Short film WIP

Here is the Work In Progress of my animation. Feel free to comment below.

Please note, There is some problem with the encoding/player which is making it drop few frames and delay at few times. I'll try and find a solution for this soon.


Blocking pass



Blocking-Plus pass


Now on I'll try and be more regular about updating the blog. Thanks for watching.

Class 6: short film production

Aloha! Its been a while I havn't updated the blog. Class 6 started this July and I was so pumped about it that I got too busy with it.
My new mentor is Keith Sintay . He is a super awesome guy and a great animator. If you have watched Open Season, Surf's Up, Tarzan, Mulan, Spirit and even the recent Transformers2, you have watched his work. He has been a 2d animator at Disney and later jumped into CG animation. Presently he works at DigitalDomain. If you want a peek at how awesome his work is, watch his demoreel. I am sure you will be as blown away as much as I was :)
This term I am having few familiar faces and some new ones as classmates and the Q&As have been fun. These guys are really good and keep pushing their work, its really inspiring to watch their films progress through the weeks.

Since this term started I've been totally busy working long hours on the animation for my short film. We are recommended to keep the short film upto 30 seconds in length so its doable in 3 months. My story was around 55 seconds in layout itself. So I knew I had to push it real hard in order to give it a good chance to finish it with polish by end of the term.

Now we are half way into this term and the animation is finally coming together. I am happy with the progress I've done in this term. With the animation, the film's screen time went a little over 1 minute now! I'll upload the blocking and blocking-plus passes of the animation soon.

Here are some designs I did to explore the look and feel of the characters and their surroundings at the end of last term. It helped me explore the colors and get them to support the story and animation. As you will notice, the design for the homeless guy changed since I had to use another rig whose head was a different shape than what was in the drawing. Hope you like them :)




- Chai

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.