Storyboarding again!

So seeing as our narrative was still needing a little bit of a fix, we went back and updated our storyboard. I storyboarding book from the library called “Prepare to Board”. It really helped us as the storyboards were a little clearer this time around, thanks to Eve.

 

Remodeling and Additions!

Claire has decided that she’s going to go and remake the Mr and Mrs Egg models seeing as they were poorly modelled (by me). Conánn pointed out that the problem with them was how the arms just look like they’ve been stuck to them instead of there being some kind of flow. While Claire remodels the eggs, i’ve got stuck into modelling a kitchen.

The feedback we were given this time round was based on how to make the narrative more understandable. Mike was saying maybe we could open the animation with a note on the desk informing the viewer that Linda is out getting groceries. And how there should maybe be a kitchen as well. Linda could arrive home and begin making dinner when a noise in the room makes her check on her husband to find him cheating. It just gives a little more depth to her character and a reason for checking the bedroom. So! I’ve began to make the room look much more 50’s influenced.

3D Animatic

When we presented our first animatic, we took on board the feedback we got and applied it to a 3D Animatic used for a pose test. Basically from the last presentation we were told the narrative can be a little unclear and the relationship between the husband and wife isn’t obvious enough. We were told we should maybe open the animation with a camera panning down a hallway, passing over photo frames that show the husband and wife’s growing relationship, just to show it shatter when we learn he is cheating on her.

Setting up the scene and textures

While Claire does the rigging, i’ve begun to set up the scene and build all the individual models. I started by modelling food based items such as a cabinet. Made of crackers. I also lamp based on a ketchup bottle for the room and textured it in a way that is as accurate as possible. At the moment we have a black and white striped wallpaper that Eve supplied me with, but personally I think its too harsh and makes it look very gothic and really just doesn’t fit the room. I’ll talk to the team about getting that changed, maybe keep the stripes but softer colours.

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In one of Alec’s Imaging and Data Vis lectures, he taught us how to save the UV Snapshot so we can paint our own textures and apply them to apply them to our models.

First you’d load up the UV editor, select the mesh you want to texture. Save the UV snapshot and then you have an outline of the mesh for painting, and reapplying to the model.

Implicit meanings and 3D modelling

So i’ve started 3D modelling. We’ve assigned each other tasks on asana and i’ve been tasked with making Mr. Egg (Andy) and Mrs. Egg (Linda) in Maya. Eve and Kirstin were talking about the idea of replacing Mrs. Bacon’s character with Frank the Sausage so that Mr. Egg would be having some sort of gay affair. I’m sure if you looked for it you’ll find the innuendo they were hinting at. So we kinda just went with that!

A week or two back we had a lecture on Implicit and Explicit meanings and how they’re used in film and how we’re looking into what our implicit/explicit is. Eve said that by replacing Mrs. Bacon with Frank the sausage it adds an implicit meaning to our animation. That implicit meaning being, maybe Linda (Mrs. Egg) killed her husband for cheating on her with a gay man food(?) seeing as it was shunned back then.

So! To sum it up:

• Explicit = Wife catches husband cheating and kills him.
• Implicit = She kills him partly because of homophobic attitude quite a lot of people had back then. (Not that everyone was like this, it was just more verbal back then.)

So while Claire modelled the sausage, I got stuck into creating the two egg models. (Keeo in mind, Andy and Lindas models are more a less the same bar the apron and faces.

They’re pretty rough looking but we might use it as a placeholder for now, just so we can get the 3D animatic done.

The 50’s and Film Noir

So seeing as our movie is set in the 50’s, we’ve decided to tell our animated short through film noir. One of the first things we talked about using in our film when we discussed film noir was the use of lighting, for example the lights behind the shutter blinds that project the bars across the room. And projected shadows in general.

Eve recommended that we check out a part from Chicago (a film noir musical), and it was quite similar to the story we are going for. Only for the part where the woman talks about discovering her husband was cheating on her so she killed him. (5.00 minutes onward). We might take influence from some of the lighting used in the scene. Like the projected lines of light across the floor.

 

“Emphasizing shadows and harsh lighting creates a sense of volume and depth in your films that embodies the film noir style.”

The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat. 2016. Lighting Tips for Film Noir – The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/lighting-for-film-noir/. [Accessed 17 March 2016].

 

 

Our Completed Animatic!

So we’ve threw an animatic together! We’re really happy with how it turned out and it did get quite a few laughs when we presented it so all is good at the moment! The animatics based on our revised storyboards seeing as it was much to close to the “Toasted” animtion from last year. To create the animatic we started basically just drawing the storyboards, and then once they we completed, they were sent to me and I put them together as a sequence and added the sounds.

Story Boards

So after discussing it with the team, “Cracking up” (the egg one) is the one we decided to stick with.

Today we began to storyboard, we were really stuck for a while and weren’t really too sure on how to begin our story so we spoke to mike and he helped us completed warp the story into a better one.

Now our story is about Mrs Egg, Mr Egg and Mrs Bacon. Mrs Egg is making dinner, she goes to the bedroom to tell her husband dinner is almost ready, to discover that her husband (Mr Egg) is cheating on her with Mrs Bacon. She drop’s the bowl in shock, screams at him then stabs him to death with the whisk she was carrying. Making Mr Egg, Scrambled.

I read an article on Scribble Junkies about how to make a successful animated short.

“There are typically four reasons an animated short film succeeds, you don’t have to do all of these, but your project should have at least two of the four:

1. Original Technique
2. Appealing Story or Characters
3. Humor
4. Design”

Scribble Junkies: Animation 101: What makes a good Short Film?. 2016. Scribble Junkies: Animation 101: What makes a good Short Film?. [ONLINE] Available at:http://scribblejunkies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/animation-101-what-makes-good-short.html. [Accessed 14 March 2016].

Basically from what I took from the article was that you should try be original and aim to create something that hasn’t been seen before. Make the story appealing, make it somewhat related and convey it in a way that one can laugh or make fun of. And make it aesthetically pleasing.

Now onto the actual storyboards! We’ve decided to do for a fifties esque setting so most of our research will be set in that period.

We first started planning out our shots on the whiteboard before drawing them up properly.

 

Once the storyboards are completed I’ll convert them to animatic format.

The First Presentation: Idea Pitching

This past week we’ve all been working toward building up story boards and working toward this first presentation. For this presentation, we had to come up with ideas for our final animation and pitch them to the class/ lecturers using storyboards. So the team got together and began brainstorming ideas and fired down everything and anything that came to mind.

Idea one: Axolotls

 Yup! Axolotls. Kirstin proposed the idea of our main protagonists being axolotls. The reason she choose axolotls was because of their ability to regenerate limbs when they’re dismembered and their soft look in general. Here’s a few concepts based on that!

Some concepts I did based off of the Axolotl idea. 

Eve then went onto create the storyboards for this, the story involves an axolotl being crushed by a rock and being split in two. Both halfs regenerate and become to separate axolotls. It’s a simple, fun idea and it could work!

 

Idea two: Desktop Stationery

So this is an idea I put forward. Basically its about a relationship between a Pencil and Sharpener and how the Sharpener is wearing the Pencil down and using it up.These are the story boards done by me followed by Eve’s concepts of the characters.

 

 

 

Idea Three: Planets

This is one that really sparked our interest at first. As we were discussing our ideas, we were looking at references. Someone mentioned  “The Amazing World of Gumball”. There’s an episode with talking planets and we thought that it would be a pretty plausible idea seeing as we were taught how to animate a solar system.

 

Here’s the storyboards Claire did that show the sun and moon falling in love but earth passes through and eclipses (separating them) before moving past again allowing the sun to embrace the moon.

These are some of my concepts that were based on drawings Eve did.

 

Idea Four: Eggs In a Carton A.K.A – Cracking up (See what we did there?) 

So yeah, eggs in a carton. To be honest this is an idea that really stuck with all of us. Basically the way this one goes is, there’s a bunch of eggs sleeping in a carton. The lid flips open and a hand comes down reaching for one of the eggs, cracking it open and making a fried egg for breakfast. However. All of the other eggs see this and they panic. “That was my wife.” “Dad where did mum go?” I’m sure you get the point from here! So yeah this one we all warmed to pretty quickly. Our only concern was that it was far to close to the previous years animation “Toasted”. So it would take some tweaking so it wasn’t to similar!

 

Now to talk a little about the presentation itself.

All of our ideas and pitches came across pretty well, got a laugh here and there so we’re hapy enough with them!