sandbags

I've been working on a lot of things recetly, but as there was a lot of walkcycles and less postable things, this is the first that I've decided to throw up here. This is the background for the sandbag scene, without the sky and foreground and people walking.

coralicious

So, I've been working on my coral sequence this week, and I need some help. Here's all the unmoving parts of the foreground for the coral sequence (I have various fish and moving sea-grasses and such as well).....it's a panning sequence, so you never see this whole thing at once -- it starts with a pan down through the water to the lefthand, colourful side, and then moves over to the bleached stuff on the right.

My question is, should I make the white-ish thing there (just off the right side of the big middle "divider" rock and the finger coral) into something colourful so that the colour/bleached change isn't quite so sudden or complete? I think I'm doing a bad job describing this, but hopefully you get the picture.

If so: what's your opinion?

these boots were made for

One of my favourites of the walkcycles that I did for the crowd sequence. Not particularly great animation, but I like her character, even though all these walks are pretty much as bland as you can get. But anyway.
Click the (unfortunately compressed JPG image) to view.

progress

I've been kind of stalled on my film again recently as a result of Too Much Other Stuff. I've done all the 9 walkcycles for the crowd scene, but that's about it. But one thing I did do is a piece drawn from the waterbottle scene for the show 'shift', which is on at the Concourse Gallery right now and deals with environmental issues.

Since my camera was nearbye I decided to take pictures of each stage of this (pretty simple) piece, just for fun. So I figured I'd post them just for the heck of it.

01 - weaterbottles drawn and outlined in brown pencil, labels painted.


02 - inside of waterbottles painted

03- basic "water" background filled in.

04- water painted over bottles

05- all water gone over, darkened. At this point I was rather upset with the piece because it really wasn't looking as good as I wanted it too (I'm really still quite a dunce with watercolours since though I'm using them for my film it's in a quite slap-and-dash manner)

06- the next morning I went in and darkened the outlines around all the bottles, and I was a bit happier with it, which was good as I had to get it in to the show that afternoon for placing.

07 - and here it is on the wall! I titled it "Water(bottles)" just because I am a jerk and like brackets in titles, as ridiculous (pretentious?) as they may be.

2007!

It's a new term and I'm back into the swing of things, pretty much. First up: crowd scenes. Here's some stills from walk cycles I've been doing of background characters. They're all in brown/earth tones -- the kid in front of them will be blue and green so he pops more....and also for the (somewhat too) obvious symbolism.

I hope to be updating this thing more often, weekly at least. Productivity! Hopefully it'll all happen.

grad panels next week

I think I'll be ready for grad panels, but one can never be sure. We have to have 1 minute of animation, 3 rendered scenes, and an updated production schedule. Wheee!



Here's a little look at what my watercolour work process is like...generally I just spread things out on tables. I was unsure with some of my backgrounds as to if I should keep them as boils as it was a bit too hectic-looking for me, but I think I will just bump them down to 7.5 frames a second (I've been doing the rest at 15 fps on 2's, so essentially 30, or 29.97 fps.)...so far tests at that speed have looked pretty decent, so that's my plan for now.

I just finished making all my waterbottles bob. They may be bobbing too fast. Darn it all!

waterfalls

I've discovered that I have no idea how to animate water properly! I still managed to finish animating and painting the waterfall scene yesterday, though. Here's a still...I have a boil for the background byt I may end up changing that if it looks too busy.

tests and more leica

Things have been going pretty smoothly -- I'm actually getting some work done!
If you'd like to see the fifty billionth version of my leica reel, you can click here ... again, it's about 80MB.

I've also been doing some animation! Wow!
Here's just some bottled water boils (this is so edgy and topical if you're in Vancouver right now!) that will eventually be moving around in after effects in some water. There will be 18 in total -- 9 different boils with two label/colour variations each (not shown here). I'm doing the start of this scene to the end of the waterfall-turning-to-dribbles scene for my motion graphics final project, which is a nice way to get two water bottles with one turbid rainstorm. (ha ha, that so didn't work).

ps. I can't remember how to embed video with html...can anyone help me? I tried a web tutorial thing that didn't really help.

leica leica

Okay, I think this is one of (if not the) finalish drafts of my leica. It's 63 megs, but if you're able to check it out and give me feedback, that'd be really appreciated. I'm pretty happy with it, I think.

After talking to Marilyn earlier this week, I decided to do the ol' "scan at hd, render at sd" trick, and have the hd fieldguide sitting on my desk to prove it.

Now: to work!

trying to find the grindstone

Work on my film has been exceedingly slow these past few weeks. I've come to the realization that I always like having a lot of little things to do; small projects and artworks and such. I think, though, that to get this film done by April I'm realllly going to have to cut back on them. Fortunately I don't have too many more non-grad-film related school projects to do, so I can focus in that regard at least.

The things I'm working on this weekend include:

• starting rough animation
• finishing my leica reel changes
  (here's three panels that I scanned together that I thought looked kind of cool when all put together for some reason:)
• deciding once and for all whether I am doing this in HD or SD! I keep flip-flopping....I'd do it in HD, but I don't want to get to April and have to turn in my film late because I am rendering....plus since I have so much after effects compositing to do I'm afraid it'll slow that stage down. But at the same time it'd be nice to work in HD.....hm, I don't know.
• starting to get a list of needed sounds down as I will be recording my first foley session on wednesday or thursday (or both). The sounds in my reel still are really not how I would want them, but I think I'd prefer to just start getting things how I want them than fiddle around with scratch sound forever.

Here's an image of what is technically not the first animation that I will do on this film (as I did a watercolour-boil test a few weeks ago), but it is probably the first bit of animation that has the possibility of ending up in the acual film in some way. It's one leg of a polar bear, ha ha!
My desk, while I was working:
Note the Richard Williams book for reference (that doesn't have quadriped walk cycles in it for some reason it seems!) , the loose bear skeleton for anatomy, the tea for drinking, the apple for eating, and the pencil....for drawing.

Hopefully I'll have the final draft of my leica up sometime this week!