Summer work...

As promised to Alex, I've been doing some more rough Barista stuff over the summer in an attempt to get the film finished. I've also followed Andy's suggestion about making the animation more puppet based, which actually works really well and has been far quicker than the previous scenes. Had I realised this earlier, we probably could've had alot more of the final scenes done in rough in time for the hand in, but as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing! The puppet animation worked really well for Alice, I was able to easily add the subtle movement of her hips swaying and bag swinging.

Major Update: Crew Assignment/Negociated/Pitch projects...

So, it has literally been forever since I updated my blog, which deserves a slap on the wrists, but I have been crazy busy. The workload has now slowed - I only have 3 projects on the go, (Pitch Project, Negociated, Animation Technologies) as opposed to six (which included Dissertation Proposals and Crew Assignments Report) and working like a mad thing with Alex in order to get Barista sorted for the 3rd Year hand-in. Which we managed. Literally, just in time (security came along to kick everyone out at studio closing time and we were literally the only ones able to walk out), and the result can be shown below:

Barista (hand in draft) from Joleaf on Vimeo.

I'm continuing working on Barista for my Negociated brief, which means I will clean-up all the shots I worked on in the video above, and then get cracking on new ones after that. The hand-in is on the 8th, so I can tell I'm going to be working like crazy again. I've been exporting videos of my works in progress, however YouTube is having trouble with them: they'll upload, but not convert... I'm not sure if this is because they're exported from Animate and YouTube doesn't like it...

The only piece of written work remaining for this term (after handing in another set of literature reviews and film review - both of which I got damn good marks for - and a dissertation proposal, complete with massive bibliography) there's only the animation technologies essay to write: we have to research a technology that is/or can be used for animation, which for me, has been a real struggle to think of anything - I was always terrible at trying to invent made-up machines and gadgets as a child - but I came up with the idea of Digital Cameras and their now cheap and high quality avaliability... So I've got to find out a bit more and write it up in a nice essay format and presentation for the rest of our year D:

On a slightly funner presentaiton note, for the pitch project I'm working with Sasha, Insa, Emily and Paddy on creating ideas for a short animated series about the residents of a kitchen cuboard, the condiments, called "The Foodal System". Emily is in charge of creating script ideas and has posted some of the ideas on her blog already, here. Paddy and I have been working on lots of character design. I have been in charge of creating the all tea-bag rockband 'The Herbals', a bunch of hippy herbal teas...

Barista Work... Update

Well, well done blogger for putting them all in a crazy order. But I'm super busy with Barista stuff, so here's a few screen caps of works in progresses etc...

Barista Work

Barista Work: Carol (Animatic)

I should be packing to go home, but I've spent the morning doing this:

Barista Work: Carol

Taking Alex's original rough mannequin base for Alice, I've started to draw Carol up in Animate Toon Boom:

I haven't done as much work as I'd've liked to this weekend, I fear I've got the beginning of R.S.I. (the irony being my wrist/arm started to hurt the evening after Georg encouraged us all to go out and buy ergonomic keyboards and mice in a lecture on thursday), so I've been trying to avoid using the computer as much as possible, but in the meantime I've been reading towards my literary reviews

Barista Coffee Roadtrip

So, last Monday (it seems so long ago now), thanks to Alex's girlfriend, we road tripped to Origin Coffee's Roastery warehouse armed with a P2 camera and all the filming paraphernalia that goes with it.
Phil, the guy who works in the Roastery (who is also a great barista and Alex's new hero), made us so many Latte's (I later had a meeting with Andy and some other second years, I ended up uncontrollable twitching and gibbering rubbish from having about 6 cups!). We now have some excellent reference footage to work with, we shot Phil's hands making some pretty Latte's and Sarah making a poor one (watch the Animatic to understand).
Heart shaped Latte, created by Phil:


L-R: Phil, Alex and Me:


One happy-coffee-loving-chappy:


Phil also gave us some free Coffee and some hesian sacks that the beans come in (which I was really excited about in my caffiene crazed state and kept showing it off to everyone in the studio, much to their annoyance).

So, Me and Alex have since sat down and worked out exactly how many shots we have to do to get Barista sorted, and it turns out it's rather scary:
Barista Planning

Another development, following Derek's advice, has been to change Tim's stick figure Boss Carol into an Ex-Girlfriend of Tim's, since we're not going to have time to complete the scene where Tim comes face to face with all of his exes on a bus (you can see the designs I did for all the ex girlfriends here). I'm designing Carol who is going to be based upon this ex:

So, after my Pre-Production hand in on wednesday, it's full steam ahead on Barista!

Barista Work: Animatic

It's been a while blog, I've been busy neglecting you and half starting and not finishing everything else...

So, here's an updated version of the Barista Animatic, the first minute and a half is by Alex and the rest is by me...


Due to techincal problems and compatability issues, only me and Alex are going to be working on the final film, we're definitley animating up to the end of the animatic and anything after that will be a bonus! No more animatic we're heading straight into animating next!

Tomorrow, with the aide of Alex's girlfriend and armed with P2 cameras, we're roadtripping to some fancy coffee place Alex has got in contact with to shoot some refererence footage for the opening coffee-making sequence, so I'll be uploading some pictures of that soon :)

I'm currently working on pre-production like a boss, after my fairly successful pitch (I feel it went well... considering I didn't have a practice and Derek & Kathy hadn't heard anything about my change of idea...) things are coming together fairly quickly and easily.

Also going to be doing our second shoot for Cinematography tonight (our first was fairly successful, but there are a couple we need to reshoot). I'm also going to take my "monkey" camera and take pictures and do some interviews for our "behind the scenes" kind-of-thing we have to do to accompany it, as well as perform my role as shot keeper (or as Frankie says, 'shop keeper'), so that'll be up on here soon too.

Barista Work: Space Scene Animatic [UPDATE]

to be followed by...

Barista Work: Space Scene Animatic

I'm currently working on an Animatic for Tim's little Daydream sequence. I'm aiming to complete before next week when I have to go home for my Grandad's funeral. I'm going through what has so far been the worst three months of my life, I was hoping it would start to get a bit better, but I was given the news that one of my cats had to be put down today. Thanks life.

Barista Work: The League

My latest work for the Barista project... I had to go home this weekend, and without access to a computer with Animate I suggested to Alex that I get designing some characters for one of the most important scenes... where Tim, the coffee-making Hero, ends up face to face with his exes. 16 of them. So, I designed 16 exes.

Being obsessed with Scott Pilgrim it was awesome to be able to create a "league" of "evil" exes for Tim to face...

Before I left for home I found a hairstyle website and saved what I thought were the most appropriate hairstyles, (the only instruction Alex gave me was for them to "be hot"), which I got Alex to approve before I went:


Rough Doodles:




Final Designs, some look more similar to the photographs than others:

Barista Work: Transitions

A week or two ago I mentioned an idea I had to Alex about involving coffee beans in the cheesy screen wipes he wanted to put in, he liked the idea and thought we could use real coffee beans in stop motion to do this (inspired by Emily's Experimental bead project), so he asked me to design a few:

Pigeon

I've finished my first bit of Animation for Alex's project Barista :)



The final pigeon will be filled with a texture made up of photographs of real pigeons.
The ending was a bugger to get right, but I feel I've managed to achieve the pigeon's descent into a dive pretty well. Especially considering this is only the first time I've used ToonBoom Animate to actually do anything! And Alex is pleased with it which is the main thing!