i'm working on animating in layers now on after effects,flash and photoshop which i've been really enjoying, it's been a good way to animate without having to redo everything all the time,which i found with colouring the last ones. i don't miss as much i did when colouring before and i can focus on things alot more.

i wanted to try more shading on characters, which would take alot more time but 

i think it could bring out more but i'm not really very sure at this point.

I am excited for the future if it has this.



I like being able to caption.

i only just came across this man thanks to this lady (thankyou) and i think there's an awful lot of similarities between this and what i'd like to make/whats in my brain.

It made me think of this,which is in my big influence chart as it is. I'm not too sure why though.

I think the top deffinetly shows a direction i'd like to go in.

A big feature that looks like that would be fantastic.

I showed someone the main character earlier who said they imagined them a lot younger 

when i explained the story to them. It made me realise i've not really developed the main character

as much as others,since i liked what i had at first. 

I like the idea of her not being consistent which is possible becuase of the big puff balls being the main

feature.

This is taking the last drawing a bit further but i think it's too charming to

be what i had in mind for the character

Diary Of A Yankee

Diary Of A Yankee

i like the three guys who are the bottom right one. 

I wanted to do some varied characters, the top left uncoloured

one i thought looked bland to begin with so i left him be.

the big radish one. jeez.

heres some more rev ideas i'm going to clean up tomorrow.
except probably big crucifix bee-hive rev.
I'd like to really get crazy with the designs so i think these are a good step in the right direction.

These are some initial designs i did for a character of a reverend/religious figure who is the second
most important character. I wanted him to be a contrast of bonnie, the main character, though obviously i've made these a bit too creepy. I took bits from some of my heroes (who are pretty funny looking people) and tried to splice them in a little.

My role models are bad people.

Artist Round up

Whilst i've been designing the cast for the film, I thought i'd write whats influenced the designs.

Rather than looking at someone and taking it straight from there,i'm thinking more of things that have

been engraved in my brain as a result of liking these lovely people.

The three above are from Todd Marrone, Who's a fantastic artist working with Insane distortions, 

rough edges and just completely surreal characters which i really enjoy drawing myself.

I feel like i've borrowed alot from the man.

In terms of Movement, i've always attempted a bizzarre straight ahead flow like Sally Cruikshank, who doesn't believe in drawing on model and allows characters to do insane movements which completely defy logical movement. I love that these people don't have spines.

I also love that a face can do this. i think it sums things up nicely.

I've been working hard,but decided i'd like to take this in a different direction than i have been.
I'd like to work on material for pitching the film, rather than the introduction with a fish.
I'd like to be able to show people what the ideas about and get them excited about it potentially
being made in the future. I decided to start by doing some character animation.

 

Here's two example frames which i think shows a rough look of what type of animation i want.

I like the idea of completely distorting the characters face, and just playing with extreme squash and 

stretch. It's a fun way to animate mainly, but also i think it could hold attention by being extremely unpredictable.

 
 
 
 
 

These are the first seven frames coloured. 

One thing i learnt when doing this was that i need to learn to do some corner cutting techniques.

For one,seperating the head from the body is extremely importing when colouring in photoshop.

For one,they move at different frame rates in the original flash file,but they move together in the photoshop files. which is a shame, becuase my main intentions were to create something slower and not  bouncy like my usual work. a slow distortion. 

I'm quite happy with how they look when played back however.

I've been playing with the idea in my head of making the short (except the fish) in 3D,which would allow a lot more dynamic shots. I'm deffinetly not good enough at modeling yet but most of the characters I had in mind for this are extremely warped versions of real life,so it could work as a very low poly telling

an initial thought of a character.

I'm not a fantastic backgrounder at all, but I decided to use a series of rings like above that move slow and flicker which gives a good pacing. the rings pan from left to right over about 30 frames and slightly rotate.

i did 15 frames and chose only to use about 8 and put them at three frames each

which really gave a nice slow pace.

He's creeping out.

i did a bad thing and changed brushes half way through, though when testing it, it worked perfectly. Which is great, I think the inconsistent style lets me get a bit experimenty which is great.

I changed a brush and made the consistency even lower and it looks like i wanted to with brush strokes,which for about two frames it didn't. perfect!

He's creeping in.

this is the first couple frames from the colourings.

This is the second part of the storyboard.

mainly just a series of gags of a fish getting eaten before

i introduce people breathing from straws.

I started animating a fish. I'm not sure if the white trail behind it looks like it's shooting

bum lasers or not but when I drew the sort of storyboard, I had little trails to show how it'd have

worked and I thought they'd look nice moving.

it's unrelated but it makes me think of this. Which I like.

Some people at uni asked to draw fish for me.

these two fish are more from Charlie. (he didn't ask, I forced)

thanks pal.

Some fish. (thanks charlie for the left one)

(i'll expand on this)

This really could have exported better but this is a quick test of the main character,bonnie.

I was thinking she'd be watching a fish that's got her attention,which leads her down to looking through her arm,then reaching for her straw.

i did a quick test of animating in photoshop ( the animation is quite poor,but the cleaning up bit looks like i need it to look).

I'd animate the film sort of like this,but a bit cleaner, where i animate in flash and lasoo tool around the

clean bits and use a big brush with low opacity and low flow.

i really like the inconsistent colours which give the glimmer of the colours

vimeos quite bad at cutting off frames,so this might look shorter than it really is.

These are the roughs which I drew lines on to be able to figure out shading.

the process was long (and it really didn't turn out well) but I think it shows what

I wanted. what I wanted to work worked.

plot! which i should've written about from the get go.

It's set where people live underwater (and have for a very long time)

and each breath through a straw that pipes into their tiny homes.

people are generally quite content, not really knowing where the air comes from.

The main character, Bonnie (gracefully named by my mum) feels unsatisfied by this

and uses her straw to pull herself upwards, hoping to reach the top of the water,which

no one thinks is real.

the majority of the story is the pulling up adventure part and what happens on the way

is not something i'm sure of yet.