How far we've come

Not long now until deadlines... oh my. 

Was looking through old sketchbooks and found this very old concept of a pirate telling a boy to eat his greens. I think this is the first ever drawing of an idea for what eventually has turned out to be our final scene. It was drawn round about the time Tom and I were joking about the idea of Veggie Pirates so I thought it'd be cool to put together a comparison picture just to see how far we've come. 

Almost there guys. It's been long, but totally worth it :) 

Mare Bears

Considerations towards our soundtrack..

I see you in the background there..

Just posting up some of the finished backgrounds :) 

 All those bottles.. 

Slight timing change

For people helping with our colouring

I made this incredibly tedious tutorial on how to ramble incoherently about irrelevant rubbish.

Whip it!

Scene 21 where one of the Gummies catches the hipster with a liqourice whip, oh yeah. Had to put it with Devo for a bit of fun. If you're unfortunate enough to not have heard this song before it watch it now!

- Sooozanne

Layout example

Here's a rough layout for a scene we had to cut. I want to share it with the world before it is erased from existence. (Scenes cut require all traces and references to be dismantled safely and memories of those involved altered)

-TOM Gee

Final crew colours!

Wassup, just posting the final crew colours for the pirate crew and of course the boy (with added notes and swatches from Tom as well as the fact he had started colouring the Hipster as we hope to colour the characters in the final animation.)  I worked my way through looking at Mediterranean veggies for the hot/warmer colours.
Taken quite a while to settle on colours that worked but I feel we've finally came to a final palette for our intrepid Veggie Pirates!

Here are the keys for scene 17 and 18 stitched together when the bear splits, I'll have to go over the last few keys in the first scene cos I've learned how to draw gummy stuff seperating now. Quality's pretty low but i ams happy with it.

Character Breakdown Sheets

Some more breakdown sheets, expressions etc. We will be printing off more for the inbetweeners but thought it best to get them up here as a back-up.

Harro! Pirate life has been pretty hectic but thought I'd post some animation. Here are the keys for Scene 17, where the Gummy bears are introduced. 3rd year animator Nuria Valdeon is our inbetweener for this scene.

Kat's recently been working on the underwater effects for this scene, and quickly came up with this pretty thing. Not sure if we have the time for hand animated bubbles, so we were thinking of working something out in after effects.

We will make more of an effort to post more as we go. As we'll be churning out a ton in the months to come!

Last animatic..

Had to make a few minor changes to the pirate town scenes, so here is our updated animatic!

Limetapse

Following in Mr Tom's giant footsteps, decided to make a timelapse video. It didn't come out as I hoped but that's mostly due to adjustment errors on my part. So apologies for the mini lightshow that's going on. Clearly our studio is actually a disco in disguise.

Timelapse from Kat Hall on Vimeo.

YOU LIKE ANIMATE?

This is real time. This is actually how fast I animate.

FINALLY: An animatic!

So here's our animatic. Hopefully it's readable and understandable. Any questions, please feel free to ask.

HELP WANTED

Updated textures

Not the final textures, there might be some tweaking with colour schemes, etc. but I think this is roughly how we're wanting our 3D to look. Probably. Anyway, it looks a lot more 2D now thanks to some invaluable advice from Pat Imrie, Kieran Duncan and Finlay Pearston. Cheers guys.

Miaow miaow miaow

I'm very tired and can't think of relevant titles for blog posts right now. I can tell you however that I've finished modelling all the buildings for our 3D barrel roll running in place bonanza shot, and I've moved on to trying to work out how to UV map and texture. Not just any texturing either, I'm trying to make the buildings look like 2D images. Not quite as easy as I'd hoped. Here's how I'm currently doing:

All thoughts and feedback appreciated. Here's looking at you, 3D people. By which I mean fellow animator types who are proficient in 3D modelling, etc. Not just people who exist in three dimensions. Although all of you are also welcome to comment, of course. Ahem.

Production Report!

So, as far as production goes...we're getting there (passes out with terror). Finalised the timings of the animatic today so just need to collect a teeny bit of dialogue and we'll slap it on here.

At the moment we're getting through layouts (2D and 3D) and starting on key animation. We may be a bit late in the day starting animating however spending tons of time on story, characters and environment design is going to make it all the better! I think the five of us are heavily into these aspects and it's probably one of the only times we're going to get free reign in pre-production so I feel its been really worthwhile.

Being totally happy with the script etc, we're ready to get stuck in and get as much done before the Christmas break. We've set ourselves an ambitious task but we believe 'it's doable'. I can say that we will definitely be looking for Inbetweeners, Clean-up artists and Colourists. Before the holidays we'll hopefully be arranging a wee meeting just to find out who's all on board and what you'd like to do. We'll keep you informed of a time and date in a few weeks time, via a poster to entice you.

That's all for now =)

Gummies!

Gummy Bear Model sheet

Water Gummy Model Sheet

Some usual gummy expressions that they usually express

A pretty rough turnaround of the bears on all fours

And some breakdowns to make your own bear =D