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).

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.

get bored and blog

So, next Tuesday, we’re heading to Bradford for the Animation Festival which looks, quite frankly, pretty freaking sweet. At the crack of 8 o’clock I will depart on a 10 hour mini-bus journey (ahmygawd) and hit Yorkshire in the evening time. Sadly we’re going to miss some gaming talks on the Tuesday which I know some people are pretty bummed out about, I think it’d be interesting to go along to them, but as I tend to be a watcher (or some might say logistics person) rather than a proper gamer (dual analog sticks are the bane of my life) I’m not completely devasted. However, I’ve been on a bit of a stop-motion kick this week and cannot wait to see Coraline in 3D for the second time and Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is also playing at the Festival. It’s going to be interesting to see how they’ve translated the book into a film, if I hadn’t left my copy of it at home I would’ve read it before going (or on the long bus ride there, depending how travel sick I feel). Before I head off to that though, I’m going to see “9” tomorrow at the cinema, so by this time next week I think my brain might have been liquefied and over stimulated by the sheer awesome-ness of all things animation.

I also wanted to show you what happens when you’re going through a phase of loving the stop-motion and decide to carve your Pumpkin on Halloween whilst watching “The Nightmare Before Christmas”:



Haha, me and my flatmates had fun creating our own Jack Skellington, I drew his outlines in marker-pen before we were brave enough to chop him up. I also drew some Jack & Sally fangirly pictures which I’m pretty proud of. If you’re interested, you can see them and some more of my personal, non-university work on my deviant art: http://insertcoolusername.deviantart.com/