"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.
I wanted these to be quite loose and playful (adorable li'l scamp that I am). Beginning with sketches, I overlaid colours and textures for each background element, using 
Against these backgrounds the character animation comes off as a little too stark. I've decided to soften the look by colouring in the black outlines and applying lighting and gradients to the flat colours. This really goes a long way toward selling that the characters are inhabitants of the environment I've created.
As my version of 
As my new film 'The Naughty List' is nearing completion I figured that this month's preview of images from the forthcoming collection 
Aside from a specially-produced 
With that in mind, it's gonna be a bit of a mad rush to get 'Brain Spillage' put together in time (I'm aiming for the end of this month), but it helps to have another project waiting in the wings to take one's mind off the inevitable post-completion anticlimax.
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 you went ahead and acted on that nagging impulse to book a holiday to Brazil this July, yet this strange, alarming feeling plagues you. A sense that somehow your visit will be for naught if you don't cross one vital thing off your list...
:(
The last week has been very productive as far as my third film's progress goes. Having come up with the idea a while ago, I've had a lot of time to familiarise myself with the character personalities even though I didn't really start working on it before March. This has really helped with the animation, which has been going very smoothly so far. The short is essentially a single conversation, charged with a lot of different emotional conveyances such as awkwardness, fear, boredom, incredulity and so on. Consequently it's been a balancing act of having the movements and expressions be considered while not over-animated. Looking back at my first two films, it draws from elements of both.
The film has two characters, a traditional-ish Santa and Elf, both voiced by me for economic reasons. I don't think I'm a dreadful voice actor but I certainly don't have the ability to play two characters and not have it be obvious that their source is the same person.