Burly Movement Test

This is the burly man test, wanted to communicate a sense of weight in his movement, a short run then jump with some follow through animation.

All done in flash CS4, a mixture between 2's and 3's. I animated it on 3's so that the action would be a bit easier to study (lie: I actually have no idea why I did it) but the end is on 2's.

Hipster Run Test 01

Had a go at the run for the Hipster. I'm happy with this start, credit goes to the Richard Williams Survival Book. We want to really exaggerate those big long spindly legs cos hes so laid back with his upper body, with his hands in his pockets at all times always trying to compose himself.

More bounce and twist would be good I think. A bit more bounce in his head would add to it too. Then onto good overlapping with the hair and possibly his shirt.

Feedback is very welcome :)

Character Design Update

Character Design!! Waohh!

Thought I'd wrap up whats happening at the moment with veggie character design. As Tom said earlier, we've all taken a sheet of the pirates, where we designed one character each.

Over the past week, we've been making changes individually to the pirates as a whole so we can have a well rounded decision on what works best.

We re-grouped yesterday and overall there are no major problems or changes in the designs at the moment. Shape wise, I think they're working well, a lot of nice contrasts. As we have a Peer Review this Friday 1st April, we thought it would be wise to get some outside feedback and show all our designs so we can round things off for this semester.

Not much works been done on the mum, as you only see the back of her and she barely moves.

These are some of the changes I made to the line up, mainly to the burly guy. I love the shape Kat's given him, the kind of lightbulb torso and the huge round arms. I just made his legs a bit bandier and his head bigger. I like the shape but the head needs work..

New version of the Hipster inspired by Bobby Pontilla's sketch.

And some burly heads...

Trying to get some action and expression sheets finished this week and update the animatic :)

Boy Lip Sync test

Rough lip sync test (my very first) he looks alot like me. And strangely, he sounds like me too.

Made in flash CS4, I roughed out keyframes of the body movement, then recorded my voice along with the movements. Took a few tries, I am no voice actor. It's weird how fake and forced your voice sounds when recorded.

I then did the inbetweens, and added the face complete with sinky lips

Boat Inspiration..

Features 3D boat on 3D water. It also has a pirate captain with 2 peg legs...made of swords

Inspiration...

Just saw this sketch on Bobby Pontilla's blog and love the spindly legs, might be an idea to make the hipster's legs a bit more spindlier :D

Burly Go Burly

 Feel that I'm getting pretty close with a finalised design for the Burly man which I'm really pleased about.

Hipster..

Tried a bit of colour, but was silly and used watercolour on the wrong paper. Still, I use this drawing because I felt its the closest I'm getting so far with the Hipster.

Needs some refining I think....

Environments!

Taking a break from Burly man, I've decided to take a little look at environments, so here are some really rough concepts for some of the parts of the animation. This is definitely something I want to get into more, because it's pretty fun and I find it really interesting. I can already see there's a lot of oranges and greens so maybe for the next lot I should focus on other colour palettes!

I wanted to create a contrast between the town the boy lives in and the town that the Pirate's start out in. For the boy's town I could see the colours and environments being really soft and homely, whereas the Pirate's town are all bright, bold and mismatched in terms of the shapes and angles. Definitely something I'll need to look into further when doing more concept art.

I've also been looking at the Avatar: The Last Airbender art of book for inspiration.. my goodness the art in that is gorgeous and the environments are simply beautiful because of the amount of detail. There's a quality in it that I like that would be good to investigate further for future concept work and I'll post scans along with more concept work once more has been done. :)

Tom G - Boy and Mother sketches

Family shot:



Recent Mum + Boy sketches:





6 page old sketches or so. To me that is ancient, I still like the drawing of him and his mum though:

Lynseys Sketches!

Lynsey's been mostly working on our drunk girl, and some of the rest of the crew, behold!

I should mention the drunk girl only gets drunk on the olives and onions in some drinks, she gets through quite alot...

Cannon foot!

Some lovely drunk poses. Our burly man basically takes care of her in her drunken state, thought we'd have a funny relationship going on there, like he's always having to bail her out of her drunken mishaps.

Some sketches of the rest of the crew...

Tom P's character development part 3: Archetypes

These were drawn after we decided on what we currently think will be our final pirate archetypes: Crazy captain; stalwart burly guy; small, drunken girl and lanky, hipster ladies man.

Tom P's character development part 2: After Christmas

These are from after Christmas when we started work on the film again, this time as a degree film. These drawings were done before we had narrowed down our characters to set archetypes, so they weren't really drawn with anything in particular in mind.

Hipster Development...

So we've all decided to take a character each and have a final(ish) design.

Suzanne - Hipster

Tom P- The Captain

Kat - Burly Man

Lynsey - Drunk Girl

Tom G - Boy and Mum

We've all mixed and matched coming up with designs for a few of the characters so swapping sketchbooks and ideas towards the final designs is definitely helping.

Here is a couple of Lynsey's lovely sketches...

At first it was difficult for me to change anything cos I loved the design so much, but have managed to take the sketches I'd done earlier on and put them together. All I can do is try and see if I can come up with anything interesting...(first sketches were awful!)

There was something in this sketch that I liked below..

Some more sketches later...

Here I started to look at the way he might run. Lynsey had the idea of him always having his hands in his pockets cos hes such a cool cat, even when he runs. In my head, his shoulders laid back, head bobbing and hair bouncing with his legs really over exaggerated with their lankiness.

Started a rough model sheet. Gets increasingly half assed.. happy with the front view and profile view.. 3/4 view needs more development, especially arms and hands.

Tom P's character development: Initial ideas

These designs all date back to before the summer last year when we thought we might work on it as our third year idea. Everything's changed a bit since then but the basic idea is still the same.