I don't have anything to show you right now but I thought I'd just tell you that production has started and I'm getting really into this. I've just done an character walk cycle and I'm really happy with it!
I'd like to retract that statement as I have just done another and it's so bad I'm going to have to remove the scene... Oh well I'll get walk cycles down sometime soon.
why can't I draw today?
Thought I'd just update this really quickly with news that I am having a bad weekend for drawing. Can totally not draw right now, which is making trying to get my characters drawn for tomorrow very difficult if not impossible. :( Here's what the list of stuff to do looks like so far.
It's not too easy to see but I still have a lot to do unfortunately. This list doesn't include all the inanimate objects either. Although it does include the pigeons. I still have a flag, a box and a newspaper at least. But once their done I'm ready to begin animating. I'm hoping to get a couple of days straight to do this in because really the success of this whole piece relies on it being a one shot piece. So if I can help it I don't want to have to move my background from the rostrum camera. :S could be tricky.
I might make some inanimate objects tonight as they wont be too hard to draw and pray that my drawing abilities return by tomorrow afternoon.
The style
Ok so this is a post to explain why I picked the style for this animation I did and what references I'm going to use in the making of my animation.
So a while back I picked a character and tried him out in several different styles and now I'd like to explain my thinking behind my final decision.
So a while back I picked a character and tried him out in several different styles and now I'd like to explain my thinking behind my final decision.
So here are my original character style ideas. The first is a lilo and stitch watercolour and pencil inspired character.
However once I'd painted him in adding pencil colour didn't really improve the design. He still felt a little bit flat and uninspired. Which was unfortunate as I liked this idea and although I got the idea from an animation set in a warm climate with lots of vegetation I felt it would translate nicely to a cityscape in winter.
My nest design is actually based on the work of my best friend Kirsty Oxley, an illustration student at the college.
Kirsty's fond of a watercoloured design with thin black cross-hatching detail. I've always liked seeing her work and thought I'd try it out as well but I can't get my cross-hatching thin enough and my character looks to blocky with his cross hatching. I thought about buying a thinner pen and trying again but I then thought it actually had the wrong kind of feel for this story. Although this works nicely with Kirsty's rustic, slightly scary representation of Tam 'o shanter, it doesn't work with a lighter, modern representation of a story about pigeons. It has a kind of old fashioned feel to it that doesn't fit with my animation.
Now the last I like. It's based on another soft, wintertime story. The snowman.
Now where as when animating the snowman each cell was coloured in separately, my animation shall just have coloured in characters in this style. I like it because it feels soft and light and has a light-hearted feel which would be in-keeping with the rest of the story. I also thought against the other characters he felt the best rounded. His shadows were better and he felt more 3D than the rest of the designs. For a little while I was worried he would disappear under the rostrum but I tried it and I could see him fine and so could Dragon Frame. Which was brilliant because I knew this was the design I wanted to go ahead with.
Animatics
Ok so feeling like I should update you now. I've been putting it off till I had something pretty concrete to put up here and now I do. I have now decided upon my story. I have spent a long time perfecting it and I'm now going to talk about the decisions, problems, concerns and ideas that got me to this point in my development.
I decided to stick with the idea of the pigeons from the city art centre because I feel I can create the best response to them as I have a connection with them, as I grew up with them around me. I also feel it would benefit me to know the area and the events that take place locally. Initially my idea was to incorporate lots of ambient things around the pigeons, things that reflected Edinburgh, including a delightful story I found when researching the pigeons about one winter when they were given little coats.
During the production of this story I threw away a few story strains before finally picking this one.
So the first idea revolved around the idea of the pigeons being alive, which is the story in the storyboard beneath. However the story posed too many questions and created too many plot holes to insure a coherent story.
So Next I developed a less demanding narrative, in which we see one man's relationship with these pigeons. I liked the idea and felt the story made sense. Then I had it pointed out to me that when the scene changes to the man's room and we view him it was confusing and caused the viewer to get a little lost. Once I saw it, I really saw it. Just so you know what I'm talking about, here's the animatic.
However this did give me a good idea. I realised that I would like to see the whole animation from a static camera, almost like another statue. This did however mean I had to reconsider my story and I thought to myself, do I actually need a narrative here? To which I decided I didn't. I still liked my first ambient idea, the idea of an Edinburgh snapshot, a small period in time when these statues occupied this space. at this stage right now I feel like lots of things are falling into place. The idea of a snapshot in time fits in nicely with a static camera. There was however one part I am still arguing with myself about. I have had since the start a small section where the last leave falls of a tree and it becomes autumn. But it is the only cut away in my animation and I can't decide if I feel it provides a much needed break or compromises the integrity of the whole idea of a static camera... I believe the likelihood is I will remove it and instead replace it with just some leaves falling but it's unfortunate as I had like it.
All in all I feel this story has a good plot, even though it doesn't really develop, I like the idea of it being a simple animation with lots of little pieces of movement. It allows me to use all aspects of life in Edinburgh to my advantage and allows me to play with the other aspects of creating a successful film, aside from the narrative itself. I'm looking forward to animating it to be honest.
I decided to stick with the idea of the pigeons from the city art centre because I feel I can create the best response to them as I have a connection with them, as I grew up with them around me. I also feel it would benefit me to know the area and the events that take place locally. Initially my idea was to incorporate lots of ambient things around the pigeons, things that reflected Edinburgh, including a delightful story I found when researching the pigeons about one winter when they were given little coats.
During the production of this story I threw away a few story strains before finally picking this one.
So the first idea revolved around the idea of the pigeons being alive, which is the story in the storyboard beneath. However the story posed too many questions and created too many plot holes to insure a coherent story.
So Next I developed a less demanding narrative, in which we see one man's relationship with these pigeons. I liked the idea and felt the story made sense. Then I had it pointed out to me that when the scene changes to the man's room and we view him it was confusing and caused the viewer to get a little lost. Once I saw it, I really saw it. Just so you know what I'm talking about, here's the animatic.
However this did give me a good idea. I realised that I would like to see the whole animation from a static camera, almost like another statue. This did however mean I had to reconsider my story and I thought to myself, do I actually need a narrative here? To which I decided I didn't. I still liked my first ambient idea, the idea of an Edinburgh snapshot, a small period in time when these statues occupied this space. at this stage right now I feel like lots of things are falling into place. The idea of a snapshot in time fits in nicely with a static camera. There was however one part I am still arguing with myself about. I have had since the start a small section where the last leave falls of a tree and it becomes autumn. But it is the only cut away in my animation and I can't decide if I feel it provides a much needed break or compromises the integrity of the whole idea of a static camera... I believe the likelihood is I will remove it and instead replace it with just some leaves falling but it's unfortunate as I had like it.
All in all I feel this story has a good plot, even though it doesn't really develop, I like the idea of it being a simple animation with lots of little pieces of movement. It allows me to use all aspects of life in Edinburgh to my advantage and allows me to play with the other aspects of creating a successful film, aside from the narrative itself. I'm looking forward to animating it to be honest.
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