back to the beginning

started my research for my animation tech essay today and got distracted with the image of Snow white in my head. I was researching lightboxes and the lead to rotoscoping instead of key framing and inbetweening.. train of thought lead me to snow white the OG disney princess and their rotoscoping and use of live action for their first animation movie in colour <3

October - 11 Second Club - Take 3

its getting there. I will lip Sync. it will happen. I will have time.

DOGGLE FUN RUN

if you dont think this is adorable. well. youre wrong.

October - 11 Second Club - Take 2

Honestly, I promise I'm trying...

October - 11 Second Club - Take 1

so the sketchy keyframes are kind of done, theres no lipsyncing yet, and i made sure to avoid as much lipsyncing as possible...

still deciding on a style to colour this in with and the backgrounds but the ideas are finally flowing

:) 

Pick n Mix Project (Instalment no. 6 - we bear bears)

SO

i started with character designs after the animatic went horrifically wrong... but before the final animatic... if you can be bothered to watch them.. youll see his character changes half way through one of them and stays that way from then on... So basically... i went for three designs after trolling through google images for what felt like an hour, looking for some inspiration. 

bear no.1 was a design from the teddybears made during the art nouveau period (kind of fluffy, moving joints, human like stature, beer belly, glass eyes)

bear no.2  bear no. 2 is kind of a take of from Disney's Brave, but smother with fur, short arms and big claws, which i though could be funny, animating him scraping claw marks into the panel desk or cutting through the back drop...

and  bear no.3  was a mix between the two but with pointier ears, shorter less promenant muzzle, shorter arms, mid chubbiness, and shorter rounder claws

i think no. 3 won... and i continued to use him for the animatic. he seems smoothest, curlier, and i thought could draw him in photoshop in like 20% opacity and under animation have a texture background so when he moved the pattern changed, if you get that idea.. Ill probably do a text animation if i get a chance from the other impending projects.

Pick n Mix Project (Instalment no. 5 - the animatics.....)

Pick n Mix Project (Instalment no. 4)

So apparently we were meant to come up with episodes names or descriptions and stuff.. so I came up with this and i thought it would be a fun idea :) 

#lastminutegenius

Pick n Mix Project (Instalment no.3 )

I spent the last 24 hours in the studio around lectures and seminars all that boring stuff redoing the storyboard, and for a very good reason. I had a dream about ted the teddybear doing a sketch called Singing in the rain. and thats where the 'meets james corden' from the previous instalment comes in...

so all that was the stuff you saw before basically with some stage directions and an extra frame for the intro.... I took out the basic camera shots because i can't really plan that until the audio is recorded... but then... i did this.. and the backgrounds took the majority of the time tbh... so... we have no1 the ceramic woman doing 'Goodmorning Baltimore' from Hairspray  infant of the New Amsterdam Theatre - and if you read any of the research i posted (don't worry i don't expect you to have) then you'll know that the New Amsterdam Theatre is a Building in Manhattan, just off Times Square, built in 1902-3 and was designed by the architecture firm of Henry Hertz and Hugh Talland. The Building was used as a movie theatre in the beginning of 1937 and closed in 1985. It was then leased by Walt Disney Co. and renovated in 1995-7 to be the flagship of Disney Theatrical Productions presentations on Broadway -  how cool is that! 

I was originally going to do her singing Taylor Swifts 'Love Story' as it includes a reference to Romeo and Juliet... and .. therefore shakespeare but i thought it was too much of a leap... so i just went with the whole Broadway thing...

The Second background was an art Nouveau style sky, with simply just clouds and swirls and Art nouveau-esque style. I don't know...I thought it'd be funny to do the FBI version of I believe i can fly or... possibly the numa numa song ... 

next we have the Russian Doll named Ronda (or something) singing Vanessa Carltons' "A thousand miles'  just because id love to see her run with no legs or arms, her head bopping of with every bounding leap to see another doll inside... but then i might just be weird. 

And lastly we get to my dream of 'Singing in the rain by Ted the Teddybear (yes i see how childish that name is..)

but how brilliant would it be that a bear sings the song with top hat and umbrella!?

this would be scripted of course... but on the plus side.... reality tv is completely unscripted or atlas partially unscripted. 

October - 11 Second Club - Pre Production stuff

Ive been working on concept ideas, like backgrounds and character designs trying different poses and such, doing turn around sheets and a little storyboard for shot ideas before i start keyframing

Background idea no. 1

simple sofa with carpet rug for character 1 to sit and stand on, and a mirror for character 2 to look at himself in... 

Pick n Mix Project (Installment no. 2)

So yesterday i posted about all my issues with the Pick n Mix project I'm currently doing and Ive gotta be honest, getting all that doubt and anger with myself out on paper... kind of.. really helped. I continued my night doing this basic storyboard for an intro.. hopefully explaining my story for the series I am to complete.. So... S1 E1 of Snowball Snowdown - and yes ill probably change that... because its corny af.

So this is the basic intro sequence on the left and to the right theres the basic shots ill need for the episode as any one person speaks.

So the premise is, its a game show.. kind of like... QI meets James Corden meets Mock the Week...  Basically, Snowball the ceramic Cat is like the Stephen Fry of the Animated world, he knows all, though he doesn't have a sidekick. Ted the Teddybear (all names are subject to change because clearly I can't be trusted to name anything... Hell i named my dog bossy and my plant oxygen.. ) and Bobo the Bronze Owl are regular Characters on the show, and team leaders who each have a guest on each episode as their team member. 

the shots I planned to use were al close up to mid shots of individuals or their pairs and the occasional  longshot to display the whole set for things like scores. I was playing with the ideas of panning shots for movement of characters so that the character can be on a walk cycle loop as the background moves as its meant to be animated in 2D. 

So.. 'Why is the script not included Tasha?' i hear you ask. Well.. ITS REALITY TV WHICH MEANS I DONT HAVE TO WRITE A SCRIPT!

best thing ever about reality tv with this project is, I can write questions and answers on cards and give it to the person who's going to be voicing Snowball and then give random answers to the other 4 voice actors some of the answers to be correct and others not.. but they won't know... and basically, sit everyone down. get people to just have a chat around the questions and then make jokes as they go... 20 minute episode with around 5 questions in total... simple... then all I would have to do is edit the sound track together, film the voice actors as they go as reference footage for movements, as well as lip-syncing. 

Pick n Mix project (Installment no. 1)

So the Pick n Mix project started on Monday, the third - and yes I had to check the date...

so. what have I done so far? well.. i struggled for ideas up until saturday. I spoke to Kathy and Derek (my lecturers) and they suggested branching off from my cards and coming up with something related to the cards but not exactly true to the words I was provided.

so I shall explain.. My last post was about the Art nouveau remake piece, which was the first instalment of this project, we were provided on the 3rd with a further three cards with random words on them. My cards read:

Style: Art Nouveau

Place: New York

Show: Reality tv

Character: Ceramic knick knacks. 

So everything was going fine until the characters, thats where all my ideas stopped and I hit, not a mental wall... more like the project was this bottomless pit and the only way to escape was to come up with an amazing idea not only my lecturers would like but my class would too. so... it was hopeless, and I'm scared of the dark, and failing, so I got myself into this downward spiralling anxiety ridden project. 

So, when in such a predicament you speak to friends and teachers for ideas

nothing. 

I literally had nothing. it had been 5 days since the class and usually id be full of ideas, incapable of just choosing one. but this time i was done for. there was nothing. my house mates tried to help but even then.. it wasn't working. 

I literally gave up on saturday night. sat down, watched tv ate dinner with some housemates and chilled.

epiphanies happen at the most random of times. ill tell you that for sure. id ben straining my brain for an idea for 6 days straight and id even tried to pretend like i was chilled and not thinking about it in order for something to come to me, but it wasn't until id literally given up all hope and just said i won't even bother, ill wing it in a week, that i realised something I read. 

You see id done loads of research, on each one of my cards and it was a single line of text in pages and pages of reading that i remembered something along the lines of 'Reality Tv is any program which is partially or completely unscripted' - you know what that means:

Chat shows  - Late night with Seth Meyers

- The Graham Norton Show

- The Tonight Show staring Jimmy Fallon

- The Ellen DeGeneres Show

- The Late Late Show with James Corden 

They all count!

Comedy Tv - QI

- 8 out of 10 Cats

 -  Mock the week

- As Yet Untitles

This is where the ideas started flowing.

So heres the research bible so far :)

Proof of Concept and research into Reality tv:

 

Ceramic Knick Knack research

Art Nouveau in New York Research

This is when i started brainstorming ideas and had a brain melt. Nothing worked. Nothing Fit. Nothing seemed just right. There were ideas but not one that I actually wanted to produce. 

So, i continued my research into how id animate, what colours i should use to display certain moods or time periods.  Then into character design, hoping that if I came up with a character I liked then maybe I could construct an animation around the character...

Update: I get Headaches

Ive been struggling the past couple of weeks to get any work done, but this week has been by far the worst. Two weeks ago my dog died, and last week my grandmother. So now I spend the majority of my time on the phone to my mother when I'm not in class, and while I love her and theres nothing I'd rather do that make sure she's okay every day, it means that I'm pretty much incapable of doing any work.
This is not to say I've been slacking off for the last 7 days, it just means I've been doing more research and tv watching than drawings, designing, and most importantly animating. In fact, i don't think I've animated anything in the past two weeks. Being so out of touch with the university and my work makes in more daunting than ever to open up toon boom, cel action or tv paint in order to get started on any actual animating. Its all planned out, every shot, every movement - the problem is, I've lost touch with the art work, I seem incapable of drawing a proper figure outside of my mind, let along a whole storyboard to turn into an animatic.
Never the less, this is my weekly update:

so as far as research goes, Ive been looking through The Animation Bible  and some other character design books

I also started a new sketchbook last week during the Presentations at the Poly, started with a couple pencil sketches, but its only been a week:

 

And then there was life drawing this week, as there now is every week :/ first is a pencil sketch and the second was a later drawing in the session in brown chalk and black charcoal.

some extra work I attempted was the drawing below, a test to see how long it would take me to draw a single frame of Art Nouveau Style animation. So ill tell you now, it took me about 45 minutes to an hour.... way too long to make a 5 minute animatic in my opinion. 

OCTOBER 2016