Duey Learns Ballet & artefact work

Kept forgetting to post over the past couple of weeks, but my client animation, Duey Learns Ballet, is on YouTube!



As for artefact work, here are some more finallised designs for Alice based off the feedback from the presentation.



And some designs for the Cheshire Cat.





Had a much tougher time with this. Trying to recreate the feeling of the Cheshire Cat while making him look as 'odd' as possible. I preferred the 'slinkier' look on the second set of designs, it makes him seem more sly like he can slip about here and here whenever he wants, which is what he does in the books. Whether this is agreed on remains to be seen.

Background 2 - the dance studio exterior

Next up, the studio interior then the stage.

Backdrop 1 - the street

Need to sort the lighting in the final render when I animate with it, but at least the 2D textures look a little 3D with some shading added.

Will post some PRP artefact work this weekend.

Duey mouth morphs

Just a quick example of how his mouth moves. Will rig him and the ballerina later this week.

Monster and Ballerina models

Both still need rigging, but Duey's (my monster got a name!) got his mouth movements sorted. The ballerina went strange while I tried to sot her hair out, but I don't think I did too badly overall.

Ballerina model WIP

Here's a front and side shot of her so far. All I need to do is add her hair and then rig and texture her.

Still need to tweak her nose and such, but considering my previous luck with modelling human characters, this is definately my best model.

Client project designs + storyboards

First of all, the mindmap.

The first designs. I went with the scary and cute scenario. The little girl was from an earlier idea I had, but decided to leave it because I wasn't getting any solid ideas for it.


The top-most designs were my favourites here, and the idea of him in a tutu showed up, too.

Rough sketch of the ballerina I planned to add in my animation, along with one last monster design. I still preferred the other design though.
And the storyboards. I'll let these speak for themselves.







Hopefully this'll take up 2 minutes, I already know it'll be enough work for me to take up the amount of time we'll be working on the client project.

WIP shot of my animation

I know I haven't been posting much, I've been busy trying to sort this animation out. Here's a pic of it in the meanwhile, while I try and get the second half of it sorted.

The tecture's not on the conveyer belt at this point, but the lighting's all sorted and I'm loving how soft and almost model-like it looks.

Pirate Model

Finished my pirate model, and I think I did a pretty good job of modelling him.

If I'm honest, this is about as good as I can model on my own without needing help or having strange problems pop up that I can't solve. So I think making it simple's worked to my advantage.

Simluated client brief, designs and storyboards

First of all, a copy of my proposal (I had issues with the dropbox, and I know this is late, sorry).

Download (password is 'uni', so people don't randomly download it)

So, for my project proposal, I've decided to focus on the more lenient (and hopefully more popular) message of saying that it's alright to file share and download as long as you support the artists you like. That way the file sharing is no different to hearing something on the radio and TV and the artists you want to support can keep going. This is hard to pull off in 20 seconds, so I had to simplify the message a lot.

Instead, I'm going to use the example of 'when you X, God kills a kitten' (with X being something bad/sinful/something a person wants someone else to see). However, I'm going to have a pirate squishing the kittens with a mallet with a squeaking sound from them, making it seem more comical. I've found the 'God kills a kitten' fad on the internet to have more of a sense of humour about it, so people hopefully won't think it's trying to see you as a criminal for whatever you do like most adverts.

Here are the charater designs:
Simplified to make it easier to model, texture and animate. Also simple because 20 seconds isn't long enough to justify a details character design when it will appear for such a short time.

The Storyboards:

Pretty self-explainatory, really. If you don't pay for music you like to support artists, kitten go squish, if you do, kitten gets petted, which means happy kitten ^^

Simulated client project

Mission: To create a 20 second animation about the consequences of file sharing and when it's illegal.

How I'll tackle it: First, by looking into cases of file sharing and think of an interesting way to create the animation.

At a glance, I think Ed Byrne sums the piracy warnings before DVDs up brillianty.



I found an editorial about American anime licensor FUNimation telling people to remove their dubbed content from the site.



While I agree that from an American standpoint, this argument makes sense, but from a UK standpoint, the legal content mentioned is unavailable and not released until at least half a year later. Those who wish to buy the titles when they're out can at least get a 'sneak peek' at what they will get eventually along with getting rid of the long delay.

So, my idea for the animation is something with little movement (as I've said before, 3D animation is NOT something I get along with) with split second imagery and effects that would hopefully mean the viewer would want to see the animation more than once. I find that videos where I've missed something and need to go and watch it again make it stick in my head a lot more.

Sketches will be posted later.