Saturday 31 January 2015

Pre-Production for the final project!

Pre-production for my Final project in university! Scary! I've decided to do another show-reel, as my goal is to be able to leave this course feeling completelyyy comfortable with animating! I'm doing an animation course after all...

So my show-reel is broken down into three stages (Just like last years one!)
Stage 1 - Basics Exercises
Stage 2 - Mime 
Stage 3 - Final Performance 

Stage 1

For the basic exercises I've planned three small animations, the first involving a hover-board!
It's 2015, I want a hover board damn it. 
Below is the plan for making the board itself, which even though I kinda struggle with the whole making part I'm so excited to make it! Then below that are the thumbnails of some poses of the armature with the board, then finally the thumbnails for the animation. Plan of attack is kinda simple, armature gets on hover board, hovers around for a bit, gets too confident, board stops, armature doesn't!




I had so much fun with the whole magic theme during the last project I wanted to do something else with the witch! Plus this means I can get a second use out of the witches hat I made. This idea is not so much about character animation, but more a chance to play with animating a prop. Decorating cakes is always fun, so thought I'd give animating a cake being decorated by 'magic' a go!
Below are some ideas/designs and the thumbnails.  




(Made a snazzy rose out of icing. Edible materials are way more fun!)


The last part of Stage 1 is going to be a basic monkey walk, as I never did quite master a four legged walk in first year. My cat armature looked like an AT-AT and was animated like it had spaghetti legs.
Below are two little doodles and quick thumbnails. To make the walk look a bit more interesting I want to make it look like its walking along a branch.



               
Stage 2

Last year my stage 2 animations only involved one character, so this year I'm guna try stepping up a notch and animate two characters! We'll see how it goes.. So I can get another use of the monkey armature I've planned to animate an interaction between a monkey and an explorer. Below are the set/prop designs and the thumbnails. 



The other part of Stage 2 is going to involve two characters on a roller-coaster, one having the time of its life and the other hating every second! I'm looking forward to animating two characters with such different emotions! 
Below are some drawings I did while trying to figure out how I'm going to film this, along with the prop design and thumbnails! 



One amazing thing about having a drama queen for a sister = I get the best LAVs. 


Stage 3

For the 'Final Performance' dialogue is needed so I'll be using a clip from Ella Enchanted. (Link to the clip below!)

                                                                          Sound Clip!

For this I had a few things in mind, mostly a damsel in distress sort of situation, but that seemed to similar to the film, so now the scenario will be two characters eyeing up the last cake in a bakery sorta situation!  
As the making stage isn't exactly one of my strengths my character designs stay quite simple. Below are some doodles I've done, but for the final character design I used Alexa Chungs face as reference. Best face. 
I like the coloured nose and rosy cheeks style. ^_^




All of my male character designs looked wayyy to similar to the one I made last year! So I'll probably add a beard or something just to make it look a bit different. And a bigger nose. Noses are fun to make. ^_^





I can't get this cake out of my head since watching The Grand Budapest Hotel. It's so pretty!


Cazy basic thumbnails.



(I suck at drawing action sheets, but I like the bike. I can draw bikes.)