Friday 11 March 2011

The magic cupboard.

Thursday 10th of March,  me and the group (magic cupboard) got together to decide on the look of the animation even though we had the storyboard down and we knew what we were doing we all didn't have a clue about the look of the animation and as a group this was one of the most important factors as we had changed our minds alot of the style first it was going to be a stylised look like the incredible then we went with the idea of kids drawings then we went on the basis of have Internet pictures photoshopped however I thought that it seemed to quickly done with all of them factors so we all decided we would do the drawings and photoshop them ourselves so we all had a go at the scenes yet in the end they would all look the same photoshopped. So we had to decided what would need to be drawn in each scene. I made a list and handed out who could do what.

This is for just the first story.

Scene 1. Friends house.
  • House 
  • Tree
  • Fence
  • Gate
  • grass
  • sun and sky 
  • Path
Scene 2. Living Room.
  • TV
  • Sofa
  • shelves-Books
  • Rug
  • Pictures on the wall
  • Door.
Scene 3. Kitchen.
  • Wall
  • Cooker
  • Cabinets
  • washing machine
  • fridge
  • tiles on floor
  • window
  • sink
  • door
We have decided that the second story will just be one scene as it isn't as long as the other and has more characters in it than scene's so it will be easier to keep just the one scene, However we will be discussing that next week once we have the first story done. Our deadline has been extended to the 10th of may however our competition finishes on the 7th of May so we will have our deadline for then.


Joy x

Tuesday 8 March 2011

The Magic Cupboard

This is a new addition to my projects, I haven't started to blog about this project yet as I feel like it hasn't had time to develop to talk about it yet. I'm working with four people on this project, we have picked an online competition. Our online competition is called 'Kindness' we have to create a piece of media like a simple video, poem, written story, music etc... in our case a animation that is about Kindness. The Competition gives us a outline on what it would like to see when it comes to creating the animation. It has to be ether about Life-changing kindness, unexpected kindness, or just ordinary daily kindness or go out and show kindness that we see in the world. We decided that we should do something similar to creature comforts, get audio from people in the streets or people we know and interview them and what they think kindness is and if they have a story to share about something personal to them that they thought was kind. We looked at the categories of people would thought would be interesting to the audience. Children was one of our main group of people we would like to interview, however none of us really had any children close to us to interview. Which set us back a week but in the week we were set back to be productive we looked at the style we would like to give the animation, our idea's together was to keep it simple and colourful. Nothing too complicated that it distracted the audience to the main topic which was 'Kindness' so we looked at things like the film 9 with the simple shapes of a human like dolls, others images were something like cards with circular people on them we liked the shapes such as jelly babies and the character Pillsbury dough boy . Luckily once we had done our research I was able to ask my house mate if they would be willing to interview their little brothers one being 6 and the other 9, on what they thought kindness was and a story about kindness that happened in their lives. We had some trouble getting the audio for when we wanted because the young boys lived in Portsmouth and we couldn't interview them personally or use any good quality audio equipment so it had to be recorded on an IPhone and sent to us by email. Whilst we were waiting for the audio off the young boys we thought that it would be productive to book out a marantz and record people we knew such as other animators and our lecturer on what we think kindness is and if they have experienced kindness or have done a kindness in their lives. We had some very good stories to go on however once we finally got the audio from the young boys we really liked the way they sounded, it was very entertaining and having presented our work to the class it got many laughs and people seemed entertained by the to children, so we have decided to go with their audio. Our next step was to have a character design, I myself did a handful of character designs for the two character however in the end we wanted something even simpler so we have gone with the character such as Pillsbury dough boy. We would make the 6yr old be small and light blue and the 9yr old be tall and bigger than the 6yr old plus red. The reason for the simple colour is we thought if we have children as our audio we would want the animation to be aimed at the children. However as a Competition is for every age group we made a decision that it would just be the character as simple and child like. Our next step was the storyboard, I made two storyboards, as a group we liked the idea of a pop up background and then it lead for the boys to tell their stories as a pop up book, when I was making the storyboard it was more to do with how we would start the animation and the style we were looking for. The next week we all sat down and decided the storyboard we would be going for was the two boys sat on top of a rough maybe leather book and first say what they think Kindness meant or was and then have them open the book and start with the 6yr old story first, were he is at his friends house and his friend falls over and hurts his elbow and he takes them to his mum. As he is telling the story when he changes scene the background will go down and pop up with a different scene for example the house will pop up at the beginning an then when he says and my friend hurt his elbow the house will fall down and the sofa and table creating the living room will pop up. Then the 9yr old will start his story with the first pop up of his scene. to then end with them closing the book which will have Kindness engraved on the front and the credits rolling with the audio we used from other interviews as the end music. My next objective is to properly present the storyboard in photoshop and then I will start to draw the buildings and objects for the background, One member is modelling the characters another is animating them, someone is editing the sound and the other is rigging the scenes. 

Joy x 

Monday 7 March 2011

Frankenstoke

I had a tutorial with Adrian tooth the producer, I showed him how far I have gotten in the project, I showed the new addition to Fritz seen as he has changed drastically from an gremlin creature, (sort of) to a Rabbit with a cloak. I showed him my textures and how I have started to do UV maps for the laboratory. Feed back on my animatic would be to have it a little more detailed, in the area when Fritz is moving the box across the room, show him maybe limping. Plus the machine for the roof and the opening of the doors to be modelled and have more than one button which I said would be different and I was only using the material I had. The other would be to have more still camera's than moving the camera around so much as it can be quite disoratating for the audience. I will also be doing my own little animation to Frankenstoke with a frog I have modelled as I would like to have some imput into the animation progress so if the lead animator doesn't give me anything to do I will be doing little shorts myself to put into my portfolio.

Tuesday 1 March 2011

Assistant Animator.

I had a meeting with Dan and Richard yesterday about the progress we had done so far, still working on the characters however we finally agreed on a style. I showed them the hospital and graveyard I had done, the changes made tot the graveyard are to put in a maya tree and not build one, that the gate needs to be less medievil and they want a path and it to be ontop of a hill also to maybe have a church in the background, i suggested that if they weren't seeing the church that much to composite a church onto the end product otherwise its just wasted time on a building we arnt going to use the same goes with the other buildings and in the story the buildings arn't going to be seen however they need to have some detail to them but the tower will be the main focus of the animation. So my next job will to redo the graveyard with the new changes and to do my own shop called the white rabbit it will be the pet shop. We decided to use our logos for the shop signs as it won't be copywriting. Other than that the next time we meet i should have a shop completed and a photoshoped image of what i think the street should look like.