Archive for the ‘Evolution’ Category

Realignment (Reprise)

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

About a millisecond after I hit the ‘Publish’ button for my last post, I knew — just knew — I was making a big mistake. One does not make lofty boasts or thumb one’s snot-filled nose at the Fates and not expect to receive grim retribution…

Doing three fairly lengthy and involved hand-drawn animations at the same time as a four-part bee movie, along with all the other Real Life endeavours that constantly spring up, ain’t such a good idea after all. Seriously, I have a rough enough time seeing one movie through from script to final reel. And since each segment of the bee movie is a whole film project in and of itself, the entire thing actually counts as four movies. Four plus three equals… whoa…

Yeah. Not too smart…

So, instead of merrily bebopping along to my certain doom, I’ve reshuffled some things, moving the bee film to the front — and only — spot in the line. It’s only fair – three of the last four films I’ve worked on have been hand-drawn, so it’s time I got back into the CG swing of things, so to speak. Meanwhile, the other projects get dumped back into purgatory yet again. Sucks, but what can I do?

I’m going to start drawing up a pre-production to-do list for the bee movie project this week. I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending all of March and April doing scripts, storyboards, and animatics reels. If I vanish for extended periods of time, you can safely assume my nose is buried in a sketchpad or spiral notebook with smokin’-hot pencils scratching away. That, or I’m glued to the Wii trying to find new and creative ways to kill Mario in Super Mario Galaxy. Either one’s cool with me…

Status Report for August 4, 2008

Monday, August 4th, 2008

This past weekend was a time crush to finish inking on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog, so I held off doing much of anything else.  In spite of that, I did manage some progress on a few other movies:

  • I made out a to-do list for adding the detail enhancements to the robot movie’s first set, and started a prop list, too.  I’m guessing I’ll have another flyby video with enhancements at the end of this week, if not sooner…
  • Looks like I started some pencil roughs for several scenes to Evolution a few months ago — found a drawer full of various dinosaur drawings on Sunday and got them all scanned in.  So, for not picking up a single pencil to draw, I managed to get a lot of drawing done.  Sweet!  Hmmm, I wonder what else is hiding in my filing cabinet.  Hopefully no forgotten electric bills…

As far as our Scary Monster movie goes, before I take the coloring plunge I need to do another edit using the inked images I just completed.  I want to trim a couple of shots, and I want to see how all the inked drawings actually look in motion, in case somebody’s eyes wander all over the place or a leg mysteriously vanishes for a couple of frames.  Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened…

Evolution Update #1: Scene 1 Keyframes…

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Got sick of staring at a computer monitor yesterday evening, so I opened up the sketchpads and started working on backgrounds and keyframes for scene 1. There are nineteen scenes in this film, and I’m going to try and tackle one scene’s worth of keyframes per day. That’s the goal, anyway. Naturally, I’m already behind…

Background: I’ve had the idea for this short for close to three years now, but until recently the stars were aligned against it (computer meltdowns, the 2007 Omaha Film Festival, house-hunting). First time I tried to produce this I got through about 60% of the pencil roughs and 10% of the inking. I rewrote the story earlier this year to eliminate a bad case of ‘film bloat’. Storyboards have been completed, and I’m going to proceed without making an animatics reel — I’ve sat on this film long enough to know how it’s supposed to go :|