Paper Cup

Today I started a magical thing.


In June I went to the Grays School of Art degree show and encountered a lovely project. I was very vocal about it and discovered that it had ben done by Naomi Leckie a girl in my year at school, who I hadn't seen in about 6 years. Her project involved painting highly saturated stills from films along with film/ music quotes onto tiles of mdf. Really gorgeous. I suggested she could photograph them and convert them into an animation. I gave her my email and now a few months on its starting to be a reality. Naomi has a exhibition in Aberdeen coming up so to help her for it I have thrown together the first sequence very roughly indicating short bursts of what can be possible. This is one of the sequences she painted and the quote she based it on is from a song called "Paper Cup" by Heather Nova, you tube link here. Below is a file with the photographs of the twelve 'stills' and some after effects stills of the options I've thrown together.


N.B. 
This is just an original test: transitions, timing, sound editing and title etc are just basic. 


Vimeo link : http://vimeo.com/14513091

Mouse-tache : Now In Technicolour

Spanish California more orange than you've ever seen it before!


Some basic colour tests and different sketch options for Ashley's Mouse-tache. I'm not happy with the style, composition or colour balance yet but for getting an idea of the general colour palettes its nearly there. The more vibrant orange ones are my favourite options and the blue hues for the night/evening scenes need to be much bolder than displayed below. But if nothing else, it makes a change from all the blue's of of Leap Year's train station shot!

Train Shot 3 v.1.2

Now, with headlights that don't float around, a slight glow to the flowers and gravity defying particles! Far far from finished but its a start!


Vimeo link here :  http://vimeo.com/14359349

Now With Shed...Possibly

I'm still not convinced but the station probably needs some kind of structure, if so I don't think this works terribly great but for now at least its been tested...

Train Shot V.1.0

First version of part of scene 3 shot 1 for Leap Year. Its a little....odd, much tinkering required! Vimeo link is here and comments are very welcome: 


http://vimeo.com/14176647

Field. Now With Doodled Train

Opening, train station shot for Leap Year with a Silver Bullet Train. Possible composited shot test to follow soon[ish - if I can get the perspective to be friendly]....

A Little Bit of Many Things

1. Mouse-tache

New preliminary basic Layout for Ashley's Mouse-tasche. This is a scene where the hero thwarts the villains plan to steal an ice-cream by tripping him up. The little girl gets her ice-cream back but is unimpressed by its being covered in villains saliva. The hero doesn't notice her looking disgruntled and blithely stands looking proud.

2. Badly Drawn Bodies

Another round of life drawing. I've been trying to make them quicker in an attempt to loosen up. It failed. None of these took over 20 mins. Next week I disregard time in favour of getting it right. I should really start putting them together as a terrible comic strip in the style of cheap tabloids.

3. Dissertation Progress

Its needs a conclusion, structure, an argument, a less vague title, pictures, formatting, more research, better referencing, a bibliography that makes sense and heavy heavy editing but essentially the bulk of it has been bashed out...

4. Leap Year

I had a good production chat with Jenny Gauci about Leap Year and have come up with a new beginning and a different way of doing the train platform which hasn't felt right. Many thanks Jenny and look out for a revised animatic/ background soon.

Today's Inspiration

Pretty 3d heavily composed animation regarding atmosphere/ emotions and extracts from being in Tokyo. The film is called Urban Abstract and was made by Musuta Productions to fill a Finnish television slot in November 2009 [I think] and has won several prestigious awards. I really like how they created the essence of skyscrapers using particles. Very pretty and can be found here:


http://vimeo.com/7681282


This is a nice image, from an installation by artist Kader Attia called Untitled [Skyline] and consists of recycled fridges covered in mirror tiles currently being used in Dreamlands exhibition at the brilliant Rogers/Piano designed Pompidou centre, Paris

More [Mneme] Doodles

The original large [Mneme] concept sketch has been coloured up, but now its deciding what to do with it which is the problem! 

Mouse-tasche Madness

Started updating layouts for Ashley's storyboard for Mouse-tasche. These panels show the first thoughts for the opening scene. The first image shows the original sketch Ashley sent through and then my first draft at a layout for it. The second image is the new storyboard panel sequence for the opening. Have sent to Ashley for comment as I'm sure many things need to be changed before it's drawn up properly!

Animatic and Train Station Colours

The new[ish] leap year animatic has now been uploaded to vimeo. The timing across some of the pans needs changing and the scene where you first meet Ada on the bridge seriously needs redrawn as its very confusing. New version to follow but for now enjoy slightly revised timings! 


http://vimeo.com/13926119


Also I've been colouring in the layout for the initial shot of Train Station and there are a few very low res options below. As you can see I've changed the station and made it more anonymous but I'm not sure about the moon and the hills so have been playing around with settings...

Animatics and Bodies and Mice...oh my

Leap Year animatic has been revised, sadly version 2.1 can't be uploaded until tomorrow afternoon through vimeo limitations by which time I no doubt I will have tinkered with the timing again. No radical changes just file size and timing, its coming in at 2:58 but parts of it are still too quick. 
It is slowly turning into an epic. 


Ashley also emailed storyboard panels for Mouse-tache so look out for provisional layout backgrounds soon!


So as I can't show you that yet, have some badly drawn bodies...

Larking With Layouts

After much deliberation and faffing about with various storyboard panels I took Jenny Gauci's advice to start at the very beginning. So here it is layout 1 of the background for the train station. It's not very exciting but it's a start and its a relatively interesting scene to start with and is relatively blank so allows for experimentation and won't matter so much if it looks different from the other scenes!

Mneme Building Colour Doodles

I've started to sketchily colour up one of the buildings for Ciaran's [Mneme] . Once the colour was blocked in I've played around with basic colour/ saturation etc to test out basic colour variations so that a suitable colour range can be chosen or if something entirely new is required!

Animatic 2.0 Now With Strange Sounds!

There's nothing like a lovely weekend off that makes it easier to get back to work, and many thanks are due to certain good company which got me away from the screen for a couple of days!

I've attempted to recut the animatic, its reading at 2'50" at present but I feel some parts are still too quick, that the staging in places needs to be clearer, the shots need to link better and the story needs better editing. It's also at a low resolution because I still haven't worked out what the best export settings are and the sounds are all free from the ever amusing and useful freesound.org and are provisional for now so excuse some of the more dubious ones.

That said its nice to have it uploaded and it was fun to edit it after two weeks away! In the coming week or two the plan is to work out a background and Ciaran has kindly offered to do a test animation with Ada which will be fun, though choosing a starting point is proving tricky!

Animatic Link :


http://vimeo.com/13819850