Short Film Layout

Class 5 is over at AM and it just flew by ! It was just 15 months back that I was dreaming of making my own short film and cant believe how time went by doing the things that I love to do.

This was another great term, was especially different since this one dealt with pre-production of an animated film. We had been introduced to strong planning also I knew in theory how a film is brought from script to screen but dint know HOW its done practically. Class 5 gave us a hands-on experience on how to develop a story, pitching it, boarding it, reboarding it, cutting together and editing animatics and then the layouts.

Thanks to Elliot Bour, my mentor for the term, I learnt so much about storyboarding. The QnAs were very interesting and he also did some demo's for us which were pretty cool. I'll start exploring storyboarding more, I like the process of telling the story visually and drawing everything.

Here is the final layout pass of the short film as of now. Cant wait to start animating it :)

Thanks to my friend Littu Kurien for help with the garbage-bag Rig. You rock :)

- C.

Toy Story 3 coming

I have been waiting for this since I heard its in the making. Heres the Toy Story 3 teaser. By now I guess you have seen in a lot of times, but I couldnt help contain my excitement.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/toystory3/

ToyStory was THE film that made me fall in love with animation and have been a HUGE fan of it. I remember coming home completely blown away and trying to make a comic book of everything I had seen in it. Unfortunately I couldnt remember exactly what happened after the scene where plastic soldiers find new toys being brought for Andy's birthday and so had to drop my idea of a comic book. I drew a lot of toy story characters especially Woody and Buzz, also made a small Woody doll out of paper and cloth. This is one of the few movies that left a deep impression on me as a 9 year old.

ToyStory 2 was even more awesome and I have been waiting for another sequel since then.

The wait will be over next year, coincidentally exactly one year from now :)

I am sure every ToyStory fan will enjoy the teaser, it has the beautiful Randy Newman theme, almost all the characters from the first two movies and the same feel !

To Infinity and Beyond !

- Chai'

CGTExpo 09

Last weekend I attended CGTantra Expo 2009 in Mumbai. CGTantra.com is an online community of artists related to computer graphics arts (on the lines of CGtalk) and they run this expo every year to showcase the best works from the community, conduct masterclasses, job fair and basically a chance to meet more artists from around the country. I had to finish my assignment early to make it to the expo. It was a day very well spent.

I attended a 'meet the artists' session about character animation which was hosted by Anand Baid and Deepak Ganguly. Anand is a lead animator at Dreamworks dedicated unit, Bangalore and Deepak is a lead animator at Tata Elxsi. The session was really cool, and it also focused a lot on staging and composition, which I just love to think about ! After the session I got a chance to show my AM progress reel to both of them and got some Awesomely detailed critiques. I got a good idea about what needs to be on my reel later on and also about what was missing and what needed polishing in my work.
Thanks a lot to Anand and Deepak, that some time they spent with the feedback was like striking gold to me !!

Later on me and my friend Aniket took a look at the job fair. Since I still have some months to go before I finish AM, I dint have a final demo-reel which I could apply with. There were some studios which wanted to recruit right away while some others who will need artists some time soon. I hope the industry keep getting bigger and better, increasing the quality of work done. I'll wait for the day I am ready to send in my reel :)

There was a sneak peek into Merry Madagascar, a 20 min film being made at Dreamworks Bangalore. The quality of animation and the look of the film was totally awesome ! At the same level of what we have seen in Madagascar 1 and 2. I am sure the studio is going to reach great heights with such amazing artists working there. The session was conducted by artists from the studio. They talked about their animation process, the character Fx, lighting and effects. I had never known what goes into the lighting and effects - what kind of passes and experiments do they have to do. This session was insightful and I got to know a little about these other technical departments too. You could read a news item about this session here - http://www.animationxpress.com/index.php?file=story&id=19671

Visiting such expo is also about meeting artists who do some really cool work! While me and my friend were hanging out and snacking, we bumped into some guys there. We met some guys who have started their own online Comics website. I checked it out yesterday and flipped (or clicked) through some pages of their first online comic book "Rage" and it was awesome ! The illustration style, design and story narration is very interesting. I recommend you take a look at their site and I am sure you'll enjoy reading their comics. Another interesting thing is that they are free to read online and its great to see artists making use of the new "internet revenue model" as we could call it.
Heres a link - http://rockstarcomics.net/ alternative link- http://www.rockstar-comics.co.in/


There were a lot of other great sessions at this event. I wish I could attend more seminars there, but some of them happened to be overlapping. Overall I just enjoyed it and I will look forward to next such event.

Enough of blogging, I got to get back to layouts !! ;)

-Chai'

Short Film Animatic

Heres the short film animatic ready to go into layouts. I have started with the layouts in Maya last week and it should be complete by the end of the term.

I had a lot of fun drawing out ideas, camera angles and timing everything so the story is easy to understand and as close as possible to the final film. Exploring compsition and staging is so huge ! It can totally define how the audience will "feel" the film. As I said earlier I am totally liking storyboarding.



Hope you like it :)

UP Storyboards

I have been working on the storyboards and animatic of my short-film "Phone Interview". Lately my interest in Storyboarding is increasing. I am loving this process of visually telling the story. Its like having all the freedom to try out different things without getting too busy with the details. I am working on the storyboarding for last 2 weeks and its been awesome ! There is a lot of things I have learnt, the story has developed a long way just through putting together drawings of how I visualize it. Its amazing how just a slight change in the composition, posing can make a huge change in how the audience will experience the emotion in it.

These days I am trying to find most I can about this amazing art. Look what I stumbled upon today - storyboards from Pixar's UP !

http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/2009/05/pixars-up-storyboards.html
Now thats very inspiring :)

I'll put up my animatic really soon.

Making Stories

For some time now I have been thinking about ideas for my short film. I had some ideas I had scribbled and made tiny little drawings of whatever I "saw" in my mind. Last 1-2 weeks I have been thinking about what can make a good story for a very short film, since we have to keep it 30-40 seconds in length to make sure it can be completed in the next 6 months. Even when I would go for a run or a jog I had things popping up in my mind. As soon as I got a chance, I made note of these things on paper, even a word or a sentence that had hit me.

This thing has helped me well. Then last week I watched the first lecture of class5 which was amazing. It helped me free my mind and explore more ideas. I am happy I could come up with six rough ideas for a story. Not all of them are great, but exploring is one huge part of the process.

I put them together in words and posted them on a Facebook note and AM Public Review and there were a lot of replies from friends, about why they liked something and why something needed more attention to make it work. Some of them were very insightful from a point of view of story-structure and flow. All these comments, however small or in-depth they were, are going to help me work on my story pitches which we are going to submit to our mentors this weekend. So, you are one of those peeps who commented, Thanks a lot for your time and suggestions !

I have to come up with 3 story pitches to submit as assigment this weekend. I'll keep thinking more for new ideas and also how to refine the existing ones. Do check back again to read the three ones that make it into the submission.

Short Film Pre-production starts

I am now in Class5 at AM and am kick-starting the process of planning my short film. This class is about pre-production, that is all about coming up with interesting story, characters, pitching stories, nailing it right, deciding the story structure, making story-boards and finally layout. The next class we are going to take the film from layout to polished animation. So this is going to be 6 months in the works and the most important project I'll be working on at AM.
I cant contain the excitement of doing all this. I have started to develop interest in story-boarding as well. Whatever ups and downs come in the next months, its going to be an awesome ride !

This week was week-1 of class5 and we got introduced to our new mentors. My mentor this term is Elliot Bour. I had seen some of his student's work before and I knew I was in good hands. Before the Q&A I checked out his website and I was blown away. He started at Disney in 1991 and has worked on 2d animation in films like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan and more. He has also experience working in story-boarding and directing animation films. The 2d animation in his animation reel is fantastic ! I recommend you visit www.elliotbour.com and check out the "animation" and "shorts" sections. Its really entertaining and a joy to watch.

The first Q&A was nice, we got to know the mentor and each other. This time my class is a mix of some familiar faces and some new ones. Elliot is a nice guy, he explanied to use what is in store for us in this term and also gave us a peek into his approach on mentoring. Then some of us asked some very good questions and then wrapped up.

This week have no submission, just brainstorming to do for story ideas.