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.

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