Research/Concept Art

[100th post!] Pre-Production Complete

Celebrating my 100th Blog post AND the completion of my Pre-Production project. It's been a mission, but it's got done :)

The Final Design Bible:
Theatre of The People Design Bible
My Production Report:
AliceNightingale_ProductionReport
My Visual Research File:
Visual Research File
All my Sketchbook work for the Project:
Alice Pre Pro Sketch Book

Pre-Production: Sketchbook

Apologies for the post spamming today, but I was waiting for this to upload before I started my other two posts, aaaaand it only just finished. Here's a .pdf of all my sketchbook work for this project, so far:

Alice PrePro Sketch Book

Pre-Production Inspiration/Research

Somehow, when Kathy told us to research Character Design, I don't think she would've expected this to pop up in what the website it's from calls "100 inspiring character designs".

However I did find an awesome blog that interviews different character/pre-production designers and showcases their work: http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/
It has quite a variety of different artists/animators on there, and the videos/pictures are really interesting, especially when you come across something you know and love. I especially enjoyed stumbling on the interview with Carlos Grangel who talked about his methods and designs for characters in The Corpse Bride (YAY BURTON!):



I recommend people check it out, it's a really cool website.

Workwise for this project so far I have been doing lots of research, mainly gathering images of wartime Berlin, watercolour artists, German wartime artists, concept art, clothing studies aaaand lots of doodles/mindmapping/scribbles.


I'm still a little hesitant to put things up on my blog at the moment, because things really are still in the rough stage, perhaps when I have more solid ideas and style I'll be a little braver.

11 Second Club, Concept/Storyboard/Reference

Voice One: "You stole it! I..."
Voice Two: "I thought you put it there!"
Voice One: "Why would I put it there?!?"
Voice Two: "Kindness?"
Voice One: "Kindness?! You stole it! He stole it!!"

My initial idea was to have two squirrels arguing over a nut, pretty basic, but also pretty obvious so I'm glad I didn't use that idea (also I'd've had to try and animate squirrels, despite watching lots of Disney films throughout my youth, I doubt I'd probably fail epically). This idea arrived almost instantaneously after listening to the voice clip, (a transcript can be found above), which was a minor miracle as this was early Monday morning.


My second idea appeared not long after while we were in the 2D session breaking down the soundclip to begin the start of our dopesheets: An Angel and a Devil (like the two little guys who you always see in films acting as the characters conscience) arguing over a stolen "feeling", the ending, where the Devil would shout "He stole it!" would've panned out to reveal the character who was having a battle with their conscience, and the Angel and Devil had been sat/floating by their shoulders.



After speaking with Derek he raised some problems with my idea (he's good at doing that), in that it wasn't obvious what my characters were arguing over, whereas with the squirrel idea it was too obvious, this wan't obvious at all. He also suggested changing the Devil to the one who says "kindness?" to make it more ironic and add a bit of comedy to it. So, my revised idea is still having an Angel and a Devil arguing, but this time, the Angel is the angry one, because the Devil has stolen his Halo and got it stuck over his horns.




Now having finished the storyboard, I have recorded some reference material (with horrendous acting once again) in order to make a quick animatic this week. I still need to use After Effects to composite the two clips (since I couldn't act for the Angel & Devil at once), but I have the cut that I want to use to emphasise the "kindness" line. Also note my amazing props. Yeeeah.


Aaaand finally (this has been a mammoth update) this is a quick drawing I did in Photoshop to give a (very) rough idea of what the final thing will kind of look like:


(The background picture is from ForsakeWolf at Deviant Art who put this up as a Stock photo so that others can use it for free).

Freeze/Crash Count... 4

I finished the fly symbol last night, I wasn't happy with the legs I'd drawn on the other one, they looked a bit stiff considering they'd be blowing about in the wind as it flew. He has the anatomically correct six legs now! Each leg is on a separate layer and each individual leg is made up of nine different frames that loop with the wings.

I'm currently working on the lab escape scenes, I've completed the backgrounds, click for a larger preview...
The Inner Lab:

aaaand, the World outside the Lab:


I'm now off to animate the fly in these scenes :)

Planning... because it's better to plan a little bit late than not at all.

Being the neurotic I am, and in preparation for the Formation project, I sat down this morning with the help of (a not very enthused) Jake to work out the exact length for every part of the Animation. Besides my neurosis about needing to know exactly how long everything is, I have some good reasons for doing so...
...Flash is notorious for crashing (Jake suggested we keep a tally going which sounds like a good idea: it currently stands at 1), so hopefully by making the animation in separate files will ease the strain, and also make it easier to edit any mistakes... We can each work on our bits of the project separately (from the comfort of our own homes!) knowing that when we come to edit the animation together, it'll (hopefully) be the correct length and bits won't overrun. It's also been easier to share the workload, so that we all have an even ammount of things to be getting on with.

We decided that we're going to edit the final scenes together using After Effects, this is partly because it'll be easier than doing so in Flash, but also because we want to add a paper texture to the background. As the animation's stlye is paper cut-out (and most of the symbols literally are scanned in pieces of coloured paper...), a plain white background would be boring and plain lazy on our part. Flash hates having the paper texture in the background (we're having to produce the animation at 1920 x 1080, so it's pretty large), but having it move makes it crash (hence the total standing at 1 from when we tried this morning...), but AE seems to like it, and if we export all of the scenes from Flash with an Aplha Channel (as we accidently did with an old version of the Animatic which we had a test play with... see below...) then it'll (metaphorically speaking) be a piece of cake. Hopefully.



Annnd I forgot to post this, an update of the (as yet still unfinished) fly symbol, now with FOUR legs:

(P.S. Congratulations to my tutor Andy who's just had a baby boy!)

Maya 3D Room Environment

So, I've finished and handed in my Maya project. It's been a bit of bitch and times, but it's finally completed. I realise now that I should've blogged as I went along to document my progress, but I've spent so much of my time working on it this week (and playing Heavy Rain...AWESOME). Luckily, I have over a dozen renders that have documented my progress. I still consider myself to be pretty crap at Maya (and when Georg sees my texturing I'm sure he'll probably agree...), but I'm pleased I've actually managed to create something AND texture it AND the final result looks pretty good.

So, from the beginning, my rough plan, based loosely upon my background project interior I changed it from a bedroom to a sitting/living room, purely because I had far more ideas about what I could put into the room (and the fact that I thought it would be easier to model a sofa than a bed).

First baby steps into Maya, with a very basic sofa:

The sofa is probably the object that has undergone the most transformation. I had lots of ideas on what to fill the room with, (close competitors were a fish bowl and fruit bowl) but I decided on making a bookcase and a coffee table as my main bits of furniture. Things like the canvas 'painting' and the rug were made up as I went along.

The first lights went up on the window-wall, but I actually enjoyed myself(!) when it came to making the standing lamp, I love the shadows it casts.


I really got into the swing of modelling objects (despite their basic-ness) I'm pretty pleased that they actually look lifelike(ish). A little close-up of my TV (with static white noise!) and bookcase (which I didn't realise had super shiny reflective books till it came to near the end...)

Wallpaper texture, also shows the full shape of the room and the ceiling was quite possibly the most annoying thing to get right:


I couldn't get the rug to look right, and when I tried to get to texture the floor the rug was stuck to it, so it got deleted, with the intention of returning, but I liked the reflections left on the floor by the table, so it was never put back in. The floor was also super-reflective when I first put the texture on it.

Aaaand, the final thing:

With a pretty occulent render (that Olly wanted me to do...), it makes the sofa look pretty cool:

Background Project

Ah, what a hellish week last week was. Certainly the busiest on the course so far! I had both the background project and my essay to finish. Thankfully I managed to both, though I will admit I was feeling pretty damn stressed about the whole thing, you know you need to take a break from essay writing when you can't even form coherent sentences anymore!

So, here are my 3 finished backgrounds:
1. Exterior Sea background (click for full view please):


2. Interior (this was the last one I completed, and I would've given it more detail, added things on top of the tables etc, but didn't have time with the essay as well!):

I'm particularly pleased with how the lighting worked out and how the light looks yellow-y on the bed :)

3. My favourite, another exterior (it's a bit shadowy on the bottom left hand corner because of how it scanned in, I had to do it in two parts and join them together in photoshop):


As I'd finished my essay & background project according to schedule, I had all of monday off to myself so decided I'd mess around in Flash, I tried to do a lip-sync to a voiceclip I'd found on my computer, but for some reason Flash didn't really want to play ball and let me create a "classic motion guide" layer, I'm not really sure what that was about, but it kind of scuppered my plans. However, I decided I'd give it a go for practisng the old faithfull walk cycle, and I think it came out pretty well, no real signs of a limp, which is pretty good considering it didn't take too long or had too much effort behind it.



I'm thinking that I might upload my Essay, because it seems to be the growing trend among the other first-years. Hmm. Wether or not anyone would read it is another matter. I also went to go and see "The Princess and The Frog" today with Olly and one of my flatmates, in all honesty, it's a good watch, as long as you don't mind a large number of songs. The animation itself is pretty shit hot, the bit that stood out for me most was a scene with hundreds of fireflies slighting up the whole swamp. It must've been done using particle effects. It was pretty damn awesome.

background beginnings

I've spent most of this weekend planning my essay and trying to get as much as possible finished for the background project. So far i've completed both my exterior locations:

An Underwater scene:
(you can click on the image to get a larger preview of it!)

and a Graveyard:


Aaaaand, this is my interior (I used the Sims2 to make a model room to base it on!):

I think the graveyard is my favourite, I wanted to colour that one in, but our brief said that we had to colour the interior and leave one exterior in pencil. If I had more time and didn't have to write the essay (the deadline for both is on the same day, hence why I got this out of the way now...), I would've coloured it, who knows, I may come back to it later on.

And in case you're interested I uploaded some of my notebook scribbles (not related to the course) on my DeviantArt here.

New Term. New Projects. New Software.

This new term is already turning out to be pretty sic. We've got some crazy new projects (including working with Broadcasting students to produce graphics for their TV show [i'm scared shitless about that one], an Animation Background project and in the future we're being set Modelling projects in Maya and Flash projects.); new Software (After Effects [which after the first session doesn't seem as horribly scary as I thought, except it kept crashing...] and Flash [which I'm pretty stoked about]); and learning to do new things like Modelling on Maya. It's going to be awesome.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon installing upgrades for my computer in order to install Flash, which took forever. While I was doing that, I handwrote out this blog update to type up and began work on my new sketchbook/background project for Kathy (and cleaned my bathroom, on a saturday night, how unbeliavbly wild University life is). But today i've successfully managed to install it, so I'll most likely be spending my free time practising getting to grips with it. (Unlike Maya & AE, Flash looks a lot more easy to use, and it's small enough that my computer can handle it... hopefully.) I've wanted to learn Flash for a long time, but had never managed to get my hands on a copy or be taught any of the controls before now. I hope that now I've got my own copy, uit means I'll be able to do some animation of my own when I get home. At Christmas I only had Animation paper, and a combination of being ill, working nearly everyday and having a distinct lack of ideas and Rostrum Camera meant I did nada on the work front. I also like the idea of Flash being Vector based and related to Photoshop, (I think this is perhaps why I feel a little more confident in learning it), it'll also give me a chance to improve my graphics tablet skills.

I'm looking forward to the background project alot more than the animal-head one (sorry Kathy). The backgrounds have to be the weirdest sizes I've come across, it's a size called 12 Field (which, incase you're wondering the exact measurements, which you're probably not, are 267 x 330mm), which is a little annoying because it's slightly larger than A4 (a nice comfortable size), and means i've had to crack out my mahoosive A2 sketchbook in order to work at the correct size. I'm glad though, because you can't work on A4 forever and the larger size means I can add more detail within the drawings.

I'm already feeling a bit more confident with Maya (which is a relief, although i'm still terrfied of going anywhere near the graph editor), our first CGI environments tutorial/session with Georg was on tuesday and I was very pleased because I actually understood it all. It'll still be a long time before I'll be able to create anything decent on it, if I thought my computer could handle it, I'd install Maya on it to practice,though it may buckle under the weight of Flash, we shall see....