Art Direction

A quick paintover of a frame in our pre-vis by Bear Winter-Perreau our resident freelance artist:

Updated Robot Design

Apologies for the lack of activity in the blog recently! Progress on the film is still chugging along. The team is currently gripped by deadlines coming up the next week. The big one being the pre-production folder for our film. We'll post the folder on Wednesday!!

In the meantime we've made further design improvements to the robot design. We moved away more from the absolute simplicity of the geometric cube by adding in some slight details within the cube. A few touches of asymmetry here and there have made a huge difference too.

Re-storyboarding

After spending about a week solely working on modelling and vis dev we decided to have another look at the story with fresh eyes. After watching the film again on the bigscreen we decided to try and liven the whole story up and have some more fun with it. 

After writing down some important story notes we wanted to stick to we then grabbed the whiteboard markers and began storyboarding out the whole story again:

Thumbnailing out random ideas and gags we were able to boost different parts of the story. It seems obvious but this process of scribbling drawings out in the open so we can all see them was so useful. It made it obvious which parts dragged the pacing or which parts wouldn't cut together very well. This isn't to say we weren't drawing out the story before but having it on display like this and being able to change parts around instantly was very helpful and refreshing.

This draft of the story has ended up being our 10th draft of the film...STORY IS HARD

But by now we can see why big animation companies spend such a long time on story. Not only is it super hard to do but also everything hangs off the story so it requires an awful lot of time and effort. Hopefully we've made some progess....

New Robot Design

New robot design:

We decided to give the robot a square design in order to contrast the curvy dog and curvy environment. That way the robot really stands out and is seen as something that is not from this world. We'll be adding fridge magnets onto his body too, each one representing a planet from the solar system he's visited. Hopefully this will make him seem more like a tourist.

Colour

During last week we all had a sit down and looked through some books on colour. We did this to try and figure out what colour style we want our film to have. One of the best books we looked at was Maurice Noble's book "The Noble Approach" It refreshed our minds as we looked at how he builds a colour scheme for the Looney Tunes shorts.

The first aspect of colour Maurice Noble works on first is the colour scheme of the character, and then we can work on fitting the environment colour scheme around the character:

From here we plonked the characters in an environment and began messing around with some more colours:

Pre-production Seminar - Deadlines Approaching

Animated pre-vis due 25th November.......