'Tis the season for line tests

A quick progress update for 'The Naughty List', my mini-short about the tribulations of middle-management. Or Santy-Claus, whatever melts your butter. Focusing on the film as a combative measure against evening snacking, I've knocked the bulk of the character animation out over the last fortnight, which is sort of unprecedented given my usual fits-and-starts approach to these types of personal projects.There are a few remaining shots of channel-hopping that need to be worked out, which I'll tackle next along with the cleanup. As always I've been aided tremendously by my own little batch of worker elves in this respect, and the unexpected stretch of warm weather we've been having has given me an excuse to take some work outside (although there's something incongruous about working on a xmas-themed film in the blazing sunshine). All in all it's been a weirdly calm, organic process putting this short together, and one I'm starting to have some faith in. So here are a smattering of line tests to go out on before the colour footage starts coming together:

So it only took me fifteen years to finally finish this...

The full-colour reissue of the first 'Mitchells In England' anthology is done and can be purchased through that oh-so-fine website Lulu. I'm really stoked to see old comics I drew up to fifteen years ago all cleaned-up and coloured-in, and by filtering out the horribly unfunny ones (I started when I was ten, so you can imagine a lot of it doesn't date too well) it makes for a pretty decent retrospective.

In the really old strips, adding colour goes a long way to making the comic more legible.

I've modified this second edition somewhat - aside from colouring it all in, while the cover is the same save for some additional shading, the back design has been tidied up a little since the original 2006 release. Also, the option to create a full-wrap design with Lulu means the spine is less generic, with a more fitting typeface.

The 2006 edition front/back design, compared to the slightly-modified 2009 reissue.

Inside I've now included new introductions to each chapter, as well as an afterword describing the 'restoration' process.

An example of a 1994 (drawn at age 10) strip in its original form, and the end result after the cleanup and colouring stages.

So if you feel the urge, go to the checkout page and buy yourself and everyone you know several copies each! As with 'House Guest', the book is available in paperback and as an eco-friendly digital download. Plus you can read sample pages online to gauge whether or not it's up your alley.
Buy 'The Best of "Mitchells In England" Volume 1: 1994-1995'

Style Over Substance

Shortly after I finished 'Ground Running' and sent it to the first batch of festivals, I decided to keep it on the QT when certain similarities were pointed out to me. What surprised me was that the original version ended up getting into some of said festivals and garnered some pretty encouraging reactions.I've finally settled on an alternate opening sequence which, along with a few other new visuals that appear throughout the film, take it to between two and three minutes. It occurred to me, however, that if I'm going to change it to this degree, it may be worthwhile to extend the film in other ways. As most of the animation's done, it wouldn't take much effort to add clean-up and colouring, which would betray my original intentions (the whole point was to have a film entirely in pencil-drawing form, peg-bar holes and all) but, in all honesty, make the film easier to watch. The 'pencil-test' look has more appeal to me and my fellow animation-geek friends, but to the general public who are more or less conditioned to seeing cartoons inked-in and in colour, it probably just seems like it isn't finished.I have no intention of eschewing the original short - after all, it's done pretty well in its own right - but I'm not above making a comparatively slick version to appease its potential audience, especially if doing so will increase the film's visibility.
And if the whole thing turns out to be a horrendous, misguided disaster, I'll just pretend it never happened and finally get a real job.

The Jo Show - Part 2

It may be a bi-product of the stress of long hours I’m having to work in this last stretch, or possibly the anxiety of how well my film will be received come the deadline (4th June…fucking hell that’s close) but I’m feeling strangely melancholy with the absence of Jo, my wingman (or wingwoman...wing-gal?) for this project. Having lost her to the world of gainful employment, where her labours are actually exchanged with currency, for the most part I’m having to slog through the finishing touches on my own. It’s usually been that way when it comes to these types of projects - when producing music I find that the best work is done once the other musicians have left me alone with their contributions to work with. It’s not an ego thing (pinky swear), I’d just assumed that it’d have to be an interminable process to observe. I also get overly-focused and I worry that I come off as curt and irritable as a consequence.
Having Jo, as well as the film’s other helping hands (who I’ll later devote a separate entry to) as a presence has not only been a boone in terms of easing time and labour concerns, but I have also felt myself to be more driven and creative. Despite the stress, which would be inevitable with any MA, the production of this film has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life to date.
Last month I posted up some line tests that Jo worked on for the Prospective Lay character. She has since made the effort to clean these up herself which again saved me loads of time, and I'm consequently ahead of my production schedule. Interestingly, there's a distinctly different style about the character when Jo works on the full animation shots. The emphasis is more on movement than detail, which is another trick I need to get comfortable with. When the shots runs together I'd wager that nobody would pick up on the difference.

A limited-animation drawing of the Prospective Lay that I drew (left), next to a still from one of Jo's full-animation scenes (right). If you look closely you can see that Jo is more economic with the character detail, letting the movement of the animation speak for itself.

Here are the main shots from the earlier post, now inked-in and coloured.


In the above shots the character's acting is timed to the Duck's dialogue. When both characters are on screen with the audio it plays really well. The same applies to the shot below, where the Hunter and Prospective Lay's body acting interacts fairly smoothly:

Overall my little outsourcing experiment paid off, and for the eight-gajillionth time I'm very grateful for Jo's assistance. I had hoped that she would be able to do more animation between now and the deadline, but as her schedule is getting busy with real work it's not looking like that'll get to happen. But I'm glad she was able to contribute these shots and make her own little mark on the film.

Hop, you mangy Anatidae!

In the last post I talked about using limited animation, wherein certain elements of the characters move while others stay the same. For this cycle I'm using full animation, which means that every frame of animation is a completely separate drawing. Starting off with, here's a six-frame hop cycle of the Duck in construction line form:

It's brief but it does what it needs to. This is for a scene in which the Duck pitifully hops away into the night, guilt-tripping the Hunter into offering a place to stay. I wanted the hops to be quick and painful looking.

Then each frame is detailed and tested again, to make sure that the animation still flows with the extra embellishment.

In the future I probably won't add as much detail at this point as I have here.

Next is the cleanup, which sees me trace over the pencil drawings in pen.

So then we colour it all in using Photoshop...

And hey presto!

The only worrying thing is it took me three hours to work this out and get it done. My course leader assures me that my production speed will get faster, which I hope will be the case. If I maintain a working pace of three hours per half-second, I'll be working on this film until 2015.