PIDDLE THROUGH HISTORY

Process of development.
The initial idea of animating mistakes in history essays was a good basis but not strong enough on its own. After our test voice-overs a character seemed to appear, the professor. We toyed with making him an animated character but this would have got in the way of a simple idea. much better that we don't see him the narration and characterization will hopefully add humor and pin the thing down. In the pitch and bible we will use mocked up photos of professor piddle to add a sense of authenticity and credit to our idea which we thought would be best played tongue in cheek!
The title has changed from "The Anals of History" to a child friendly, "Piddle through History" which I like better as it carries our characters name plus the obligatory double meaning.
I began to write the presentation in the style of a really bad pitch beginning with a hopelessly
mixed metaphor. Rosie found some photos to add to the nonsense, I hope the BBC woman has seen enough bad pitches to get the joke!
Costumes may play a part If we have time, I'm thinking maybe tank tops and corduroys.

Exeter Ident so far...

To create the Animated Exeter ident there are a lot of different techniques needed, which is good, and allows most people to get involved in what they are interested in. I initially took on the role of producer which I have to admit scared the crap out of me, but after I broke down each shot and we worked out how to actually do it, It became less daunting. Andy suggested that I should take on the role of Art Director and Adam and Holly stepped in to Produce and are doing a great job so far. this will be a huge post production job and so the bulk of the stopmo and CG needs to be done end of next week. we are still waiting for the black curtains to arrive so the stop-mo can begin, delays on this will have a knock on effect as post needs the footage to work on as soon as possible. In a budgeted Animation , Pre-production art would be created and given to all departments, with the set build I had use what I already had or could buy at DIY store so pretty pictures of how I imagine it to look are pointless. The set Build went well and Nat and Charlotte popped round to lend a hand. Now that it is set up at the studio there are a few minor problems that need thinking about,
1. how to lower the egg, originally from below in the animatic. There is no hole to insert a pole so may have to be done from above or a segmented pole used which can be shortened.
2. How to get the Phoenix out of the scene down the hole, this is only a problem if we use a stop mo model rather then CG which can be done in post!
3.do we dolly in or zoom in? zoom looks more promising at this stage as we dont have a way of sliding the camera in, model railtracks or a lathe were discussed at one point.
Answers on a post card please to me.

Narration for our pitch

Did some sound recording today with Rosie and will, pretty much forgot how to use the equipment but after a brief reminder from Steve we were good to go. took a few times to get it right as sometimes I could here my "normal" voice slip through but hopefully with the animation to watch no one will think its me. Wills doing an excellent job with the character designs and general look of the thing, very comical and those simple cartoons that he has been developing should bring a lot more comedy to our pitch. will try and post some sound bites soon.

The Pitch Project

It's nice to take a back seat on the art side of things for a change and concentrate on re working the initial idea of essay mistakes into a workable script that will help drive the animation, The concept of this series is fast past shorts, each dealing with a period of history i.e the Greeks,Rome,Egypt...I found a brief compilation of these online and it made me laugh. I need to elaborate on them without making them to cute or contrived- Rosie, Will and I discussed how it should be narrated, by a child or a kind of boffin like character called Professor Piddle for want of a better name. Thankfully we managed to get a Mum to record her child reading out part of the script, it did'nt really work. Its a lot funnier when ridiculous statements are read out with an authorative voice and the timing is essential if this is going to work. I have rewritten the script and will record in the sound room tomorrow, then its on to story boarding and producing the animatic.

The Animatic

Some shots were shortend to fit the allocated time however they will read better when I lenghten them in the final piece. The Elements are begining to come together but i feel like im just making it up as I go along at the mo, the set build is coming on and charlotte and nat have come by and lent a hand. Should be ready to go by monday.

ANIMATED EXETER design work

The actual animatic I will post as soon as I can but these go some way in showing my thought processes.

The Ident project for Exeter was to create a short 30 second animatic to celebrate the 10th aniversary of the festival,I had an idea initialy about a cuckoo clock and this was developed within our group into something that would encorporate many different techniques in animation and some motifs that would allude to the 10th aniversary and the Phoenix building itself, hopefully it will apeal to the Exeter audience who are described as being "a funny bunch". I story-boarded the scenes and produced some Concept designs to help communicate the idea. When it came to the animatic the first scene didnt work for me, it was a dolly in to the round window from the establishing shot, while this allowed the audience to see the various mechanical trumpets and such come out it also meant that the Egg on top which was to slowly rotate and desend became lost and obscure. I decided that a cut to the top of the tower (when we see the egg descend) was needed, then a pan down the tower and zoom through the window. we lose the trumpets but seeing the egg travel down inside the tower is more important. Rosie put the boards together in after-effects and it bagan to come together. Having the cogs move around and floor boards and the little wooden ducks really helped sell the idea, I dont think still images would have done it. Mike did some work on the sound track, the original idea was to have a slow build up of sounds based on the initail "tick tock" sound but this did'nt happen. I think trying to find the right sound effects took longer then expected.

So here are the stop mo models, not sure what happened with the colour of the last images! looks like its in reverse. I am going to try some stopmotion with the armatures before I start on helvis (If there is time), I seem to be focusing on what things look like and neglecting the actual animating which is something I did'nt want to fall in to. If I can manage to animate Helvis to the sound recordings I got then i will be very pleased.

The king is back!

Helvis is progressing as a stop mo model and as a result looks a little different to the 2D designs, as it happens I kind of prefer the new look. more work on the head is needed as well as the addition of a cape. I have posted the designs as well as a little bit of flat graphic work i did to get a feel of the concept as a whole. I will include these in the design bible when I eventually get around to it. I will post a picy of the stop mo model soon. I have also found some old ELVIS LPS I want to record and try some lipsync to! hopefully the new head wont melt.

Stop-Mo

my attemts at lip-sync were hindered by hot lights and melting plastercine which became very shiny. my original plan was to replace pre made mouth parts as different sounds are created, this was impossible due to the sticky plastercine losing its original shape. the results are very rough , next step is to recreate the whole face and seperate jaw using fimo. plastercine can be used to smooth out the join but thats all. Moving the armature itself was a bit better but I still need lots of practice before anything descent will happen.

the start of everything

Summer 08

This Summer I had an opportunity to produce some story-boards for a short educational animation on how Tin is formed. Starting with the Big bang and including proto-planetary solar systems, the Earth cooling and continents colliding. The trick, I found was to create a flow to the direction moving from one point to the other as the narration dictates. Once this was done colour keys and a bit of concept work was required for the clock. These will hopefully act as a guide and give an idea as to what it all should look like, drawing squiggely lines for the storyboard is fine, but more info is required for a decent animatic.

Final thoughts

Initial Ideas and the Conceptual stage of this project I enjoyed but when It came to animating other peoples concepts it became hard work, I had really thought Id be able to get to grips with this but it wasnt the case, Im aware now that I only really like working on my own ideas, This does'nt bode well for employment in the industry (unless its preproduction) and worried me slightly but to be honest It helps me understand how I can direct my porfolio to suit a certain area of expertise. Above is an idea based on the tshirt design logo but I got the impression the client thought it was a bit off! no pleasing some people, Panda with a hard on though? fine.

This is a design for the main character in a story based on Lewis Carols "Jabberwocky" I'm thinking Maya or stop mo, going into shadow puppet style, The basic story boards are in development, as well as concept backdrops. this is more long term while the Helvis project is also developing, ill post the character design and some enviroment concepts, cathy suggested more work on lighting to create dramatic effect, so ill have that in mind for the next series of concepts based on a paradise island in hell. Helo Heloha!

The Basic armature you see here is a toy with plastic ball joints, cheap and light but limited in movement somewhat.
I stuck foam "muscles" to the basic skeleton to flesh it out and even added some plastercine in places. extra foam is cut away with scissors. I was inspired by Ray Harryhausen's book on stop motion which details how various puppets are made, I thought this way was best as I dont have the latex or plaster mould and sculpting equipment yet and this way is less messy. Hands are plastercine over a wire armature but when cold plastercine tends to crack so I may have to rethink this. another problem that might arise is the hooves that are made from fimo with small magnets embedded in them, these may not be strong enough for the figure to stand so hole's may have to be drilled for tie downs.
Finally the costume, the 70's Jumpsuit is white and gold and covered in gems and decoration featuring eagles and the like, will include a few skulls and a dragon, the white should work nicely with the reds and yellows of the backgrounds, ill try and post some background concepts soon.

Animating the Ants

This seemed simple enough yet for some reason it became a chore. A bit like painting by numbers. I had forgotten the process of working in Flash and my mind kept wandering from the task. because the different animated elements are stored seperatly it proved difficult to get a good performance.The end result is a bit wooden but after slogging through lip sync I developed another character for the second voice and limited movement to head nodding and hand wagging as well as a salute every now and then. Elements began to float and I got frustrated and never got to grips with the project as a whole. Not sure why this happend as other flash projects seemed to go alright. Now slightly deflated and releaved its done and hoping foley will be more fun.

OSTN ident and helvis walk cycle

so I have finally figured out how to get some moving images up here, the finished ident and a very rough walk cycle for the helvis character i'm developing,had some trouble with this at first but after a bit more anticipation to really get a feel for the weight, it began to work. he's a big guy after all, should be fun trying to convert all of this for stop motion, still trying to work out a good technique for the lip sync.

end of term project begins

the initial ideas and concepts for the T shirt designs seemed to go down well, a few of my story boards were a bit obscure but I always enjoy the design element to these things. the can jumping from the bin after being thrown away was entirely dictated from the client and so became fairly simple to do. I am also toying with incorporating the logo in other graphics and some other ideas but the initial reaction to the ones I had done was positive.Now to start lip sync on the military ant. great idea for the audio so should work well if i keep it simple, will see!
Helvis has begun the transformation into stop motion with a puppet that is being made, i will post some shots of the various stages and a very rough 2d walk cycle. Also initial stages on 2 other stop motion ideas.

Maya animation

It took me a while to grasp the concept that each element should me animated individualy and then can be repeated to other locations to get the basic movements up and running.Going through it with someone was a lot of help as the tutorials were hard to follow. I then tweaked the graphs to try and create a bit of character, producing a slight limp and smoothing out any timing mistakes. I think the landing could do with possibly a few less bounces but i've been looking at it for so long I cant be sure! the ping pong ball and football also seem to speed up at the end but this could also be fried brain syndrome.Looking at a real football really helped for timing and squash of which there is none unless its slightly deflated but I suppose these thing are slightly exaggerated in animation to make it belivable even if it isnt true. Overall not bad for a first effort.

script writing

Writing somthing that would fit in to the 90 seconds was tricky. All the ideas I had already developed for an animated film were going to be far to long, I remembered a nursery rhym from when i was a kid about a rabbit beating up mice and so I have tried to adapt it. The song really sets the pace for the animation which is a good basis to work from. It became difficult to write the script in the right format but Story- boarding it really helped and most of the desriptive narative could be thrown out. the only problem now is to work out a decent twist at the end. the mice could have their revenge or perhaps somthing totally unforseen should happen , not sure yet but will tinker with it some more.

The final characters are posted above and are definatly more appropriate for our animation , Rosie designed them and took some time to put the 3d effect on them which works really well and gives them some weight, the arms and legs were done by me in Flash and added later in after effects, its proving difficult to post the final animation for some reason but ill try and get it on the blog soon.

The first run of ideas fearured a series of windows in an apartment where the blinds would come down as a cat walks past and the letters are printed on the blinds, also a reel of film from a projector. We eventually settled on turning the logo into 4 seperate characters which we developed along with some background ideas. i wanted to try somthing abstract and looked at Picasso and Miro for inspiration for some reason the ocean kept poping up as a theme.
The animatic was produced and it became clear that our original idea was'nt going to work in the time alloted. it was scrapped and we went for somthing a lot simpler that works as just as well.
I thought it would be good to try a bit of stop motion regarding the characters but this was a little over ambitious, as the project developed the simplest designs prevailed and seemed to work best against the busy backdrop.
The sound track was recorded by my freind rob, an amazing gargeling talent and Rosie did her thing in bringing in the other audio and making it all fit in to place, All the animated elements are their but many were not used in the final as it becomes really crowded. amazing how fast ten seconds seems when your not thinking about it.
we kept elements to a bare minimum and had enough time to sort out the pre production side of things. I have posted a few concepts of the characters above which were rejected in favour of simpler designs soon to be posted!

Ok... well in to the OSTN ident and just thought Id post a few images to show a train of thought, wanted to keep it very simple and our original plans and story have been discarded, they just didnt work in the alloted time frame of 10 seconds.
the look is inspired by the art of joan Miro the spanish artist and trys to evoke a n abstract underwater feel that will hopefully set of the characters.

New year begins

Well into the new year now and i've been upto my neck in essay's , walk cycles and character turn arounds. The essay took a big chunk out of other stuff i'd rather be doing but no matter. After testing the walk cycle I realised there was not much anticipation so have been trying to address that problem, I will try and post the results if I can. Still dissapointed with the Maya assignment we were given.The problems I kept coming up involved cleaning up models for subdivision and we didnt really cover how to overcome these. Frustrating but perhaps it'll be in the next session. Finally Helvis is done. given him a bit of a 70s cartoon look. This "style" might be a bit clean and derivitive but its simple and quick and allows me to get on with the animation side of things. The juimpsuits I researched were somthing else...I settled on the Aloha with american Eagle, or should I say Heloha. Now on to lip-sync..."Ahoy there shipmates, I like Biscuits!".