Bullyboarded

Here are some more random storyboard excerpts from "Bullies", my current in-progress fillum. I'm purposefully dealing with very limited, Hanna-Barbera-esque animation this time around, so my range of expression is automatically restricted. Hopefully the dialogue and compositing will fill in the gaps and make it fun to watch.
I'm not putting these up in any kind of chronological order, so there won't be a lot of sense made from them. Ain't I the mischievously mysterious scamp?






Storyboard is pretty much done at this point, so the next stage is the dialogue record and animatic, both of which will be equally crucial in determining whether or not the film can be feasibly produced without funding. Otherwise I'll have to start puckering up to thems with the monies, yo...

Bully For You

The impulse with my latest short "Bullies" is to keep things all very hush-hush as it comes together. Why, however is beyond me; I'm not exactly making the next season of "Breaking Bad". Wikileaks doesn't have a special category labeled "Ben Mitchell's Cartooney Horseshit". I think it's more a reflection of my own over-cautiousness as it's a different type of film than I'm used to, story-wise as well as visually, and if I were honest I'd put up the whole warts'n'all process so the world (by which I mean the microscopically small percentage of its inhabitants who read this blog) can see me trip up at every hurdle.
But I'm not honest. No, I'm driven entirely by deceit and misrepresentation - not just on here, but in every facet of life. Don't judge me, it's society's inability to accept grown men who still watch "The Real Ghostbusters" on DVD and count Tangfastics as one of their five-a-day that has forced me into this corner.
The hell was I talking about?
The hell am I ever talking about?
Well, anyway, in a bid to get over my preciousness, here are the concept designs for the main characters, in full view for the first time. Meet Patrick and Liam:They're douchebags. Of the lovable variety, if I pull this little endeavour off right. And here they are in non-sequential storyboard form (my compromise is I'll keep the actual dialogue under wraps for now):






So there you go, the first gander at film #4, albeit a sketchy and smudgy one. I'm storyboarding the whole film as written (which is presently a tad overlong) and will put up some more excerpts in a few days. In the meantime, here's a man in his underwear:

The Replacement Fillers

It's crunch time.
I'm hurtling toward the hand-in deadline and sacrifices will need to be made. I equate the feeling with the scenes in so many action films, where those fleeing from peril by plane or helicopter are forced to jettison extra weight if they are to have any chance of escape.
Ironically, by removing certain shots from the animatic, I'm finding myself having to create new animation. Ultimately it still adds up to less work, but I need some filler visuals to bridge the gaps created when certain sequences are removed.

This series of shots is pretty dispensible, as it doesn't really further the story. However, it furthers the action as they walk from one location to another, so when the sequence is omitted I'm left with a jarring change of background from one shot to the next.

As they can't magically leap from the doorway to the liquor cabinet, I've remedied the continuity issue by creating an unstoryboarded cutaway shot:

This actually benefits the film, even in its brevity. Firstly it establishes the Duck's bedroom, which we otherwise wouldn't see until the penultimate scene where there's some potential for confusion. Also, by having the Duck hear the Hunter and Prospective Lay arrive, it helps sell his entrance a few shots later. Incidentally, the barely-readable book title is 'The Secret', a fad (read: BS) self-help book that gets mentioned on the radio a lot. I thought it'd be funny to have the Duck reading it.

These storyboarded shots were conceived as fully-animated lip-sync sequences, where the Hunter enthusiastically sings while opening the bottle of wine. What I've had to opt for as a time-saving alternative are two brief shots with no dialogue.

These actually work fine, and my delivery of the song fell a little flat anyway. There was also a potential licensing issue as it was to the tune of 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow'.
The remaining scenes that are being considered for the chop don't require replacement shots, and may help the pacing of the film by their absence. It'd be nice to have the time to produce the whole film as originally storyboarded, but the fact of the matter is I've bitten off more than I can chew. The average length of this type of student film is between three and seven minutes. My animatic runs at twenty, and with my planned cuts it'll wind up at about seventeen. I've been keeping this on the down-low as my course leader would probably have conniptions if he knew what I was trying to achieve.
I'm not trying to prove a point - a long film doesn't guarantee a good film. Oftentimes it can mean just the opposite. I just really believe that the story jusitifies the length. At this point I have an accumulative 14 minutes of footage finished, and the remaining shots use fairly limited animation. I know I can do this, but more cuts will doubtless be made.
Man, it's like Sophie's Choice up in here.

Children. They're All Little Bastards Really.

Not a big entry this time, but I wanted to show a couple line test/end result comparisons from a scene that actually features very little by way of animation. This is the sequence in which the Creepy Kid has brought the Duck home and is in the process of stitching it back together. One of the shots has already been discussed in a previous post with those that remain featuring far less extreme animation.

The first appearance of the Kid in the scene is simply his rising into view.

When offscreen, sound effects will imply his rustling about. To punctuate his emerging from beneath the table we see and hear lightning from outside (fairly crucial to establish its presence as later in the scene it strikes the dead Duck through an open window).

The tricky thing with this shot was getting the secondary motion of his head settling into place right. With the accompanying flashes of lightning I feel it's more or less there.
Here's another shot featuring the same backdrop and composition. All that really occurs is the Kid, having been called to dinner, contemplating the Duck before he decides to leave any further taxidermy until later.

This is done entirely through facial expression, one of my favourite things to animate as I have documented previously.
Here's how it looks with the backdrop (and to show the compositional arrangement with the Duck silhouette).

One more to end on, and my favourite of the three. In this shot the Kid, having supped, returns to his room to find that the reanimated in absentia Duck has buggered off.

This makes for a nice reaction take, and some facial expressions I'm really happy with that convey the Kid's subsequent fear and bewilderment.

With some post-effects (and eventually a soundtrack) the overall shot nicely caps off the scene.

The character of the Creepy Kid is probably the least explored of the ensemble. He has no dialogue and little screen-time, but the audience should hopefully pick up bits and pieces from the glimpses of his behaviour and the environment in which he dwells. My intention was for the viewer to know enough about the character to know they don't want to know any more. Y'know?
Actually, I don't know. I'm starting to smell the potential for a Creepy Kid spinoff. Yep, tons of mileage there...

An excuse to leave the attic

On the 16th we have a screening in which the full-time students will showcase their films. As a part-timer, 'House Guest' isn't due to be finished until June, and at the time of writing is still in bits and pieces. I'd like to include some indication of my progress as part of the screening and figured that a trailer would be an ideal way of cobbling said bits and pieces together. This has motivated me to get some footage completed for scenes other than the attic/trophy room sequence that has dominated the last couple months. Going through the animatic I decided to focus my energies on some shots that would look good if thrown in the mix for my trailer.

The above are shots that aren't especially difficult to animate and don't necessitate line tests as such. Their execution is fairly simple through limited animation and a lot of the work is in the editing. Here are a couple other shots that require somewhat fuller animation:


A fairly simple reaction shot, for when the Prospective Lay first sees the Duck. This is only a handful of frames but to sell it in terms of convincing acting (and to refine the secondary hair movement) it's worth doing a pencil test first.

After a few passes to get the hair and mouth action right I ended up with the above shot. Here's how it looks inked-in and coloured:


The following shot is also dependent on facial expression, although it's a little longer:

In this one, the Creepy Kid prepares to finish stitching the Duck together, guivering with eerie glee, only to be snapped out of his unsettling reverie when his offscreen mother calls him for dinner. Here's what I came up with for the pencil test:

I wanted him to switch from docile to anticipatory quickly, and then to snap back just as fast. To emphasise this I used a mild 'smear' transition going in and an extreme one coming out.

With a slow zoom and some moody lightning applied to the colour version I'm really happy with the end result:


The remaining shot requires some full-body acting, from a scene in which the Duck melodramatically unveils his partially-decomposed body.

The body acting in this shot is determined by the dialogue, which means the movement has to be specifically timed and lip-synced. Here's the test animation after all the dope-sheet transcription was done:

After tweaking the lip-sync a bit (that's another reason these tests are so crucial - the erasability of pencils can really save some heartache) I wound up with one of my favourite shots in the entire film so far:


Special mention has to again go to Jo Hepworth who did all the inking-in for these shots and thus ensured their completion. As I've said before, her line work is far smoother than mine, and if I'd worked on these shots on my own they would not only have taken far longer to do, but also wouldn't have looked half as professional.
Knock wood by the next entry I'll have the trailer finished. Shazizzle!

And here we are again...

In the wake of all that giddy rotoscoping wonderment it's now back to business as usual, although at a slightly faster pace. I'm getting between one and four shots completed a day (which averages out at just a few seconds, which is still heartbreakingly slow) and am determined to have the penultimate scene which includes all the complex animation finished by xmas. From what I've been able to determine, the other scenes in the film are far less demanding, so I want to have one scene that really lets me indulge in some different methods and styles to have under my belt for when I am assessed.
Here are a few more stills from said scene to give some indication of how it's all turning out:

Hope you all appreciate the bare flesh. I would like to post some clips soon as the visuals in motion sell the whole thing a lot better. So there's something to look forward to!
And away I go!

At last we get some nudity!

Well, I kept my word, because that's just the kind of guy I am. Shame about all the other horrible facets of my personality though. Anyways:

These visuals are developed from some of the layouts that were shown in previous entries over July and August. I figured that the small handful of you who have stuck with me all this time deserved some full-frontal nakedness. It's my way of saying thanks.

Bedfellows

Having described the fundamentals of the animation process for my film, it has in some ways eliminated the need for continuous blogging. What I am currently working on are sequences that all draw upon the limited and full animation described in prior posts, so with that knowledge in mind all I could really talk about at this point is the deconstruction of each scene and shot as they are being worked on. Truthfully, that would be boring, not to mention that it would suck out a lot of the soul of the film.
So, until I move on to other processes, I'll just post some more storyboard/end result comparisons, just to give you more of a flavour of things, and to prove that I'm still getting stuff done.To start with, here's a layout for a brief scene in which the Hunter finally snaps when lying in bed. It's a fairly simple sequence - panning around the bedroom until we zoom in on the Hunter's face. The entire layout was done on A3 to allow for more background detail:

Here's the inked-in version, with more details (such as cement between the bricks) and definition:

And here's how the final shot will look at 16:9 and in colour, compared to the original storyboard sketch. If you look closely you can see that the Hunter has been redrawn with more detail as a separate layer, so that the line quality doesn't deteriorate so much when the shot closes in:
For now that's the only interesting thing I've got for y'all. There'll be more, I swear!