What work I have been up to.

This weekend I've kept myself busy. As well as continuing to ink in the scenes in Flash, all that is left is the audience scenes and James and Al's scenes. They need to be done by next week, I also re-edited my showreel for widescreen and work on these two images for the degree show website.

One is the concept art picture, took me absolutely ages trying to get it to look right.
The other is a final composition images. I slightly blurred out Mort and the background.

Finally, since we decided that the old intro was just to eye catching, I worked on a quick new version of the logo, going from black and white into colour.

Flash Coloured Practice

With all the dissertation work it just feels like term just began. It was suggested to me that we use Toon Boom Studio. Simon and I tried that but couldn't make no heads or tails of it. Then we use illustrator, hopefully using the live trace tool, but that came out fuzzy with broken lines, and it's difficult to colour. I just spent the last few weeks colouring all my frames in photoshop with no luck. Finally Simon discovers that flash will do it just fine. What a colossal waste of my time! Oh well, least I know how to make the film now.

I decided that it would be useful for me to practice flash, so using the coloured frames I did, I used them to do a bit of this Mort scene in Flash. Because they were coloured in photoshop it is a bit fuzzy. Also for some reason the frame rate a bit weird. That may have happened when it compressed the quicktime video. Gotta go two weeks to dissertation deadline.

Prof put on gloves test animation

Well, here is the prof puts on gloves test animation scene. It's without the dialogue at the moment, but I hope to fix that. I noticed a couple of things I would like to change, places where it jumps. Hopefully I can see what it looks like with dialogue soon. I pretty happy with the change of expressions and the arcs.

Amendment

Here it is with the tweaks and the dialogue. Their are a few minor lip-syncing issues but overall I'm happy with it.

Idea and Research

In order to help we animation and resizing up the background I decided to model some dummy models of each of the characters to use as reference, just like the do on actual productions.


Harrison suggest we actually split the renders up into different layers to make it easier for composting. That's a good idea.

I've also got some video reference of Stitch, for four arm animation.


Lot's of Christmas work to do.

Dummy Test Models

Here are some dummy test models I made. I made them so the Elisha and Harry could have some reference of size when they rescale the background.

Test Walkcycles

Here are some test walkcycles I did for each of the characters. I tried to get different feels of walks for each character. These are just rough tests.

R.A.M is very short, so he has to hop quite quickly.
The Professor is very energetic and optimistsic. He walks with the classic 8 frame double bounce walk. Notice the lower set of arms are slightly delayed.
Susie-May glides across the floor not moving her head at all. She swings her hips and shoulders for sassyiness.
Mort has a great deal of weight so has to shift that weight we he walks. He takes 16 frames.

R.A.M Test 3D Model

Here are some shots of a test model of RAM I did to see if the Toon Shader effects will work. I think it turned out quite well. Now he just needs to be re-modelled and full rigged with blend shapes. I best get someone else to do that.