First Complete Background

Done for now. If I have time later in the year I may revisit this.

Ideas for Character Style

I have some interesting ideas that Ive seen being done and thought about. Matt, who I now live with (oh shit!), and a few other animators are working on an animated commercial this summer and Ive just been shown some interesting techniques they are using for the colouring of the animated linework. What I was shown was a simple character design being painted with a new feature on Photoshop CS3. So it was an animation that has a painted quality look to them. Matt was pretty damn excited by this and I was too! Because of the simplicity of the character design he was able to paint them quite quickly. Since our character design is a little bit more complex I thought we could use ToonBoom to lay down the basic colours and importing them into Photoshop CS3 to add in highlights and textures.
This could be a bit of a lengthy process but we could also save time as we probably wont need to draw the shadow layers on. You can see above a little test I just did. If it works out like I think it could, that is how the animation could look.
Anddddddddd... heres a sneak peak of what how the layout is looking...

One Down.... Another 40 to go!

Yup, finished my first layout for the film. Thought I'd warm up with a simpler one. This one is from the third scene where we first see the boy. This one was done under a day, but there are some more complicated shots...

Still To Do...

Thought I might update you all on where we are currently up to.

Character Design - Need to finish boy design, a bit more work on the girl's head.

Model Sheets - Once the character design stage is near complete, we can get this underway. Ive heard the more model sheets we produce, the better.

Storyboard - Pretty much complete (until Parr destroys it so we'll need a check up on that) There are rooms for the animation to break away and add some more flashy movements.

Animatic - So far we are using the old one. There is only a few chances in the storyboard so I think this is still a decent referance for timing. Our editor was going to have a go at timing the animatic himself but we can hardly keep contact cause he's extremely busy atm.

Music - I found a few musicians on the internet that are available for collaboration but I havent made any approach yet. I was thinking of keeping our options open cause there may be someone we could use from the BU. But perhaps we should act fast instead? Will ask Parr for his thoughts.

Colourkeys - Complete. May fiddle around with it more but no big thing.

Character Colours - Got a strong idea of where they are heading. Cant really get this done without the character's final design.

Layouts - With the colourkeys kinda done and the thumbnailing/designing pretty much done too. This stage can start soon. The perspective lines are already available, so when you're ready, you can animate.

Crewpack - Im getting on to this. A few pages are written up, but we'll need the model sheets done too to fit them in.

Things to think about (we'll probably decide this when we're all back):
Clean-up (TJ mas some interesting points about this)
Referance (would it be helpful to film some live action?)
How to do the petals (2d or 3d)
When are we going to Smash some Bros?!?!?!

Where the Characters Stand

Heres something to give you all an idea of where the placements of the characters are. Ive also hinted at a few background characters too. Though most of them wont be animated (so dont worry about that) theyre only in shot for a small number of time. Also I put in some perspective lines to help with the animation. Its probably hard to see but when we start animating, I'll print them out without the colours or linework ;)
O btw, you may notice some panels missing. That is because they are reusing a layout previously illustrated.

New Colour Keys Part2

Heres the final parts to the colour keys. Actually, they're not all finished. I have a tendancy to go in and rework parts of it so bits n pieces will possibly change. The previous post on colourkeys has been reworked but I wont bother posting those (dont wanna flood this place withthe same shit :D)

Wheres TJ?

Well, Ive been back in Bournemouth for a few days now and I have found our missing TJ! Hes got no internet for a while, he'll have it back when his new housemates: Hozen and Jed gets back. Anyway, he showed me his work and we spoke a bit about our film. Hes done a lot of studies (gestural drawings) from kung fu films and claimed it was a very useful exercise and he feels more confident tackling this animation after that. So I guess it would be encouraged that we all go out and do a few of these ourselves if TJ found it that helpful himself. He also came up with a few good ideas for the movements of certain scenes and suggested possible camera shakes - he saw a film that used this technique very well during one of their action scene.

Oh, and his Nicktoon project looks pretty cool!!!!!!!!!!! We can all have a lil screening of it when we're all together again.

Oh! And and and...... We got our spaces picked! It was hand picked by the tutors. But anyway, we got half the booth that Seiji's Bird Team occupied last year. We're sharing it with Sara's Risk Team. So we get 3 seat n lightboxes. We get the seats facing the Maya room. Soooooo... Im afraid we might have to take turns floating around.