying from £3 to £15, I made enough to be able to buy a new bag and begin replacing some of the drawing materials that were lost. So this week, I finally got to work on my first shot for Sam Shaw's "Dead and Breakfast", and having finished it, Sam's given me permission to show it off, so I will! Here it is: There's going to be one or two minor edits to this before final inclusion, but other than that it's done, and personally, I'm really happy with how it came out. On to the next one!
I've now finished the animatic for the BBC Listening Project, pending final approval from the BBC's representative. But if that goes well, then I'll be able to get the green light to go into production, and I can get the ball rolling on crewing up and getting more animators involved for the next phase of production. I'll probably also get someone to fulfil the role of producer to manage timetables and schedules so I can focus on making sure the animation and look of the thing works out. The main issue I forsee in production is the move between live-action and animation - the short begins and ends with a transition between looking at a whiteboard and being zoomed out from that whiteboard to see the wider surroundings. If this costs too much time, then I can probably live without it, but I think it'd be a really nice touch and sort've explain the style of the whole thing. Still, now that I've got this animatic done, time to get it approved.
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