We have reached presentation which is having the production at keyframe stage, this enough information for people to decide whether or not they would like to commission this piece. Now to put these individual scenes together I now need to take the renders to premier and get back to you with the sequence in order…unfortunately no sound so you will have to imagine what is being said…lol

Ok my favourite part of the process, I always love doing eyes and stuff, I find it very exciting to come up with so many different expressions that can be used in an animation…its so cool. But I must admit my fingers have been to hell and back with this whole designing on a trackpad. Ok now I am blocking the scenes out and rendering them out one at a time hoping that all of the hardwork has been done and its assembly assembly assembly from now on. Heres a recap. I did all my illustration work in Flash, then assembled in MOHO. Even some of the items that have been drawn frame by frame were done in flash and then set to MOHO’s switch layers to select which state I need at each point. Feel free to write to me if you didn’t understand that last part…am so tired.

Just a day before the first presentation of this animated concept and the only thing I have managed to do is start the first of the cycles in the production. My first characters walk into the scene so basically what I have uploaded is the walk cycle and now am moving onto working on the main expressions I would like conveyed in the story then the simpler animation work will happen last. Firstly as you can see in my horribly done walk cycle is to clock out the main positions of the walk and then tweek the other frames or inbetweens to make it smoother. Because this is still a pitch I will not really be going back to tweek until we know that this is going on television biaaaatch…lol

I am not so sure if the panels in the story board are going to appear in order but here they are, well most of the images I have used for my storyboard. Basically I wanted the function of my staoryboard to block out the elements of this project so I can make certain decisions on exactly how I will excecute the animation. I also used Celtx storyboard feature which plays the images in sequence and then camtasia to present the story to you. I am also going to upload that so stay tuned.

Please excuse the very low sound quality and presentation style, I am currently ill from a bad case of Chicken Licken that has had me losing so much production time…TMI I know. I just wanted to run through the basic sections of the story so you can get an appreciation of how it will flow. As you notice I always love films that start and end at the same place, theres just something about symmetry. Anywho, have a listen and get a feel of the story. The script is on this blog by the way so feel free to read it and go along. Please note because of time constraints I have added some cheats ie we no longer have the lion chasing the dog, I felt it would be good for another episode besides I wasn’t going to do a four legged run cycle at this time of the night.

 

Ok it’s time to go to bed now. This is my little reward…making a banner for my facebook page J makes me feel like I have achieved a lot today…doesn’t that look pretty? Ok that weird blue space on the left hand side is to accommodate the position facebook leaves for the profile picture…didn’t want anything to get obscured there did I?

Ok so now our project requires a logo, this always makes me feel like the project has officially started. Some people like to do their logos at the end…its up to you I guess. I couldn’t think of a cool name so I went straight to my formula for naming stuff when I can’t think of something, which is to focus on the basic premise of the story “what if a street comic couldn’t tell a joke? BINGO “Can’t Tell a Joke” ok we are done with the name and now the logo…voila, a logo that my art teacher Mr Burtenshaw would be proud of…lol. Hope to see this on television!

The visual style of this is highly influenced by the fact that I had no mouse or pen to draw so I had to work smart. Simplifying my characters by using basic geometric shapes to block out the main features of each character and of course my trademark is the high contrast colour palette, influenced by me being short sighted and always having trouble watching stuff that’s washed out or muted colours when I don’t have my glasses on. Ok so our characters are done, normally I have names for these guys and weird back stories but this time I was under a tight deadline to get this done so they are nameless, we will develop the characters further based on whether or not the project is accepted. If not then we go viral with this mutha!

Ok, so drawing on my trackpad is much harder than I thought and the process even longer than anticipated. Its been great opening up some of my outdated animation software to do this. For some strange reason I can only use Corel Draw 13, Flash and Moho and edit in Premier…eish that’s taking it waaaaaay back and Old School for sho! Ok so what am I doing now? Well I am blocking out the main characters in one pose so I can assemble them to do a storyboard…I know am switching stages around and mucking about with the process…but hey, its getting me the result I need I guess and since I am a one man team then what I say goes right?

Ok cool, now that my legal issues are done, I can reveal this script to you to have a look, mull over and give constructive feedback. Its been a while since I have written a screen play but thanks to celtx I could at least organize myself in a way I have never done before in an animation project. You are wondering what celtex is? It’s a software program that combines full-feature scriptwriting with pre-production support and also enables online collaboration.

So my corel draw is a mess right now as I draw the famous corner in the city I will call sunshine city. Basically the story is about a dude who likes to tell jokes by a street corner who fails to successfully tell his joke every week for various reasons. I only hope my trackpad comes through for me at this stage because the amount of illustrations I have to do are crazy. For confidentiality purposes I cannot post the script. Ok the background is traced over a hand drawn plan of how the corner is meant to look.

Using Corel Draw (don’t ask) I mapped out or blocked out the main structures and the details as the next section