9/23/14 - Animaticmatic

Cranked this out a week before animatic night, which was truly quite a feat considering I tend to wait until the night before to get it done.

Believe or not, this was actually my 3rd revision for the animatic based on advisor and peer feedback — I have some more things to revise but this is about 80-90% of what my film is gonna be. 

As far as overall thesis progress goes I'm kind of (not surprisingly) behind but I plan on having my modeling assets listed by next week and if possible, get started on character modeling. I foresee having the shot list done after animatic night (Oct 1st/2nd) depending on how much useful feedback I get.

WEEK 5, LEGGO.

9/08/14 - Some Semblance of Storytelling

K guys, here it is. THE THUMBNAILS (not storyboards because I want to cut stuff out before I get started on those).

These are incredibly rough an scribbly, so I apologize in advance for hurting your eyes. BUT YES, THEY EXIST NOW. These took me a while just because I had a really hard time trying to figure out what kind of shots/angles I wanted to use to condense my treatment as much as possible without compromising the story. Based on past thumbnailing using the same 30-odd template I predict the final film might hit somewhere between 4-5 minutes. I honestly pray that it doesn't go over.

By next entry I plan on getting storyboards half done — from now until week 5 (before animatic night) I want to get at least 10 boards done PER DAY and start timing out my current thumbnails into an animatic.

9/01/14 - It's September Already?!

I started my journal title with an '8', only to realize that it was no longer August, but now September (it's actually the 2nd because it's past 12 am now, but for sanity's sake I'm dating this entry as the 1st). Where did the time go?! 

Okay so last entry I promised storyboards.

Good news and bad news.

Good news, they exist. Bad news, they're very rudimentary and halfway complete. Think crude thumbnails. For some reason the angles and shots play so well in my head, but when I try to translate them into actual storyboards they end up looking messy and confusing. It's truly a struggle.

Anyways, as I continue thumbnailing I already know I'll definitely need to cut scenes/shots — as things are right now it's gonna run a tad bit too long. I'd be torturing myself if I even attempted to animate my entire treatment.

Looking ahead I plan on finishing thumbnails by this weekend, get half of my clean storyboards done by next weekend, and start doing some test modeling on zbrush/maya. In between all of that I still need to work on environment concepts and plan a layout for the hut interior. The list is goes on.

On a separate note, have a mood board. It's primarily for my environment style research and texturing ideas since my character designs are based mostly on life research and not any particular designs.

As you can see I really want to achieve a bright, painted look in my film and give it almost a 2D-like effect through my usage of textures. I know I'm not as adept in my digital painting skills as the French artists above, but I'm very attached to this style and will try to work with it to the best of my abilities.