Pardon our dust...

http://vimeo.com/37989417

Up on vimeo this time! I just don't like/trust the embedded youtube doohickies blogger automatically puts videos in. What can ya do...

Met with composer again today. Talked a lot of stuff out. Excited to see the next pass of music. Will have it together with another new animatic after spring break.

Speaking of spring break....

I will be in Mexico. Well, off the coast of Mexico. On a boat. With my wacom tablet. Animating. Probably with a margarita... but animating nonetheless! This weekend I set up a few scenes to be fully fleshed out during spring break, namely the running sequences and their backgrounds and the rest of 5-1. The Flash files are there with layers already set up waiting to be filled in, kind of like the end of a game with Solitaire: the cards are all lined up, you just need to get them in suited piles behind their ace. That's a really bad analogy if you don't play solitaire actually... well, just know that everything is falling into place.

color chart, fyi...

No, the characters will not be just outlines. I just haven't colored anything in yet because I think it's more pressing right now to finish the animation first and color later after picture lock. But just to put your minds at ease... enjoy these informative doodles:

You guys...

I have been an inbetweening BEAST today. Intro will be done tonight. I can't help saying that it's beautiful. It is. Had some tricky issues with getting a camera move + rotation of character + zoom all at once so I just cut it. Do that later on in a few shots anyway (which is what I was working on on Wednesday night to get rid of a nasty jump cut), so it's not a total cop-out.

There are very few actual Flash-made "tweens," but I did put one in the intro. There just wasn't any avoiding it. I actually like the wobbly lines that come with manually inbetweening, gives a little more life to the world/characters. They're supposed to be doodle-creatures anyway. so it makes it even more fitting they should shake a bit.But really, doing the big pan/zoom reveal by hand was just not something I was looking forward to and I decided is time better spend working on another scene.

I'll render out a quick clip after dinner. Time for some well-earned tuna salad!

EDIT: here we go! still need to put the title over the city and animate the mask that will make it seem like it's being drawn in front of us, but I have early class tomorrow so am going to call it a night. You'll also see the redone transition where the jumpcut used to be between 2-2 and 2-3.

birds that swoop and fish that... bloop?

pieces from 5-4. man that bird was fun to animate! it's tricky coordinating all of the pieces in this scene. lots of layers of characters... been alternating throughout the day going to the gym and working on this scene. maybe that's why everything's so dynamic :P

still in progress:

how very purple of you

Thought I'd show you one of the final BGs. This might be my favorite shot. Very moody even though there's basically no animation. There's a very slight and slow zoom, but I'm a fail at having backgrounds in Flash so I'll probably just do that it AfterEffects.
So here's a frame from 3-1:


As far as animation goes, all of Act 2 is roughed, there are just a few awkward frames that I sorely need to touch up. That'll be my Tuesday.

Act 1 is still the same mechanically as it was before. Not worried there.

Act 3 is underway. You saw a frame from that above.

Act 4 has bits and pieces done. I should start putting that together.

Act 5... is daunting. But I can do it. I can! Definitely a weekend project. Needs a good few uninterrupted hours. If I keep it well organized it should run smoothly, I just know that one shot will have A LOT of layers...

gettin' TEXnichal

Let me tell you what synapses in my brain I had to reactivate to pull off a Tex Avery take AND a smear in the same second of animation. Whoa nelly.

Need some inbetweens still, but here's a taste:





Since tonight I have a chapter meeting I'll hang at the house (I get creeped out biking around late at night so it's hard to get to the lab) and work on the cityscape scene since it's background-heavy.

bloomin' inkblots, batman!

Well I had a super musical weekend! Met with my composer/musician/all-in-one awesome guy, Will Sturgeon. You should check out his music. It's amazing. When not laying down all of his own tracks on his computer, he performs around campus with his two bands Brightener and The Miracals (formerly The Smiles). Check them out on Facebook/YouTube/Bandcamp/iTunes, they're just all over the place. You won't regret it. Really. Don't believe me? CLICK!

I also dropped the new edits and reframed shots into an animatic. Hopefully that's the last of the timestamp-alterning changes I make. Some of these shots have really gathered momentum and are screaming to be animated, especially running through the city with the ink trails rising through the buildings. SO FUN.

a curiosity

Easter Egg! Ever wonder what these guys would look like with pupils?? A few reframes from the second scene. Thought it looked funny when I penciled them in for the first pic, so I just put a few more in for fun :)

this monday thing will never get through my skull...

5pm Monday always catches me off guard. Last semester it was because I went right from class to formal dinner at my sorority, had to be standing behind my chair at 5 o' clock on the dot.
This semester... I don't have class on Monday, so I get all day to work in the lab. I get in a groove and then suddenly: AHH! It's 4:50pm! Update update update. I'm still having trouble uploading files to blogger from my computer in the lab, but I can write with no problem. That being said, I guess you should expect a text update at 5pm followed by at edit around 7:30 (after chapter meeting) with any video clips / screen shots of the progress that I can upload once I get home to my laptop.

Anyway, the last couple of weeks I've bee working on integrating the suggestions made by the faculty review at the end of last semester:
*Need more of a "build"
*The beginning is abrupt
*Show frustration with communication she has when she cannot draw
*She looks at him- then tries to draw. Maybe not sound effects, but make it clear nothing is coming out of her hands.
*Could make pencils and pens for hands for clarity
Maye she draws a question mark?
*Show the reactions of the crowd
*At the beginning you show the boy first. Instead, you could show her in the foreground so we know the story is about her.
*Instead of drawing a crowd they could ignore her. The anger could cause the ink to stream from her hands.

I definitely agree with the vast majority of these. I really liked the visual communication bit so I've added that in with Penny's first 'conversation' occuring early on and demonstrating how their world works. I've added some bits to insert into the beginning and reframed a few shots to show Penny the most and people reacting to her inability. People are a little more confused at first rather than going straight to ignoring her. I'm not THAT mean...

So, those are all boarded and ready to be plopped into Flash for animating. Other than that, there was a little that we talked about during a sound spotting session last semester, too, about Penny's "flight" where she runs away from the crowd. I'm going to have her leave the city altogether, clearing the background away to make room for her own growth. That being said, I'll be adding more environmental background stuff to the rest of the beginning shots, i.e. the world that the city people have made.

These new inserted bits are a LOT stronger than the first pass, I'm excited to see it all take it's final (hopefully) shape this week.

edit: Also, I'm meeting my composer/musicial/all-in-one awesome dude this week to make sure he's still game to make some sweet, sweet tunes for this project and start getting stuff down on paper. Stay tuned!

breaking the rules! shh

Ran upstairs from formal dinner to finish uploading this. More text later.

running running running

running to meeting. have some animaticization. more later tonight. ahhhhh

The Shadow Knows

Some pics from the shadow sequence in act two. Still working on combining these two different looks. The colorful bits will probably fade/flash in a out out frame while the shadows (see first pic) remain constant in moving across the screen. Maybe the colorful creatures are in her head, representative of what she feels she's getting from society, and the shadows are reality passing over her.

Boom! Inky.

This one was tough to rough! Wanted to keep it very loose feeling, which is actually a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But that's one angry face! This scene was brought to you by the insane desire for burritos. Really. Animating while super hungry is definitely helpful when you need the character to be especially full of rage. Rage for burritos.

a domani

Presenting in class tomorrow! I'll be showing the first half of "Ink" with posed-out scenes being the least common denomonator. I'm still working on getting the shadow sequence to look sufficiently artsy while also conveying the passage of time and what's actually going on in the world. TBD...
Little bits here and there are animated, but hopefully things make a lot more sense now that they're all strung together.
Nothing to upload right now, as I'll be working tonight on pulling everything together into one file to render out and show tomorrow. Want to get as many consecutive bits as I can into the clip to show tomorrow.

On the plus side, it's getting easier to navigate Flash and generally wield the Wacom pen without everything looking completely wibbly when I'm working in a program that doesn't have a smoothing function. Yay! Considering all of the new boards are being done layer over layer in Photoshop. Small victories, one at a time. :)

Part 1 of animatic

EDIT: if the video embedded above doesn't work, I also put it on Vimeo. Yay Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/30342424


Here's the first part of the animatic. I'm doing it in installments because at this point it's still in flux and I don't want to sit down and board the whole thing, then make an animatic of the whole thing, and put off animating while doing so. Time-wise, it just isn't smart. That being said, here's the first 'act', if we're going by the model so oft-used by Shakespeare and his contemporaries of the five-act play. Actually, it's a Roman model, but it was soon forgotten about and then regained popularity in the Renaissance (as would be fitting). Freytag put it best in his oh-so-German dissection of the dramatic arc: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.

So, here's the 'exposition' bit, which will be followed by the rising action sequence of shadows cast over Penny as she struggles to understand what it is that keeps her from relating to the world she inhabits.

Climax: Penny's tantrum, Cruella deVil-style with ink blots flying everywhere.

Falling Action: the public spotlight on Penny's art and abilities visible takes a toll. She and the general populous need to figure out what to do. **THIS IS WHERE I'M STILL TWEAKING. Many thanks to Matt for helping me bounce ideas back and forth.

Denouement: Penny (through one course of action or another) is no more, but we see her lasting imprint on the world in the lingering bones of the city and how the people recognize that.



( The previous explanation was written very excitedly and with much credit due to Sharon Carnicke's THTR 302 class, Spring 2010!:D )

Animatic 10/3

So, there were some uploading issues. The internet at my house is very slow, especially with videos. I'll let Blogger sit with it over dinner and chapter meeting and see if it's finished by then.

Until then, I think we can all sympathize with Penny in this little .gif from sequence 10...

Actually, just kidding about that, too. Even that won't upload. :\

If this isn't up by the time I get back, I'll head over to the lab and upload it there.

EDIT: 9:50pm
Here's the .gif to tide you over. Definitely sums up what I;m sure a lot of us feel like right now...

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

Oh no, Mr. Bill!

Oops. Tonight's post is a little late. Had an interview on campus and a special event dinner tonight. Biking around in high heels... not so fun.

Anyway, I finally have the solid list of scenes/shots/whathaveyou chalked up! Huzzah! The ending will be decided tomorrow in class. Put on your thinking caps...

((SPOILERS!! But who's keeping track...))
I thought I'd figured out a way NOT to kill Penny, but it turned out to be very... unfulfilling. It just kind of ended with a pretty bow tacked on in the middle. Well, that's not what art's all about! So. Penny will diminish in one way or another. Will leave her eventual death somewhat ambiguous, but you'll see the trajectory all laid out there. This is one thing that I've decided I must stand up for. This is the real root of the whole project: what it is to create and what it means. Where art comes from. The price of something beautiful. The price of expression. At what expense one opens up to the rest of the world for all to see. It's everything.

So, here I am, all set up in my home-away-from-cubicle captain's chair, screens and tablets all around, papers propped against the wall, and my fratty neighbors (for the time being) quiet. Animatic will be presented tomorrow in class.


Wasting no time: the new intro drops us quickly into the world, shows us the art-people, and presents us with Penny and her... "problem." Don't worry, these are just the thumbnail versions. It is actually a lot clearer than this...

Get on 'board

Been putting together, pulling apart, and putting back together my animatic. Finally hit on a scene to speed up and simplify the whole "time goes by" part that shows how the populous' hands wear away as they age. There will be some awesome shadows involved that will be a lot of non-animation animation. Woohoo for creating tension by NOT showing something! They were on to something with that whole "Jaws" deal. And to think, all because of a crappy animatronic shark that didn't work, it became one of the scariest monsters to grace the screen. Not that mine will be scary, it actually won't be at all...

Imagine Penny sitting against the wall with the cast shadows moving over her. I'm really excited to see how the lines would bend around her (implied 3D) 2D shape. Should be interesting.



No pictures of stuff in-progress right now (it's all on the computer in my cubicle... whoops) but next week I have my in-class presentation so that will bring a truckload of new stuff to play around with and I'll get it up on vimeo.

ready or not, here i come

I'm starting to animate! A few scenes are solid and ready to be Flash-ified while I'm still working on a couple others as boards still. The ragtag systems is working OK: animate in my cubicle every afternoon and on weekends, revise boards while I'm home at night. With a tablet setup in both locations, I can easily shift to animating at both when the time comes. Here's a little .gif teaser from the scene I'm working on right now. Penny is leaning into a wall and sighs... hope that's what it looks like. Pretty wonky angle, had to
use Kristina as reference from below.

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

INK: THE REBOOT!

Hello all! Big news. Over the last few months I've teased apart the long and confusing threads of my old thesis story and come up with a much simpler, sleeker, and overall better version. The character designs have changed a bit but are still true to their art-person nature with chalk/crayon/charcoal/ink hands. A few new things have crept into my inspiration folder, including Evan Dahm's "Rice Boy"


the popular kids' book "Harold and the Purple Crayon", and the overall texture of Norman Mclaren's "Blinkity Blank".



The rough redone animatic will be up this weekend before I dive head-first into animating. No more 3D environments either! Going very minimalist with the whole thing. The world will be created by those who live in it and so will fade/erase over time. I wonder how Penny will solve the problem...