Animal Firm finale

Well, it's all done now. As most of the images were completely coloured in the last week, I can post them up now.

The Chameleons are a corporate business that specialise in information trafficking, and help crime syndicates cover up more noticable crimes- for a price. Having such a large amount of information about the syndicates at their disposal, they have the capability of exploiting the gangs for their own personal gain whenever, where ever. They also act as a loan company with a price higher than the money borrowed.
They work in with the Loan Sharks, who are the debt collectors for them.

Benny's night club Lapdogs which is the main scene, really, as this is where the whole Poker game goes very wrong.

The Chameleons at a board meeting, the higher up chameleons have larger horns and a more dominant attitude, like the chameleons in real life.



The line up of the characters, from left to right- Ethan, Benita/Benny, Pasha (the bear), Aleister (the snake), Salma, Hiroshi, Cecilia, Hampton and a Chameleon agent.

I'll only up load these images as I think the three largest ones are probably the best work me and Al did, and the chameleon with a gun is just a favourite of mine. That's not saying that the rest of the work is of a lower standard, just that these are the ones I think we put the most time in to.
Personally I'm very happy with this project. Alberto and I had the main plot and characters decided on in writing a few weeks before the What project, so when we had to animate for the two weeks we seem to end up in the same time frame as other people. The colouring and a few designs were done in the last week, and Alberto finished the whole project in InDesign to make it look pretty professional. I really think we did well with this one.

That's it for the year, isn't it? Only waiting for the grades to come back now, so nail biting time for the next week. I may try doing a summer project over the Holiday just because I can see me becoming endlessly bored otherwise. I have a few ideas, although most are comics, but I suppose I can still post them. It's character design after all.

Reference for Animal Firm

To save me getting reference later, and also to catelogue the images I'm likely to print of for use in my reference book I'm going to post some images up here that I need to use for designing the Koi carp and the High ups in the Chameleons group.

The aftermath and animal firm

I went to the screening yesterday, and really enjoyed the other projects shown. I don't think anybody had an idea that was similar to another groups, so its amazing how differently people can interpret a brief.

The feed back on ours was sort of what I was expecting. When I did the track laying I had a suspicion it was going to come off as being very quiet, and the sounds I had were a variety of mono and stereo so I thought that might affect the audio quality. To be fair though, I did have an hours sleep was working at about 5 in the morning on it, so I probably couldn't hear things normally anyway.

Kathys project is done and dusted, and I managed to not post any images of it up at all. Sorry Kath.

I did photograph a few of them before I handed the book in though.

I do have the original sketches somewhere, but wuth these two images I wanted to work into them more, so here is Alberto in the style of a hieroglyph and Alan in the style of a picasso image.
I'm pretty fond of the Alan one actually. And no, it's not a basket ball.



Alberto and I were pretty far ahead with Animal Firm a few weeks ago so we could devote our time to the group project without suffering too many set backs, but we've now started colouring the characters ready for doing backgrounds and action shots. Here's a coloured Benny for his profile image. We're also hoping to do a character sheet in the style of a police height chart!

Episode Four- Final Week

Wow, this has been a very tiring project. I don't think I've worked this hard on an animation at all this year, and I know everyone else has been working their hardest as well to get everything done for the deadline (I hate deadlines...)



This week I've been continuing to get the animation drawn, which backfired on me this week because I spent last week drawing the easiest ones. I spent most of my time drawing the ending scene, which I then coloured and hated every minute of it for doing it frame by frame.

The animation wasn't finished when I'd hoped it would be. I'm a terrible producer.

But enough provaricating, here is the final thing-

Episode Three- Hardest week

This marks the week that the group have to begin animating the project, ideally completing the animation process before the start of next week (which will be used for post production). I'd much prefer not to be doing these projects on the day of the deadline, so really tonight is the last night I can feel relatively at ease considering the amount of work that needs doing.

The animation is being completed on Flash for the sake of speed and time, as we can correct the timing issues by reordering the key frames around whenever and can exchange the files between one another depending on the roles we have in the process. Everyone is on animating duty, along with colouring, but Alberto and I are working on key frames. With some pieces though, we'll line and do the inbetweens for ourselves.

The style of animation is meant to be very wobbly lines around the characters, rather like Rhubarb and Custard in that the characters never seem to be still. Although the wobbly lines mean that tracing it frame-by-frame will be slightly easier as we wont have to keep rigidly to the guidelines, we'll have to keep an eye on changes to the characters mass.

While we have at least two scenes done, I can only post this one as my laptop doesn't have quicktime, so I can't make another file type that blogger supports (and youtube really dislikes me uploading for some reason) but here's one completed sequence minus the 3d background and colour.

Episode Two- Start the ball rolling

This week was to make up for the previous week, when most of the other groups had begun their pre production work so the group put a lot of effort in to getting the work done in a shorter time frame.

It took a while, and it turned out to have more pages than the Knightrider script, but the storyboard is now completed.

As the other work isn't mine, I'll leave it to the others to post up their work, but this is the WIP Animatic (minus sound) that Nigel made.

Episode One- Start of the Group Project

Better start blogging about the group project, hadn't I?

After the first week, we now have out assigned roles in the projecct. I'm acting as-
Producer
Storyboard Artist
Animator
Sound Track Lay(er?)

I need to make sure everyone is keeping on track with the project throughout. I did create a timetable of a rather strange design, but it was too rigid to compensate for any delays or changes that would have to be made, so I've thought of a much easier one to follow. I won't post it or else I'll feel it necessary to use as reference all the time, so better to have it memorised so if any discrepancies occur then I can talk about them and the solutions here.

I'm working on the storyboard currently, drawing it all digitally and rather roughly so if I need to change anything I won't need the scanner in the studio.

(Opposite order, read from top to bottom)

Trying to get a feel for the movements here, so far I've made 7 pages of this and I'm still not that far in. Feels like another big storyboarding job, but hopefully smaller than Knight Rider.

I designed the small dog the Old Woman owns, which sits on her lap for the most part of the animation. When the character designs are finalised, the characters can have colour tests to make sure they dont look strange next to one another, hence the multi- colours of the dog at the top.

Some of the jobs we chose to assign to the whole group, like animators, colourists as when we' re actually creating it we want a good work flow going so the group won't have to rely on one person before the rest of the group feel they can do anything. This also allows for assisting other people with the work should anyone want extra help and to take some of the pressure off.

So far, Chloe, Darrien and Nigel have been working on the conceptual work. Darrien has created the concepts the animation will be based on, Chloe is designing the characters and their actions and Nigel is working on the 3D background using Darriens background concepts as an influence. I need to get in contact with Alan to see how his own background work is doing, and Alberto is the final decision on the work we produce. So far, everything is working.

I will post about the Animal Firm project as me and Alberto are working together (did I say that in a previous post?)and we've split the character designs between one another. I'll post the characters when they're coloured.