Finished Animatic!

Right, I've made a bit of a change.

The drawn animatic was looking good and helped me plan out my shots. But it was much more useful for me to physically build my shots on the animation rig to see if I could construct the space I wanted.  So I decided to make my animatic with still images taken on the set rather than drawn on paper. Here it is:

This turned out pretty well and I learnt a lot from it.

1. I need to make my robots stronger.
I had problems getting my robots to do what I want them to do. The arms weren't strong enough to hold the pizza. So I need to re-enforce them and fix them to the body of the robot more effectively.

2. I need to make Postbot able to stand up.
Postbot, and the other two actually need rebalancing. Postbot was the only one I had trouble with getting to stand, but equally I haven't animated Ping's walk cycle yet so that could also cause a problem.

3. How will Ping jump?
Ping does not have knees, I think you need knees to jump. This is why in the shots where he should jump (his close up) he currently just sits there.

4. What am I going to do with the background?
It looks very flat and very bland. In a way I like this but I'd like to test some more realistic looking buildings .

5. Lots of time needs to be put into sound design.
For this I used found royalty free sounds from the internet and I think it really shows. I aim to record my own sounds. Hopefully this will give it a kind of audio-continuity and overall better quality and more appropriate sounds.

So, a useful exercise. My next move is to focus on the above areas as well as more testing.

Meet the Robots

Here are the three characters of my upcoming animated short film. 

Click for larger image. 

From left to right, we have:

    POSTBOT                                         ROBIT                                       PING 

The post box                                    The fridge                            The microwave

Follow Robit, Postbot and Ping as they go on a journey of friendship and self discovery. 

I don't want to say too much more as a lot will come from this film on the first watch. I believe any story can be read in an infinite number of ways and I want each reading to come without preconceptions, hence I don't want to set this narrative in a set reality.

More to come soon. 

Animatic teaser

A shot from the animatic for my upcoming animation. 

Robit the fridge

Here is some further design work on Robit, the main character for my upcoming animation. 

Click for larger image. 

Working from these sketches I constructed a model from foam board and wire to see how he would look as a model. 

Click for larger image.

The next step will be to see how he looks when animated. I intend to test the capability of the arms to express emotion. For example having them drag behind him to show his sadness, or raised to show excitement. Him arms will be the main expresser of his emotion along with his eye. 

I also need to see how it looks when he opens himself as shown in the above drawings, and see how I can make him dance for one of the possible scenes.

What I'm working on - Robit

Here are the first sketches for the main character of my third year animation project. Here are some possible designs for Robit, a robot who wants to have an awesome party. 

Robit with legs. 

R2D2 inspired.

A more angular design. 

An inverted angular look. 

     

A box design with a single wheel. The handle allows the centre to be opened for storage.

A deeper cube with four wheels. More like a fridge. 

I have several varied designs here each with their pros and cons. The last design is the one I am working from and have developed further. The stability of the four wheels is important as having a single wheel may lead to balance problems when animating. I like the fridge concept, whether the chilling function would be used is yet to be seen as I don't believe a robot has the need for anything to be chilled. But I can definitely see Robit storing things in himself much like Bender from Futurama.                          

Colourless

Colourless - Documentary

- Second year Documentary project

- March 2015

Solo project. 

I'm really proud of this work, I believe it to be a real worth while film that features an incredibly hard working young man. The juxtaposition between the expectation and reality of what a registered blind individual can do is an interesting contrast that I feel challenges peoples perceptions. 

It gave me great experience of filming on location independently. I was responsible for everything on this production, not only with respect to the footage captured but also looking after the equipment. I had to carefully choose which equipment to take as I travelled alone over 150 miles on public transport to get to the location. 

I would love to produce more work like this in the future. Documentary is a genre I value greatly, the ethical implications of what is produced and how it is approached are extremely important. 

The Wizard (and the spelunking of Råtröckbat cave)

The Wizard - Animation

- Second year Animation project

- April 2015

Solo Project.

My first real Animation. The idea started off as a simple fight scene between a mouse and some toys, as if a child was imagining an epic fight where his pet is the hero. The only real similarity between the original pitch and the finished project is the mouse, albeit with as completely different character. 

It is a very experimental project. The mouse needed to look realistic (for the original idea), the best way to achieve this was to use a real mouse but in my experience live mice don't do what they are told. Cue mouse taxidermy kit. 

Picture courtesy of Firebox.com

It's safe to say my Biology A level has left me with a curiosity and interest is biology, I think this may have leaked into my work. Anyway, I dabbled in taxidermy for this project and I'm not sure I'll do it again. For one thing the mouse wasn't very moveable, once I'd treated it and put the armature in and everything it just went very stiff. Hence the exaggerated, jagged movement of the mouse in the film. This was one of the major factors in changing the story. I could have used it as a main character and had it's animation style as a feature, but this isn't what I wanted for my first animation project. I wanted to practise and learn good animation technique, which I couldn't do with something that wouldn't animate.

Fun Fact: I accidentally pulled off one of the mouse's feet when taxidermy-ing him. 

I'd like to note the mouse was ethically sourced from a pet shop, already dead, sold frozen and intended to be snake food. 

The new idea was a movie trailer rather than a complete narrative. I needed some new characters. I wanted to use Lego and see how I could animate it, seeing as it has been done before I thought it would be a good test of my skills. It was a lot more difficult than I though it would be, it took a day of testing just to get the walk cycle right. The orange dots in the image below mark out the distance of each complete cycle.

Click for larger image.

The cave set is the only one I built myself as it was the only setting I could get the aesthetic I wanted out of the Lego I had available. All of the Lego, minus the figures, was donated by a good friend of mine. On a low budget production like this I would never have been able to fund it without borrowing  and foraging. 

The film was quite post production heavy and allowed me to get to grips with some of the more complicated aspects of Adobe After Effects. The laser and the explosion were the most demanding sections. The explosion required a lot of masking done individually on each frame. 

Click for larger image. 

This animation has informed my ideas for my third year animation project, mainly on what I what to do differently:

- No Taxidermy

- No Lego (although it is something I would like to use again in the future)

- Complete story, not just a trailer

- Less emphasis on post production