Well, I haven't posted in awhile, but considering how huge my current animatic is, I figured I would upload my roughs for a shot later in the film. I spent this afternoon trying to find a good source online about hair blowing in the wind and couldn't find anything. I found a lot of 3D animation videos of "hair" reacting to "wind," and the effect was almost right. In the end I went with my gut and I think it turned out pretty well. I worry for the day that I will need to ink and color this, because that will be a sad day. At least their bodies don't move. Also, since this is just straight out of Mirage, when she disappears off the screen, assume that there'll be more of a transition than this. There'll be some dissolving action. Right now she just sort of BAM, isn't there anymore.


Also, in super fantastic news, my webpage is back up again! Yay for me! I've had a webpage since...middle school? When I entered college it kind of went to hell and I didn't have time to update anymore. This time around I made it in the interest of having a portfolio website available when I need one. I coded everything by hand, and I'm almost sold on really liking it. Next time around I may go for something with slightly less of a boxy look. It's hosted on my friend Kyle's webspace and it's named Cheshire because my webpage has always been called that.

Check out my personal webpage, everybody!

I'm sure I have more fun news, but I'll post about it later.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy rabid badger.

Blogger decided to have a freak out on me and wouldn't let me type anything. I appreciate that in a blogging website, really.

Today I did some animation and worked on finalizing the look of a few shots. I will present them to you now! (Go team!)

This first image is a shading test I did. This was colored in Mirage using the closest colors I can decide on for my final look. They keep changing, so just assume that in another month her skin will be green, her hair will be red, and she'll be wearing purple slacks and a tshirt. For now, though, I'm liking the slightly more blue-green dress (as apposed to the more washed out blue-gray color), and her hair is a dark yellow with light orange shading. Her skin color seems pretty bland right now, but maybe I'll figure that out eventually. My ultimate goal is to be able to get enough animation done this semester that I can use shading in my film. I haven't tried it in any other animation I've done yet, and I think it could really be successful.

This next image is the scene I did for class on Tuesday. I only colored this one frame, but the look is really pretty awesome. I spent the afternoon looking through Deviantart for inspiration on my trees, and I'm pretty darn happy with this outcome, honestly. I'm not sure how this blue-green color is going to carry over from previous scenes (there's a shot of just the trees/bushes a few shots earlier than this), but I really think it has a better atmosphere than using green. It's hard to tell, but Mel is a very dark brown, not black. (Hopefully that will read on other computers, as my screen is probably very bright.) I colored this in Photoshop, then duplicated each layer and blurred the copied layers behind the original layers. As there's very little actual animation in this scene, I wanted to make it look impressive. I'm planning on using After Effects to move the different layers to give it a very ominous feeling :).

Also, in my Devianart explorations today I came across a fun tutorial on Photoshopping trees. I didn't end up using it in this picture, but with this many trees to draw, I assure you it will come in handy in the future.

Haha! Now my goal is to try and customize this blog to some extent. I already changed the background, but my goal is to change the rest of it by the end of the year :). I can't have my seldom-used HTML and CSS skills go to waste.

My shirt has a picture of Superman on it.

So, here are my most current character designs:

On the left is Mel, a dark and hairy forest god type guy. He's got shorter hair than I originally planned on, but this style works so much better. He's kind of like a Satyr, but not at all. (Satyr's are really kind of dirty creatures, and don't wear pants.) Mostly I just wanted to draw someone with hooves and this was my solution.

On the right is Ella, and she's wearing more modern clothing. Her dress is supposed to be one piece, but when I draw it the dress tends to look like a skirt and a shirt. Whatever. I'm trying to go for a muted by sort of colorful palette with her. I really like the colors that I used here, but her hair will probably be brighter yellow just to stand out against all the green imagery.


These are my current background and finished concepts. I don't know what I intend to do with the line colors, because I'd really like the lines to be colored separately. (Ex: hair outline is dark yellow, not blue or brown or something.) For now I'm animating in blue because it's easier to change later in either photoshop or Mirage. The top picture is darker and grayer than the bottom one, because she's supposed to be in shadow standing on the back porch. The bottom one might be the finished colors when she's not in shadow.
I forgot this picture in the last post. This is another original concept for one of the earlier backgrounds. I liked where I was heading with the textures, but over all it didn't mesh well. I don't really know where I'm headed with the backgrounds at the moment, but I want them to go with the one above, definitely. I'm getting better at 'painting' in Photoshop, so I'm planning on leaving the backgrounds for later in this whole process.


This is closer to the new design for the same scene. I decided on more of an alley feeling, like she's walking very alone and enclosed. I also like the overall feeling of drawing out the buildings instead of trying to paint them in without outlines in Photoshop. This drawing was inspired by All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna.



I just like this particular panel of my storyboard. Mel likes sandwiches. I wonder what would've happened if she had brought pasta salad to the hill instead of sandwiches. Perhaps they wouldn't have become friends.

I'm updating because I have to!

Lalala, blog time.

Today, I have to talk about how I came to the current developmental stage of my senior thesis animation. I will call this assignment "Shawn's Guided Tour of the Visual Development of [insert title of film here]." I wish I could actually name my film that. Well, I suppose I could, but no one would know what it was about.

My original plan for this film was to do something that related to my heritage and go from there. Being of 100% full-blooded not-interesting-at-all decent, I latched onto my only known interesting old old relatives from Hungary. Or Poland. Great Gramma sometimes decided she was Polish. But yeah, that was boring. Then I decided to go for a sort of old world-ish, 101 Dalmations approach, after drooling over some Peregoy concept art:

This was all well and good, but someone else already made 101 Dalmations, and old world didn't do much for my drawing style, so I decided to update things a bit. I still am relying on Peregoy's color schemes and general feel, though.




These are my old character designs and background ideas:





Okay, Blogger's being a jerk, so I'm going to do another post with all of my new junk. Yay! Very exciting.

OMG.

So, I set up this blog for my senior thesis. At some point, I'll post fancy pictures for the world to see of all the neat things that I do. Right now, however, I'm not feeling all that motivated to do anything to it. I'm confused that this is essentially livejournal without being livejournal.