Stress? What stress?

Some repainted versions of the backgrounds. Parr seemed OK with these. A tiny bit of issues raised about them but not much to consider otherwise. I'll get on with re-storyboarding the end. I just need you guys to stick to the plan. If all goes well, we can animate in a week and a half.

Near Death Experience

Well, what a day today has been! The film nearly got cut! Problems with work being shown on youtube, animatics not showing on the presentations, last minute editing, being lambasted by the tutors, yayayayayayayayayya...
But miraculously... we are still here! But.... we have to keep this place private. I have put a privacy thing on this blog for now. Its a bit of a shame that we cant even show our own work but that is the case Im afraid. Soooo... Bye bye to all the guys who used to lurk around here secretly! Its just the 5 of us now.

Heads Up!

Based off the mocel sheet Zen did of the girl. These are some constructions and measurements. We decided to change the dress a bit also. We r going to do away with the splits there and just go for a nice simple dress without any splits. If shes doing any high kicks just think of Princess Peach's moves in Smash Bros. We have a lot of the background people designed, and we will contact a model maker soon.

The Temple!

This layout is appears at the end where the master stands before the two characters and they bow to him. As you can probably see, the style is a little different to the other layouts. The dark lines are gone and the values are lighter.

Girly Stuff

Well, here it is. Finally! Some model sheets for the girl. And some concepts that Hozen did. All we need now are a few angles of the face and the constructions for it. And I think we can call the model sheets all done after that. For the next two weeks, the plan is to practice the characters and perform some animation tests. Try drawing the three characters in poses, try get some dynamic ones and get the whole body moving with the action. Apply a few facial expressions too. The details dont really matter, as long as you can nail down the proportions of each characters you wont notice if the shoes are actually wrong! BUT! The face is the only detail we cant get away with. That is why we must pay extra attention to their faces.
So the main areas are: The full body proportions and the face.
Animation tests are also going on for a day or two towards the end of the 2 weeks. The idea is to get you working under a time limit (10 min) so you will have to think about the overall form rather than little details from the start.
Tegan, you can continue with the production still as part of this. And if you can bring in the sheets with the eyes and hands, I can scan them all in for everyone. So in the coming weeks you can expect a crew-pack to be ready for you :) W00t! Its nearly 2am, I got to research my essay... Chow!
EDIT: Added a new image there that I forgot about.

Linezzzzzz

Some more layouts. Nearly finished another painting, this one is quite a lot more lighter than the rest and probably too colourful in places so I will adjust it for a bit first. We may have a first year helping us with the layouts too. At the moment the numbers are quite manageable but it would mean I would probably rush parts of it so I thought extra help would be good for us. It could mean I would get more time to help you guys out and do my essay :P
At the moment, I will try to sort out some model sheets for the girl. Zen, if you could post up that drawing of the girl u have, then I can compare the proportions and get this done.

Reloaded!

Soo, we have the changes made now. Tried to make them lighter, done away with the harsh black outlines. Added more variety to the colours. Now hopefully when it comes to the other paintings, I'll remember to do these. Meeting with the editor needs to be arranged so we can get the animatic timed out to what the final film should be.

Revamped!

In our first production meeting we had a few suggestions to alter some issues with the background. I dont think we need to make any major changes. The main thing was to have it more lighter and keeping the mood happy and therefore helping keeping with the mood of the story and fitting in with the animation. I will be reworking into the other paintings but heres what the changes look so far.
I still think the style of the characters fit each other. I think most people got confused by the wide variety of concepts we shown, which is what Peter Parr thought too. I dont believe we need to change the designs we have already. No, smoothing the boy's hair out because the girl has smooth hair (we might as well give him long hair like her too in that case). We could however tweak bits like incorporating some of the overlapping shapes in the boy's costume into the masters and girl. But be careful not to over do this.
So the plan now is to continue as we were. I heard Parr wasn't sure about our progress recently. I know we are in quite a good position at this point but apparently we haven't kept that pace up?!?!
But some good news... Jon Turner loved the idea of the film and gave us the all-clear on the storyboard so that is virtually complete. Same with the animatic except we need to run it pass the editor so we can fix up bits of the timing. That will begin next week.
Looking at the time table, we have another week to make more model sheets. 2 weeks after that to practice the characters to a quality that will prepare you for the animation stage. Also on that week, there will be animation tests going on. After that we exit the pre-production stage and enter the real production!

Kung fu panda character designs

Kung fu Panda link :D http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=photoGalleryAlbum&galleryid=1523&order=0 as requested by TJ. Enjoy.

Back to work :D

Hey guys, hope you all enjoyed trashing my house :D Hahaha, nah it was all in good fun! Anyway Ive re-timed the animatic somewhat and will show the Jon on Thursday at 11am. The length of the animatic is 2:03 which includes the title shot in the end. Some of the scenes may be a little too fast so I hope Jon can give us some advice on where to slow it down a bit. But I think maybe the start can slow a bit.
And here is another layout.
Other progress news: We have a final design for the boy and master. Still a bit to do on ze girl. We already produced a few model sheets for the boy and master. Well done on that. Some of you have been practicing the characters too which is great. We will be needing to do this for a large part of the beginning. Maybe around Christmas time you will begin to get used to it all, I think thats what happened with Seiji's team last year. So do keep that up.
So for this coming week we follow our original plan with producing more model sheets for hands, feet, eyes, faces etc. This also involve drawing the characters in various poses and facial expressions. Plus, we need to construct the girl. Yeah, shes been the most problematic of the characters, we pretty much have the design down. We just need those model sheets and an entire body shot of her.
As a side project there are still those smaller characters to toy with. We had an idea that we could give cameo roles to each of our team members and famous martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan!
Andddddddddd.... Thursday production meeting! I'll need to scan work in from you guys! Dunno if the school computers are working, but I think I heard that there are scanners in the library. So if I can get some scans for me before the meet then that would be awesome! Cya tomorrow!

Party Time!

Im sure most of you know anyway but.... theres a house party at my house this Friday. Do drop by! And have fun! Thats an order!
This layout was a bit of a pain. I realised some bits that didnt match up with the other layouts so I had to redraw this one. But its no big problem:) Looks like we may need to reassess the girl design. The face is probably still too complex to draw so we probably should take the design we have now and simplify it some more. Or some other way we can get everyone to be comfortable with drawing them.
Oh! And a big welcome to our latest recruit! Veronica Chen will be designing the sounds in our film. Its all coming together nicely so far. Hope youre not too stressed out already :)

Working through the limit:D

I tell you now, painting with a sore neck is a pain! But we managed to get there in the end!!!!!

We Are...

Poster for our lil team :D And something to show how the layouts are progressing from thumbnail colourkeys to finished paintings.
I came in today, it was raining like mad! And I some how suddenly got a stiff neck and couldn't look down for too long. So I thought sod the dissertation today, I'll fit it into another day. So Im working at home today, painting some backgrounds. I'll show ye when it be done yar? I sure hope I wasn't missed in the production meeting!

Another One Bites The Dust

Yeah, another layout down. Time out today, I'll be working on my dissertation. Happy life drawings Tegan n Hozen! Keith n TJ, maybe this is a good time to work on the essay yar? If youre not working on them, you pretty much know what to do anyway :) Let the fun begin!

Model Sheets Coming Soon

Hi team! Just to update on what we need to do. The boy design is as good as done! TJ will be on the job to produce some model sheets so you can all start practicing that on Wednesday. The girl design is as good as done too. Zen's just having a bit of trouble drawing her consistently. But once we find a formula for drawing her it should be easier. So I guess all thats left is the master character and the odd background guys. We could base some of them on the team members, this should be less tricky to design as we dont need a strong model sheet for them.
So plan for now is: Practice drawing the characters. Make model sheets to show how you would construct the characters. And try drawing the character's with expressions and in poses too.

That should continue for another 3 weeks according to our initial schedule. But I think we may just be ahead of that schedule so if we keep it up we can go to the animation proper soonish! Do constantly practice drawing the characters, I think TJ said that throughout the Bird team they practiced the characters throughout the production. If you havent drawn the boy much then now is the time to have a go. Youmay not be used to drawing these different characters but with enough attempts under your belt, you will get a better hang of it. So now is the time ladies and gentlemen!

Tuesday as I mentioned before is now my dissertation day and your life drawing day. So I may not be in tomorrow. But I hope you all know what you can do. See ya laterz!

P.S. Keith!!!! Why O WHYYYYYYYY did you leave smash bros in Spain :(((((((

P.S.S. We got a sound designer now! W000000000T! We just need a composer and the crew is complete!

What Have I Done?!?!?!

Another update of where we are with the layout stuff. I repainted parts of the first layout again. I dug through some of my Photoshop brush collection and found some neat ones that I thought I could use on this layout. And here's another line drawing for one of the interior shots. This one is when the master is pointing furiously at the boy.

EDIT: Changed a bit of the painting again. I remember Hozen spotting something wrong with the pots. Just fixed that now, but I cant be bothered reposting it. Just take my word that its been seen to :)

Mondays

Hey crew! The third years have Mondays to work on their dissertations but I might swap my schedules for Mondays and Tuesdays around. That means I will be working on my dissertation on Tuesdays when the second years have life drawing all day. And if I forget, remind me that we need to check our animatic with Jon Turner for the timing. We need the timing to be spot on to avoid the over-animating that the P-man warns everyone about.
Other than the timing, I think the storyboard is complete. Parr seems to like it and said it is clear. He did raise a few ideas to consider but if everyone reads it clearly anyway, there isn't much wrong. So fixing it might help, but nothing is broken! So lets continue as we planned.
P.S. Monday is the return of a certain member of the squad I believe. This crew just got a whole lot more awesome!

Painting Lesson With Uncle Ben Part 3

Want to know another trick? Im just spoiling you guys. Dont worry if you think theres too much to learn already, remember, I was a lil noob too! With more experience, you'll start to learn things like this for yourself. Anyway, remember that thing I said about separating surfaces like on a cube so they become more readable? Well I thought I needed more of that for part of the panels on the walls since there are a few bumps and separation going on. I already changed the levels (value) of the panels a slight tad. But I decided to also change the colour slightly too. First, we need to select the panel so we can alter it without affecting the other parts of the painting. The lasso tool is used for this. You can find it on your toolbar on the side (or just by pressing 'l' on the keyboard). If you click and hold the lasso icon on the toolbar you can change the type of lasso tool to use: freehand lasso, polygon lasso or magnetic lasso. Any would do, use it to draw a selection arund the panel like I have done in the image. Then to change the colour, we use colour balance which can be accessed via the top toolbar but I just hit ctl+b. You should get a window that lets you slide a few bars around. If you slide the slider towards red, the selection will receive more red, or if you slide it towards blue it will become more bluer. Be wary of the 'temperature' of the painting. Colours has a warm or cool look to them and you need a decent balance of the two in a painting. If the reds are all looking bright and hot, we should probably cool parts of it down using the colour balance and adding more blues, magenta or cyan.


Heres the almost completed piece with a texture applied on top of it.


How do I apply texture? Bring in an image you want as the texture. Put this image on top of the other layers and set the blend option to 'Overlay' like I have. You can play with the other options too but it seems overlay is the commonly used method. But sometimes you may not want the colour this texture brings in. Well if thats the case just adjust the hue+saturation. Pull the slider for the saturation down to make it grayscale and therefore not affecting the colour of the image. And you may want to alter the levels too by pulling the triangles around until the value of the texture s the same as the value of the painting. This was the texture doesnt affect the values. Makes sense ya? Then you can pull the opacity of the layer down too and maybe erase parts of it where there shouldnt be any textures. I also add a little trick in there too. By going to Edit > Transform > Skew I can change the perspective of the texture so it doesnt look too flat when I apply it.


So thats all done. I leave the painting for a bit and then realized that somethings missing. The distance, and the sky seems a bit empty so I add in a few big buildings in the distance and more trees behind the wall on the left. And I think we are done :)
Hope that was useful and maybe you can go on to put me out of a business now hahahahha!..... why am I laughing?

Painting Lesson With Uncle Ben Part 2

Painting more details. Slowly spreading out into the rest of the painting.


Still rendering. I add some dabs of other colours into some areas like those greens in the red wall. This is just something I do sometimes to add a bit of interest in an otherwise quite boring paint job for me :P I like the randomness you can get from traditional painting so this is kinda inspired by them.


Another Photoshop trick here. This is something I started to use only quite recently. I make a layer that darkens the whole painting and then I erase parts of that layer to reveal the original painting beneath. This way I can darken the shadows without repainting it by erasing where the light is. I also do this with the highlights too. You can make another one of this layer and use it to lighten the whole piece and erase where the darks are. Of course, you mustnt depend on this to paint the shadows for you. Its just something to boost the contrast when it is needed. Its a good way to vary your values in a painting. So how do we get this layer? Its similar to the hue and saturation thing that makes the painting a grayscale. Go to Layer > Add New Adjustment Layer > Levels. You should have a window with three triangles. Dragging the black triangle alters the dark values, the gray alters midtones and the white alters the lights. So if you are making a layer to adjust the darks, pull the black triangle around (and maybe the gray one too) till you get the right darkness for the shadows. And then erase baby!

Painting Lesson With Uncle Ben Part 1

OK kiddies! I did promise to show you how I work so here it is. I hope this can be educational for you all, painting digitally can be tricky when you first start out. Heck the first couple turds I made should never see the light of day... EVER! Its a big help to know the program or how to use it. But you dont need to know everything, just enough to get you going. Over the years I just used a standard circle brush with the opacity on pen pressure. But as I got more comfortable I started to learn other tricks to add to my arsenal, so dont think you need all the tricks in the book from the beginning. Anyway here we go! If any of these dont make sense just ask me in class and I'll be happy to go through them with ya.


The linework is done and scanned into the computer and opened in photoshop. If the layer is locked and named as 'background' just double click it and press OK to unlock it. Now change the blend option to Multiply. This allows us to make the whites transparent so we can paint under the linework. Anyway, I start by blocking int he colours. This stage took long because its important to get the colours sorted before I render (paint to a refined stage) it up and waste time. So Im trying to find the right colours and trying to hint at what the values are. Think where your light source is (here its from the top right corner a lil behind the building). O, and dont be afraid to use reference for the perspective, lighting or colour. Even professionals use it, so if its good enough for them its good enough for me!


Starting the painting is always the hardest part for me. I need to see some promise that this will turn out good to have motivation to carry on. I couldnt quite see the end so I redrew the linework to something that offers a bit more interest and upped the contrast on the linework (by ctl+l you can vary the lights and darks). Now I can see a more solid drawing which convinces me that this is worth painting :P Before I could only see a chaotic splash of colours but with a drawing on top, I see some structure to the chaos. Its easier to paint if the drawing is correct. Throughout the painting process you'll have to fix so many things like colour, values, lighting, design. We're not smart enough to think of a way to fix the drawing at the same time ;)


OK, the hard part is pretty much done. We got the blobs of colour to guide us to a direction. Now we just paint them up into a refined stage. Basically I go in and add shadows and highlights to every area. It'll take a bit of experience to know where to go intense on the lighting and where to keep it subtle. But dont paint everything into a high contrast. Things that'll effect the way you render things are: lighting (is the light dull in that area or sharp?) and focus (is this blurred in the distance, something on the side we're not really looking at or right in our field of vision?).


More rendering. I choose different colours or different tones to seperate differnt surfaces or different elements. This helps things to 'read' clearer. Think of a lit cube... All the sides we see are a different gradient of gray, if they were all the same tone and colour we wont be able to recognize it as a cube.


Hmmmm... may be a bit advance for starters this trick. But I'll talk about it anyway because when I was told about it by a very helpful chap, I hardly did a painting without its help! Basically this creates a layer that'll turn everything under it to grayscale. How is that helpful? It allows you to check the values. If the values work, you can use any crazy colour you like. Thats something I read about and I think its true. As long as it reads in black and white, it can read in any stupid colour. So I use this to keep a constant check on how the form, lighting is going.
Now, this magical trick can be yours! All you have to do is give your uncle Benny a big wet kiss! ......... or you just go to the tool bar at the top and click Layer > Add New Adjustment Layer > Hue and Saturation. This window should open. Now, drag the saturation slider all the way down to the left and click OK. Taa Daa!!!!! Magic Value Checker got! You can switch it on and off like any other layer. Go nuts!

End of part 1. I'll put the rest up later. Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Library Recall

Off topic but... TJ, return the Gnomon DVD back to the library by Friday or I will be punished! No one wants that to happen right?

Yup, Still Working...

Some more linework for scene 2 and 6.
Tutorials dont officially start til next week but I managed to persuade Parr to give us one tomorrow with my uber charms :D So youre all welcome to tag along if you'd like. It starts at 11:30, we'll be checking what he thinks about the storyboard, colourkeys, camera angles and other things. I spoke with him today and he actually admitted we have a solid narrative that may not need changing much! We'll be absolutely sure tomorrow what he thinks.
And the character designs are looking good. I like the body shape Tegan came up with for the girl. If you can upload that on the blog, or if we scan it tomorrow everyone else can start practicing it. Hozen finally nailed something for the girl's hair, the slight worry I have is that it may be a bit complicated or tedious to draw some of the loose strands of her hair. But we can cope cant we? Btw, the hair style is kinda based on Sara's hair, so if ever you need reference just turn around and stare :P Hozen showed me how to draw the head too. Its pretty simple by the look of it so we can make a lil guide to constructing that for you all.
The boy design is almost done too. We're using the body of TJ's character but he has yet to put a face on him!!!! So you could practice the body without a head!
Good work team! Im delighted by your early efforts and enthusiasm! I think theres quite a positive buzz about our team. It makes me fired up and excited :D
AAANNNNDDD.... I found out the dissertation for us third years has gone from 6000 words to 4000 words!!!! Im SOOOOOO HAPPY!!!!!!!!!
Go Team!!!!