"Rangers! Get ready to TEXTURISE!"

Most of this week has been spent flicking between doing the Maya project and trying to complete the Flash project, so I feel like I've had my face glued to the monitor screen most evenings.

Flash is very close to completion. Being an anal retentive moron, I decided to do the maximum time allowed for the movie, using three characters and animating not just the mouths but also heads, eyes and limbs including the character who doesn't talk at all. The program likes to crash unexpectedly and the first time it happened I'd not saved for two hours, so I'm more save savvy now. Here's the nearly completed version.


I'm really hoping this thing turns out alright.


With Maya, I hadn't realised that the deadline was sooner than the Flash so I'm in a bit of a panic about that at the moment. I do enjoy working on it surprisingly, it's sort of like virtual play-doh except I tend to stick to mainly using the Booleans tool for sculpting.

I've been scouring the internet for textures but because I'm making kind of a dirty image I quite like adding another layer of semi transparent dirt on top of the image. Since Nigel told me about layer properties (thanks Nigel) I've been messing with those options to get the best effects.

I can't post all of the textures because some of them are too big, but here are three of my favourites-

I'm going to bump map these (the hand on I already have).
I also have designs done for the characters in the story board, but I'll likely post that when the story board is complete.

Putting a face to a voice

I was quite stuck for ideas when it came to designing the characters for flash, because I couldn't really get a clear understanding of what kind of personality they had from the small highlighted sections, so I sort of took one teeny thing I picked up from them and exaggerated it.

I ended up designing them all as tree-dwelling animals mainly because hearing one of them explain something put me in the mind of an owl, being all exposition-y. Althogh I found later that it seems to be only one voice clip from the trio rather than all the highlighted ones, so on the section I selected you get two people talking rather than the three. I'm still including all of the characters though, seeing as you can hear background laughter.

Rather than posting each image individually, writing about it then repeating ad infinitum, I've made a big collection of the images with the explanations next to them, the colour stuff will be posted seperately.

This is the painted background, made to be fairly simple with the colour scheme so the characters don't look too out of place next to masses of detail.

And here are the final character designs with colours. I decided on a Barn Owl for Matt, because the colouring was so striking, and a grey squirrel to stop all the characters being brown.

Making dem der mouth words...

I've been wanting to post this stuff up for some time, it's been because of the essay that I've been putting this on hold. I won't mention too much about the essay, apart from that Althusser makes a terrible read, studying ideology makes you become aware about the repressive measures the governement are not above using and that prior research works substantially better than guess work.

The background projects were finished and as it seems with some others there isn't an equal amount of time spent on each piece, so the two colour pieces are much better than the pencil drawing, which I am mildly cross with. As that one wasn't scanned, here is the first, an underwater scene in monochromatic blues-

I wanted to go for smething quite moody and cold looking, but not snow/arctic cold in the colour pallette (which I find a lot more gloomy).


I love nautilus shells, so drawing these was very fun.
I am pretty pleased with the lighting effects from the water surface, but I'm concerned about how they don't decrease in size into the distance, an whether that makes the light look super imposed on the image.
The interior was orignally going to be the pencil sketch and I'm glad because of it's complexity that it ended up sticking to the brief guidelines.

The original was painted in watercolour (probably my favourite medium) but I knew I couldn't get the light effect to be right in paint so I added it in Photoshop, along with some tints of colour to look purdy.



Relating to the title of the blog, we tried lip sync for the first time on Flash. Here's Max the Vampire Kleptomaniac (a boy, incidentally) speaking in a most eloquent manner.



I love the pronounciation of "JELLY" and "GLAZED" the best. Some of it looks odd because I had to use the EL sound to symbolise T at the same time, so it's not right near the end but I had fun doing it.