Film progress

I showed my animatic at it's current state to my two teachers at animation school this week.
One was co-founder of the oscar nominated studio Cartoon Saloon, Fabian Erlinghäuser, the other was newly graduated animator, Frederik Villumsen.
It went pretty damn great, if I may say so :)

One of my main concerns with the story, of cause, was whether or not, people would actually get it. A lot of compex emotions and storypoints are being told within 5-6 minutes, with no dialogue, just body language. I'm relying a lot on posing and staging to tell this story.

But to my great pleasure, the both seemed to get the story, even the little hints of character trades that is spread throughout the story. They both contributed with great ideas and adds, and though they viewed it seperately, they came with pretty much the same remarks and ideas, so I have a strong feeling of what to change, and how to do so!

That's the story update. It's making slow but steady progress, and I think it's coming out great.
I feel good about the story as it is, and I'm sure it will benifit my tremendously, to have a solid storyboard/animatic down, when going into the actual production. By then I will know, that every single shot I'm sweating over, will have a significant contribution to the story, which is always a great feeling.

So moving on from the story, I've also done a bit of work on the 3d character.
Gone in and build the shape and character, from the basic shapes I've posted previously.
I realised some things worked out great in the rough sketch, that just won't work in 3d, for instance the neck area, where he needs room to rotate his head, and as I want to keep it fairly close to reality in terms of proportions and body structure, I ended up moving his head above the shoulders. I think it gives a more natural look to the character, and combined with some old-man poses, I'm sure he'll look great.

Here he is, so far:


















Wow! that was a lot of words, I've probably lost the one (if any) reader out there, so I might as well sign off.
Have a nice evening!

Cheers

Possible main character

I've done it, scraped it and done it again probably about 10 times by now, but here is first real character design attempt that I post online.
I played around with different shapes and ended up with a very rough 10 sec. sketch that looks like this:




















I kinda liked the design, the high shoulder, the fragile lower legs, the sorta unease and rigidness it has. I think this could be a really cool way to go.
So to test it out, I did a super fast mockup in maya, just blocking in the basic shapes.
It still need to be pushed a lot, right now it's a bit too flat and doesn't have quiet the contrast in form that I'm looking for.

But here it is, the initial blocking of shapes, for what might be the main character of my short:



Cheers

Color tests

Time for an update.
This is four storyboard panels, with some color slapped onto them.
It may or may not represent the final look, but it certainly shows a way of going.

Anyways, check em out, and come back for more soon, hopefully :)















Maybe I should sum up, where the film is at the present moment.

• Storyboard/animatic is in progress, close to finish
• Character design of main character is close to finish
• Look dev. is as you can see stated and in developement
• Prep work (research) is being done in terms of 3d and technical challenge

And that's basically it for now.
I don't have a lot of sparetime to use on this project, hopefully around summer time, I can focus on this film (besides school of course), and I'd like to go into production, modeling props/character and starting 3d layout, within 3-4 months, but before that I HAVE to solve the remaining story issues.

Cheers :)