This is your Captain speaking!

Okay, we had our peer review on Wednesday, and it went well. People that were new to the story understood everything from the animatic, and they seemed to like the idea. Well, it got laughs in all the right places!

The animatic is still about 15 seconds longer than we'd like it to be, but it's hard to decide what to cut. I'm sure it'll become apparent once we start animating! It's also a bit dull without the soundtrack. Imagine music and you'll get a better idea of the feel we're going for!


Oh, and the kid designs have changed. Again! So ignore the poor wee creepy models in the animatic. New kids look a bit more like this-

So tonight I've been doing a bit of prop modelling, since Erin's a bit pushed for time. I'm no modeller, so they're awful, but here's what I managed! - (the bed and toybox)

Since I'm a bit ill, I think I'll spend tomorrow modelling from the flat. Get some toys, pencils, night light, the curtains etc done so I can pass them on to Charlie.

Cheers lads! 

New Schedule

After our meeting with Bob Last yesterday, we've had to take a look at the length of our scenes. Some cuts will have to be made, mainly in scene 2. 

We'll also be taking another look at the kid designs, after deciding the designs are still a bit... creepy, haha.

So yeah!

Cuts and changes. Again. Woooo

Monster Vision continued

Vision tests for Ellie's Monster:

Since Ellie's Monster has six heads, the screen was split into the vision of of those six heads. I wanted to do test it in a really stylized exaggerated way. So I created the basic division layer and used a series of masks to keep each layer within its section and simply keyed movement in the layers.

Nikki said she felt come blinks were needed again to highlight that the audience are seeing this through the monster's eyes.

I did a simple fade to black kind of thing really quickly but ..it just didn't look clear enough...

Monster Vision

For the animatic, Nikki asked me to have a wee look at the monster vision ideas. Sam's Monster's vision was actually proving to be a VERY difficult task to pull off.

As Sam's monster is mainly rocky textures I tried to have some dusty textures around his eyes to explain to the audience that it is Sam's Monster's vision. However I felt it was too distracting and boring.

In this test, as Sam's Monsters eyes have an orange glow, I thought I'd add the orangy/yellow tint to the vision. I also gave the vision a watery movement to try to bring some life to the scene. But it just didn't really seem to work.


Of course these are only the first two tests. More practice and research are undoubtedly needed for this section if we continue with it in the film.

Animatic Shot Compositions- Scenes 1 and 3

Just some stills to show the composition of the shots for the animatic.

Scene 2 to follow!

Cheers!

Monster 2: Animatic Model Complete!

Cage needed the models lumped together quick as you like to use in our 3D animatic, So Monster 2 has come to a hasty conclusion today, He's missing 2 inner mouths, but the good news is everything seems to have come together not too badly

I realised after investigating my mouth modelling techniques that i may have made it more difficult than strictly necessary for myself to give him teeth. So, i went back a few steps and opened the mouth of Happy head like he was in a dentist's chair... 

 I made gums by using poly cubes and then shaping to fit the roof and floor of the mouth using the lattice deformer.

 Extruding the teeth...

That way i could work with the teeth/ tongue outside the model and then pop them back into the head like dentures. They were then combined with the head and that whole head was duplicated. Then it was just a case of attaching all the heads, mirroring geometry, snapping points, latticing Derp's eyes to fit his skull etc. etc. (I make it sound so off hand, yet I type this at 20:25 on a Monday, the only animator left in the village)

 Voila! turn-arounds!

 Some close ups of those happy happy chappies

 And a smoothed view of the gang

 I'll be tweaking him a bit in the coming days and then i may attempt a bit of detailed sculpting.

Wee Voices!

So over the weekend I met up with my wee volunteers to steal their voices! 

Sam Culling

Ellie Tait

Both did very well, and I'm gonnae have a fun day today trawling through the clips and picking out the best lines!

Only problem was created entirely by myself, I forgot to record one line! How does that even happen to a director?! So the last little "I'm drawing a robot!" will be re-done at the end of the week. Road trip!

Expect a new (final!) animatic by the peer review next week!