Final Stretch

Here's the last batch of stills from "Chicken Chokes You" before the finished film goes up (knock wood it'll be done in the next day or so). I'm in the last-stretch, sleep-as-little-as-possible stage of production, which will inevitably lead to a crippling anticlimax depression once I'm finished. Nature of the beast, but this has been a real blast the last few weeks.

Studio Time

More stills from "Chicken Chokes You", the O&A animation I'm barreling through these days:




The action alternates between Jim Norton (with Opie and Anthony) in studio, and the story he's telling in which he, as a farmer, is thwarted by poultry. It's like a very condensed "Chicken Run". The main visual references for putting together the studio assets and backgrounds come from Opie's Youtube channel where he posts segments and appearances he films himself. This one, in which Jimmy presents his idol (and mine) Ozzy Osbourne with 18lbs worth of birthday gifts is possibly the greatest thing that's ever happened ever, in the history of ever. Enjoy!

Render Farm

I'm aiming to have my O&A animation done by the beginning of March and things are looking good, schedule-wise. Unexpectedly, given that I started it as kind of a goof, looking at the finished shots as they come in I'm happy to say this has some of the best animation I've ever done. I know I'm still in the adolescence of my career but there are shots here and there that really seem to be a tremendous leap forward visually. It's a good sign for the feasibility of my next planned traditional animation short 'Everything Esther', which is a long way from even beginning production but this experience has rendered it considerably less daunting. Here are some stills:

Merry Xmas Everyone!

"The Naughty List" is finished! As it's the end of June, pretty much the equidistant point between holiday seasons, naturally it's the perfect time to unveil a xmas-themed short...what an ass I am.
Although if the reception to my first film was anything to go by, I suppose if I start sending it out now it could take a fair few months for it to pick up steam. Also, while it definitely screams 'xmas' on the surface, at its core it's a film about the frustrations of dealing with upper management, which people can relate to all the year round. To that end, here's an excerpt from my funding pitch back in March:Eh? Eh? What a blagging little shitbag I am. I guess they didn't buy it 'cause no cizzash was ponied up, so I'm doubly proud that I persevered with it and was able to follow through. Plus the trade-off with the smaller amount of private funding I was able to secure for it was that I could stick to my original idea and not have it diluted or tinkered with. I'm still at a point in life where I'm kind of precious about that stuff. Give me another year in this industry and I'll no doubt have abandoned such trivial concerns as integrity and self-worth. Until then, here are some stills to prove I'm not making the whole thing up:And to all a good night.

Like Pulling Teeth

Here are a handful of stills from my in-production short "A Cautionary Tale (Of Coital Mishap)", the delightful romp about sex and dentistry, a pairing that I felt needed more exposure. Rather than go into too much detail and ruin the story it seemed like a better idea to just have the images speak for themselves. I'm also a lazy fuck and can't be arsed to type much today.


The film's coming together in a fairly atypical way. Rather than having the whole film storyboarded and written, I'm finding myself continuously writing more material as I animate. After its initial, inaccessible length of ten seconds, the revised version is about two minutes. My plan, cackhanded as it is, is to continue to embellish and flesh it out as I go, until it takes the shape of a coherent, appropriately-paced short film. Probably somewhere between three and five minutes. It's an experiment and it may end horribly, but I have to say I'm having a lot of fun working on it and the animation itself is turning out far better than that of 'House Guest' and 'Ground Running'. If nothing else, it'll make for plenty of new showreel footage.

A Cautionary Tale (of Coital Mishap)

Just a post to say that my epic new ten-second film is done. In total the animation took two evenings, and I actually had to trim quite a bit to get it down to ten secs. Ultimately it's a bit of a clusterfuck that speeds by, so it might take a couple of views to really get it. That being said, it turned out quite well, and there's something to the idea that makes me think this may grow into a bigger film if time allows.
You can download it in hi-res here, or have a look at some stills (with the obligatory warning of it being, I dunno, kinda-sorta-not-really adult):




NOTE: For this version I've put an Auf Der Maur poster on the wall which I guess I'd have to change if I ever make this into a proper film.

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!

Rotoscoparama!

It's over!
Or, at least, the sequence which has dominated the last ten days is finally done and dusted.
Following on from the last post, here are the final few seconds of the rotoscoped background scene in delightful, purty colours!

I feel that with these scenes I have reached an appropriate middle-ground by keeping the perspective work in the tracking shot reasonably impressive, with the crudity and shakiness of the rotoscoping process in keeping with the aesthetic of the rest of the film.
After all this work though, the fact of the matter is that these sequences serve as backgrounds, and as such are not the focus of each shot. In keeping with the storyboard, the Hunter's POV sees him looking through his gunsight at the Duck who's attempting to escape. The Duck animation is largely the looped flight cycle which was broken down previously, and the gunsight is a still image layer, so it took very little time to comp the entire, final sequence together once the background animation had been done.
If I say so myself - and I'd like to think it's not too cocky given the time and effort that went in - it all looks great. To the extent that I actually don't want to show it here as it will be a nice payoff visual in the context of the finished film. Instead, here are two more still images to give you an idea of the final look:

Making this film has not been (and will not ever be) an easy process. The repetition of traditional - nay, any - animation methods has given me a strange fondness for talk radio, and even seen me actively going outdoors and exercising for the welcome relief, something I never thought would happen. What has also been happening more and more of late is the feeling that comes from watching a shot that not only matches the version I had originally envisioned in my mind's eye, but at times (mostly due to the capabilities of the software I use) surpasses it. It's a strange kind of validation and it allows the speed of production to snowball as you get, to pardon the phrase, hooked on the feeling*. This sequence has been a prime example of that, and my faith in this film is getting stronger.

*If you didn't choke to death on your own vomit after reading that, I'll hopefully see you all next entry.

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!

More Stills!

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Figured I'd throw up some more comparitive examples of shots as conceived whilst storyboarding next to how they'll look in the finished film. Check 'em out, y'all: