Escape Animation

Well, here it is, after quite a few months working on this the project has finally come to a close.  If you wish to see some context to this scene, I suggest you take a look at this previous post, which includes the entire storyboard from where this is just five seconds from.

I animated in TV Paint once I got a hold of the layout for the background, while my partner composited the background in Maya and made sure to make the appearance 2D despite being made in 3D space.  I think she succeeded well.  Check out her achievements on her blog.

Once the animation was done I took each frame and placed it in Photshop, where I rendered each image.  It was tough work, but once I got more and more done, each successive frame was easier to make since I could reuse layers and assets.

Frankly I'm quite pleased with this assignment.

Character set

Well, after two weeks of straining labor I have finally created the character I will be animating starting May 9th.  It was a difficult journey, but the destination was satisfying and the travels enlightening.

Next week, Dialog Acting with a teacher who worked on:

Clay Time

 I have had alot of fun working with this material.  The exact name of the brand escapes me for the moment, but I wish I have had some of this when I was in school.  Unlike that terrible brown clay that could never keep itself up, this clay does exactly what you want it to, and never dries up (well, it will eventually, but never during time of production).  Here is my character for the escape project visualized in three dimensions!

Casting Call

Character Design is turning out to be tougher than I give it credit for.

We were given some new techniques and tools in desiging characters, the results of that right beneath:

The idea here was to design a character through the means of Photoshop, by cutting images apart and constructing a character Frankenstein style.  Another approach was to take pieces apart into distinct random shapes and piece them together.  One approach I took was to make random shapes in Photoshop and adjust as necessary there.  And the final two examples at the top involve manipulating the Pen tool and making simplistic lines.

Turned out I wasn't that keen on that system, though through examples from proffessionals and students I can see how it can work.  Interesting as it was, I just couldn't find my protagonist through these means.  So I was given free reign to draw on paper, and the top and bottom pages are what resulted from a day's work.

I demonstrated these to the teacher, and apparently these were much improved, and we agreed on which one we found most appealing:

That was the second one I drew.  Should have stopped then and called it a day :P  Tomorrow we will be making Maquettes of our characters.  Should be fun.



Storyboard Week

A little late update from last week, when we made storyboards for our Escape project.  These are the five pages that me and my partner Camilla did together to tell our story, but its only fair to give the background and premise since the whole story isn't told in our storyboard.

We had this idea of an animated TV series about a kid who would travel through parallel dimensions through the use of a portable device.  Each episode would be a new adventure in a new place, allowing the writers to come up with anything they wish.  Key concepts in the show is the theme of escape: our protagonist is afraid of responsibility and attachment, because he feels unprepared to live up to expectations peoplle have of him.  This is why he flees, and escapes into other worlds, where he hopes a reset will make his life better, though the same problem arises nonetheless.  Another key rule is that the device needs 24 hours to recharge itself after use, so he can't just constantly be zapping himself of anywhere immediately.

That being said, here are the pages!

We got some notes from our teacher afterwards, detailing mistakes and improvements that could be made to it, such as improved angles, pacing and clarity.  However, he was for the most part pleased with the two of us, and the rest of the class seemed to be engaged in the story.

I'll update this week's work a bit later.