More Designs, A Practice Background, and An Animatic

I've changed up the old man character's design (I've been calling him a wizard, but he doesn't look much like a wizard. Maybe an alchemist? Weird eccentric old man?). Here's some revised designs:

Also, as an exercise in modeling backgrounds, I modeled a still from the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which has a similar feel to what I'm going for.

And, finally, the most recent animatic.

Scans of Some Development Sketches

Here's a selection of drawings I created while figuring out what I was going to do for this film. In order from around the beginning of the semester to the end:

Many story revisions later...

I'm keeping the bird theme, and now the premise for this film is that a bird, girl, and a wizard get mixed up in the reality warping properties of a stair-filled building. While I work on coming up with a clearer log line and revising my animatic, I thought I'd update this blog with the most recent designs.

These are the first takes I've got on characters. The wizard guy still retains design aspects from an earlier iteration of my film, so he is definitely going to undergo some revisions in the next couple days. I'm also planning on making the bird's structure easier to figure out and animate. Those two character turnarounds are in progress.

Here's the girl turnaround. I'm actually kind of happy with this one.

And a sort-of style frame... though it's more of a style exploration. I played around in photoshop to try to emulate the texture of illustrations from the early 1900's, though the actual composition evokes more of a German expressionism and Tim Burton style, which I'm not sure I want to go for. I also decided on creating 3D backgrounds, so the 2D stairs and columns here are stand-ins for 3D models for the time being.

Rough Storyboards With Ideas and Things

After agonizing for the past month over what to make this thesis be about, I finally decided birds are cool. So it's about birds, and they all live in an aviary. And all of them have keys around their necks that open different doors in this house. Our main character needs one of these keys to get through a specific door, and she goes about trying to find the right bird. And then she finds a key-shaped bird? Anyway, here's some super rough story boarding as I try to make ideas make sense.

I've also been looking at lots of style reference. So far I'm leaning towards making this thing very early 20th century fairy tale looking- intricate backgrounds and lots of geometric patters. Some favorites as of now are Errol Le Cain and Kay Nielsen. I've also got a whole collection of Italian architecture photos sitting on my computer, so I may as well use those too.

Errol Le Cain

Kay Nielsen

Medici villa

Chase Scene Storyboards

With my thesis still an amorphous blob formulating itself in my brain, I took Christine's advice and used this week to research chase scenes. I like chase scenes because they're fast, frenetic, and potentially fun to animate.

I watched a bunch of chase scenes, and then I went back through a few that I liked and drew thumbnails for all the different shots, trying to figure out how the choices the filmmakers made while putting the scenes together. I first watched a scene from The Thief and the Cobbler, a Richard Williams film that apparently suffered from extreme executive meddling, but still has this really cool scene where the cobbler chases the thief through optical illusions and geometric patterned backgrounds.

Those patterns were annoying to draw in thumbnail form.

I liked this scene partly because of the art direction. The backgrounds in the film are very flat and monochromatic, but the director creates depth by having characters that are constantly running to and away from the camera. He also gets clever by subverting the audience's expectations, making some of the geometric patterns flat, while giving some depth. The stair part at the end, when the camera tilts down and we see that the characters are actually running down a spiral staircase, is super awesome. I had to watch it a few times to figure out what was happening.

I then watched the hedge maze scene from The Shining:

Kubrick starts off with a pan so that we can tell the spatial relationship between Danny and Jack, but then, since it's a maze and we have no idea where anything is, he just cuts between Jack and Danny. The audience just kind of assumes that Jack is getting closer and closer to Danny, which then adds to our surprise and relief when we find that Danny has actually found his way out of the maze and into safety. Jack is initially chasing Danny from right to left, which is awkward to draw in a sketchbook and also kind of awkward to look at-- maybe he did so in order to have Danny and Wendy ride off to safety from left to right? Kubrick also uses POV shots from Jack's perspective to show him trailing after Danny's footsteps. It really gets us into Jack's head and differs from The Thief and the Cobbler's more comedic wide and medium shots. 

Next was the pale man scene from Pan's Labyrinth:

I started drawing really fast at this point.

Way different style compared to The Shining, and I think more conventional. We get a shot of the pale man coming up behind Ofelia, she turns, the pale man does some fairy munching, Ofelia gets a reaction shot, and then cut between Ofelia running, pale man chasing, and a reminder that time is running out. I like the cut between Ofelia's feet and the pale man's feet, and also the way the director added suspense by having Ofelia's chalk break as she tries to draw a new door. Super effective, and I can see how shots were only included that moved the film forward, with nothing extraneous.

So for my thesis, I'm thinking of keeping things cutty, but also to pace things out so the audience has time to breathe in between quick successions of shots. If I want to keep things funny I should keep some measure of distance from the characters; similarly, to make it more dramatic go for close-ups and POV's. From watching all these scenes I thought it would be fun to see how a chase would be affected by changes in lighting... maybe a chase scene through a chandelier factory?

The Pipeline Post

Here's the place I'm going to start typing up thesis-related information, both to keep myself organized and because I think it might be required. I'm still fleshing out the actual idea, but I have sort of vaguely gotten a pipeline plan put together.

I'm thinking almost definitely 2D, because I find 2D character animation more enjoyable than the 3D variety. However, 3D backgrounds might be cool. I'll see as I get further in the semester.