I originally had thought of bats hung upside down mocking the intrepid explorers entering the Aztec temple in Aztec Escape. The idea of the lad's away from the wives having a chin-wag over the 'sporting event' of choice (i.e. seeing humans attempt to navigate all the temple traps successfully) sounded fantastic. Looking back on the designs though they are all a little too flat and have no shape to them, bar the bottom right one. This character caught Jono's eye but he decided that he did not want bats to be the main characters. Looking down the list of acceptable alternatives I chose frogs instead (below):-
These designs are far more fun and varied than the ones above. I think the charm lies in the bulging eyes. There is plenty of scope for funny gags, expressions and animation in a character with eyes like that. I still kept a couple of fat body shapes in there to juxtapose the tiny, more wirey ones. My favourites are the top three. I think these work quite well together as a whole but the scale from large to lazy to small using pretty much the same character idea interests me. The odd shape of the right hand frog is quite comic. I do not know how Jono plans to proceed with the dialogue and animation in the film but I would hope he has the frogs zap a couple of flies here and there with their extendable tongues (fast food anyone?). This is, of course, if he decides to use frogs at all! I have yet to hear whether or not these designs will be used. As with the bats, this picture was drawn in mechanical pencil.
The Day that I Died is a poetic story of tragedy turned to happiness when a girl dies and becomes reborn through death to a better place. The real world is colour drained and almost lifeless - mirroring the little girl who is close to death - but the afterlife is everything she wants it to be, colourful and exciting (this is my understanding of the film - quite like Corpse Bride in terms of colour). Wheni drafted up the sketch I had completely free reign over design and materials used. It simply had to be a little girl on Death's door (so to speak). I drew two pictures of the same girl, one in hospital garb with an I.V. and one in a summer dress. The first girl is the girl near death, she has dark circles around her eyes and she is bald from all the treatments she has recieved to cure her illness. I had her hunched over to show her phsyical frailty. The I.V. is oversized to emphasize just how small and young she is. The Grim Reaper in the shadow was something I added to literally say - "you are about to die". The second girl has all her hair and a beaming smile. She is far more open and expressive in body language showing she is perfectly alright (albeit dead) in the afterlife. I have no idea what the afterlife looks like so swirly clouds sufficed for this early draft. This picture was drawn in mechanical pencil. I do not know as yet if any of these ideas have been chosen, but to this point i have not had any follow up talks about them.
Groups - Week 3
As mentioned before there was little work to be done on some of the groups I am involved in so i freelanced out a little bit. Here is the update for the main four groups (and the synopsis I missed last week for my fourth group):-
War in Wunderland: Adam told me this week that the storyboard artist he had planned has dropped out last minute so I snapped that job up with a big smile on my face! I have planned to begin these storyboards this week coming (monday onward) to be finished within two weeks, I hope. The reasoning behind the long turnaround is that I am working on the boards on my own with all my other work on top. There are a lot of reference thumbnails so it is going to be time consuming. Adam has given me to the end of term to complete these but I want to get them done sooner so whoever works on the animatic can start working on timing. More updates on this part of the project next week.
Cafe de B...: Ash finalised three character designs this week. He was happy with the old man and the two coffee shop employees. He had said previously that he was less keen on the old woman and i did change the eyes as asked but it still was not what he was looking for - which is fair enough. Three out of four isn't bad is it?! The next step was to complete the model sheets for the old man and coffee employees (see below). These model sheets were completed on Macromedia Flash 2004 and they all share the same hand template. On one of the old man's model sheets there is a hand template that can be copied and modelled separately. By reapplying textures to the same model hand this will save Ash time modelling and rigging/weighting.
The same re-texturing idea can be applied to the coffee employees bodies - which are essentially the same. The normal employee can be textured with normal trousers and shoes as the rock/goth employee can be textured with jeans and converse sneakers. The red highlight on the old man is designed to allow the modellers to model him with or without his blazer jacket. I was not sure whether he was going to have it on in the cafe or whether it would be hung up on a rack. Other than these model sheets I have not been asked to do anything more for Ash at this time.The Stamp Collector: Becca has yet to task me any jobs so I have concentrated on other concept areas this week.
Aspiration Point: This story was omitted from last weeks blog as I completely forgot the title! Aspiration Point, a Kyle Elliot story, follows a young boy and his passion for fishing. Set in a fantasy realm where humans hate sentient robots (much like the end hours of I, Robot) the boy is harrassed by a young inquisitive machine who is actually much better at fishing than him. The two eventually land themselves in a scuffle with a wild beast/machine. When they exit the skirmish alive it is as friends. What interested me about this story was the strong visual artwork that accompanied the pitch (very heavily influenced by Manga Japanime etc, which is a very distinguishable style) and the underlying racist storyline. Whether or not it is intentional, the story shows a young white boy constantly ignoring and alienating the other young 'boy'. This alienation and prejudice becomes discrimination when the white boy throws mud at the other. The white boy then gets his come-uppance in the form of someone or something much larger and stronger than he. Before he is squashed the other 'boy' intervenes and together the two save themselves from the threat. The heart behind intervening even after he had mud thrown in his face really appealed to me. The overt story of acceptance and friendship and the subtle reference to racial equality shows this story has really been thought about strongly.
Since last week I had drafted an idea for a wild mecha beast, which I then re-drew this week. The original was a warthog - Pumbaa from Lion King meets Lord of the Flies - with rat teeth. Not incredibly scary but this is after all an all ages film.
The second design is far more scary. Kyle wanted the beast to be a wild machine, so here we have a wild mechanical wolf complete with chest cavity power source and piston driven legs. Neither of these two designs have been confirmed as yet.
I thumbnailed the middle sequence of the film, Kyle took the end fight sequence and Rob Evans took the beginning fishing sequence. My thumbnails are shown below: -
These thumbnails were then drafted into first stage storyboards. By this I mean that the ideas are still lose and succeptable to change as the story develops and progresses. I deliberately did not conform to the conventional picture in a box storyboard formula for two reasons. 1) Kyle's attention to detail is insane. There is no way i am going to draw that much into the storyboards one after another and so on. A lot of the backgrounds have been left out so they can be added later digitally when they are finalised. What is important I think is that the characters be shown doing or looking the way they should at the time they should be. This helps the animator with poses and the backgrounds can be added afterward. 2) the style of the story and the artwork begs for more dynamic and interesting boards. The artwork lends itself so well to comic art that the boards would look far more interesting as a storyboarded comic so to speak. These are all shown below (with the exception of the final few pictures as the beast has yet to be finalised. I represented it as a giant american hard-gum in the thumbnails but for storyboards the likeness should be more accurate): -
Finally, here are some sketches that didn't make it into the first week or second week blog due to neglegence on my part (I misplaced them). I found them though so here they are!
The six above pages are all the original concept sketches for the old people and coffee employees for Ash Reemul's Cafe de B... idea. I did not just jump straight into one drawing for all the ideas I really did work on it honest! Ash picked out the ones he liked and then I went from there. Little arrows or stars mark the preferred designs of the time.
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