Progress

I noticed that I hadn't posted for a while... The hand in for our pre-production was on the seventh and I spent the next few days somewhat unsuccessfully catching up on my sleep. I looked over what I handed in a couple of days ago and spotted a few mistakes bu at least I survived the deadline.

I'm working on Layout at the moment but don't have anything that I could put up here yet, so instead I'll show you my newest animatic instead. (A animatic is sort of a rough, cobbled together version of the future film that is useful to work out camera-angles and timings)

Here you go:

More character stuff

Thought I'd also show you the character and expression sheets so you can kinda take a guess at how the character will move and behave. (I should have mentioned this earlyer: you can click any of the images too see a full high-resolution version.)

Turnaround

 Just a quick look at the finished turnaround of my main character. As well as colour keys of the environment Jerry will be heading trough. (Images after the Jump) These jpg are from my pre-production hand-in folder, hence the annotations and semi fancy borders.

Concepts

I wanted my character to have a bit of a shifty feel to him and to that end I tried to incorporate several things into my designs. Influences where rats, weasels and other rodents. When that alone didn't work, as it made the character to unappealing, I borrowed design elements from DreamWorks' Sindbad and Disney's the road to El Dorado.
There are scans of some early concept sketches of mine after the Jump. (beware, my early EARLY concept work never looks good) Also, there are jpg's of my tie downs of body shape and clothing, which is where I'm at at the moment.

So... lets get started.

The goal of the courses major project is, for me specifically, to create a 90 second 2D animated film. (Just in case this ever gets read by a non-animator: you need at least 12 drawn pictures, called frames, to get smooth movement. For ninety seconds that means at least 1080 frames plus backgrounds etc. that have to be drawn, cleaned up, photographed, edited and maybe coloured. That's if you get everything right the first time.)

The courses last project was an eleven second long piece of animation, focused on expression and lip synchronisation and although I found it engaging and mostly fun, (you always get to a point where you would rather be doing anything else than draw, then you get over it) I didn't want to do the same thing again.

To that end I though I'd try my hand at a flight sequence. This would enable me to both show some emotional acting as well as more acrobatic-centric animation. To that end I came up with the following premise:



A Thief gets chased over the rooftops of a renaissance town by a Monster, after disturbing said guardian of a treasure trove he found in an attic.





After some more thought I expanded this idea into a rather much longer script that you can read after the jump, should you be interested.