Failed to Send Update

Sorry its been a while, lately its been a lot of just tweaking my shots and trying to make sure things are okay for Failed to Send. I’ve mostly been focusing trying to get my portfolio shots underway to be honest but this week I’ve been setting aside time to do some animations and asset building. The biggest thing I guess is that I have made the tube appearing asset its own thing for Flash, that way we can just drop it in when we need to in the shots. Originally we were going to do that in post, but looking back at that decision now, I’m not entirely sure what we were thinking, that would have just been such an unnecessary step in the process.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely the biggest thing, I’ve also been doing a lot of animation for the short recently as well, here’s a couple shots that I completed.

Onions Have Too Many Layers

So I’ve been working on my shot over the past week so that I could get it to a good spot to submit it to the Dreamcrits session for animation. I’ve mostly been focusing on trying to get the breakdowns correct, lip sync, and improving the key poses.

The Tornado

Its been a little while, animation has been getting underway, I’ve been busy making assets for the short. Though (and I think this is the biggest leap), the biggest thing for me has been developing the tornado/cyclone asset that we will need for our character, “Boofy”. Here is said asset:

The key thing for this was that we needed an asset so that animation could go as quickly as possible for the shots where the tornado is involved. And because the asset would have to move eventually and would not be a static up and down formation, I had to divide each section of the tornado so that we could take each part and animate them or tween them separately to fit what we needed it to do.

Overall the short is moving along slowly, but we are getting what we need done.

There’s So Many Layers!

And so, I’ve been doing what I can to divide up my time between working on the short as well as putting in time to work on my senior portfolio shots. As stated in my previous post on the matter, I have decided to go with the Chef in training idea. I’ve spent sometime and I’ve got some rough blocking now, but first allow me to introduce my characters!

Upgrading to Malcolm 2.0 (with very special thanks to AnimSchool) I was able to really customize my characters quite a great deal and with a lot more ease. My characters’ names are Troy and Abed, named after the characters from the show “Community” (where I got my dialogue from). Troy is the Chef in training cutting an onion, doing his best to impress his mentor (Abed) with his culinary skills. But being an inexperience Chef, he is not prepared for the dreaded Onion. Here they are:

Troy

Abed

Originally, the scene was actually only going to have Troy as a close up single character shot. The onion would be off screen and then there would be the reveal when he raised up the onion like my quick animatic showed.

However, after showing this initial version to my professor (the wonderful Raquel Coelho), she suggested that I pull the camera out a bit so that the onion is in the shot from the beginning and the gag would be the action and how he reacts to it. From there I introduced Abed so that there could be contrast between the two characters. Here is where I currently am with my shot. It’s in the early blocking phase but I’m rather pleased with everything that I have in the shot.

I’m having a bunch of fun working on this shot and I can’t wait to continue working on it!

New Shot Ideas…

So while I would like to go back and re-animate my first shot for the year, I’ve decided that it would be best if I went ahead and started a new shot all together and took a bit of a break from that troublesome shot. SO! I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas for my next shot one idea is called “How’s the Hand?”, where I imagined that the scene would be between an overly enthusiastic doctor and a patient who has their arm still in a cast.

The other idea would be a bit of a gag shot, where the character would be cutting up onions and exclaim, “There’s so many layers!”. For this scene, I imagined that it would be a close up on a junior/chef-in-training.

After getting some critiques, I’ve decided that I am going to go ahead with the second idea with the junior/chef-in-training idea.

First Work Day

Well, its our first work day! I have to say I’m rather excited for this! We got everyone together in the art building in room 243 and gave everyone an overview of the short and what we would be attempting to accomplish in the next several months. I am happy to say that I am very proud of the crew that we managed to gather up, small as it might be. I was able to grab Ben Morgan and Charlie Ly as animators onto our short as well as Nicolle Castro as a temp animator. Originally I was going to have one more person to help us animate but unfortunately he couldn’t commit to the project after getting a separate contract from another company. However! The team that we have I am certain we will be able to pump out some good work. After the introductions, I assigned everyone shots to do and then we went on our way to work. Jon Mandel helped out by going around making sure that everyone was drawing the characters on model and helping out with critiquing animation. I also printed out several character sheets for our animators so that they could have a physical copy out in front of them while they were animating.

A pretty good first work day if I do say so myself!

Failed to Send Assets

So over the last couple days, I’ve been in the BFA lab coming up with color designs for our short and finalizing any other kind of asset that we may need, namely the capsules, the look of the large capsule dispenser, and how the tubes vanish. For color designs, I set out to look at colors that phones actually use for sender and receiver text messages. The colors available ended up being, a pale yellow, a light blue, green, and grey. From these colors I went to try to come up with a color that would work best for our outgoing pipes.

In the end we decided that we would go for the yellow pipe as the final color choice for our outgoing pipes. Also, here is how our pipes will be vanishing out of sight.

Also, because one of our shots was getting closer to being started that had the chair in it, I figured that I needed to also come up with the look for the chair as well as how the chair should look and operate.

We decided that we would go for the look of the top middle chair, with the green line going round the bottom of it.

And finally, I drew up how I wanted our large capsule dispensing tube to look like. For this design, I really tried to go for very angular shapes as well as go for a color that is the opposite of that of the outgoing tubes. That way we could still kind of get an idea that one tube brings the capsules in, the other sends them out.

Thus concludes a majority of the designs that we will need for our short.