I’m gradually editing an animatic for the first scene on a miniature laptop during my commute.
Here’s a storyboard for the opening scene that I thumbnailed on the commute to work.
The main aim of this storyboard is to edit it into a simple animatic for Iain (the composer) to start working with.
It’s very rough but hopefully it will be enough to begin with. www.iainwheeldon.com
A quick link to the ‘Space and Time’ composer’s soundcloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/iain-wheeldon/
Take a look.
Sketching on the train is interesting. My very rusty drawing skills and the constant shuddering of the train gives the drawings an ‘impressionistic’ quality.
Nothing to show yet.
After a brief stint in a coffee shop with my new baby daughter I managed to make the changes to the script. I’m not sure where I’ll find time to keep the film moving… I’m thinking sketching new younger character designs on the commute to work.
During today’s train journey I’ve been looking over the script for the first time in a long time.
I’ve decided to change a few scenes and add a few moments. Hopefully these changes will help to create more balance between the characters conflicting motivations. I don’t want the audience to instantly take sides.
I’ll try and work the changes in over the next few commutes.
Recently I haven’t been able to work on the film as often. I have left the world of freelancing for a full time job at Rockstar North as a cutscene animator. That combined with having a baby on the way is taking up a lot of my time. I’ll return to the film as soon as I can.
I was emailed a few questions about some elements of the production so far, and I thought I would share the answers:
1. The plants were bought or free from turbosquid. I tried to do that as much as possible for non-hero props to save on valuable time.
2. Similarly google image search found many of the textures, although some of them I had to make tile-able myself.
3. Lighting setup; The million dollar question. The lighting still isn’t great and it still took a while to get to that stage. Off the top of my head I used GI to get the basic soft bounced light look, then a light for the main light source (the sun or a lamp etc.), and weak spotlights to fill and highlight areas that were in to much shadow. It was a lengthy and ongoing process of changing render setting, light positions, and light strengths.
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My next task is to rig the two birds. I am trying to research the best way of going about this. I am considering avoiding the difficulties of rigging wings that are capable of folding against the body by having two versions of each bird; a flying version and a walking version. This of course means having four models to rig rather than two. Hmmm
Here is the result of adapting the budgie model to a blackbird. It’s not perfect, but for the amount of screen time the birds are getting it will do for now.
Here’s a little bit of reference for my transformation of the budgie model to a blackbird.