Third Year Film

This is a big post.

First, the film:

So, there was a looot of time put into this.  I was one of the production managers on this project, which means it got pretty hectic at times.  A lot of the work I did over the two semesters during my third year can be seen below.

Here's a beat board.

Patricia did the other three :)

Next up: storyboards!  I did a lot of these in the first semester.  We divided our entire group in three smaller groups: character design, layout, and storyboarding.  So as you may have guessed, I was part of the storyboarding group.  Many late hours were spent on this, but it was fun and helpful to collaborate and solve story-problems with a group.  Some of the stuff here was cut, as we simply had too much going on at some point.

Some colour keys here.  We didn't end up using these, but they were fun to do.  And good practise too!

Here are some of the rough character designs I worked on beside working on the storyboards in first semester.

An expression sheet I did for Edgar.  This was at the end of first semester and we were all super busy.  I did these all at some late hour.  In pen, haha (except one!)

Speaking of that end-of-first-semester rush, we had an animation journal to write for our animation and stop motion classes.  We also had to draw something for each of the ten topics we were discussing.  I used our film characters for this.  They were all drawn super fast and I must have been pretty sleep deprived at that point.  It's funny to look back at them now though, so I compiled them all here:

Backgrounds I did for the film.  I sadly didn't get to paint any of them, but I did put in the blocks of tone that could then later be coloured.  I only did the workbook of the third one here, so that one is still rough with some... uhm... discarded storyboard drawings in there :P

And yes, I animated too!  I wish I had some more time on some of the scenes, but there were other things that had to get done too.  I didn't do the clean-up for most of my scenes, so I worked on them up until the tie-down stage, which you can see here.  It was a pretty quiet video, so I added some music from the film to it :)

And as a little bonus, I tried doing a whole bunch of "Scary Edgar" drawings, for when Edgar loses his mind towards the end of the film and sneaks up on Bob.  Everyone kept saying I drew him too cute, so we didn't end up using these.  They were interestingly fun to do though, haha!

And that is all (I could find)!  I worked on almost all of the sound and music in the film too, which was quite a bit of work as well.  I learned a lot from it though, so that's great.

I have some zoo trip animal drawings I could upload, but I'll save that for another post.

I Never Finish My Drawings

And that's frustrating. One day, one day!

Here's a whole bunch of stuff from the last couple of weeks.  I compiled a whole bunch of sketchbook stuff, so... well, yeah, here goes:

Cafe Sketches.  All unfinished, of course, but there are more full-body poses.  I never do enough of those, so it's a step in the right direction, I hope.

Zoo trip number one:

And fourth year film concept stuff. These are all from the sketchbook and some Photoshop files, while the coloured images are parts of my pitch package that I did at the end of the semester. The story is about a salamander and a dragonfly. I'm still tweaking it, so I'll leave it at that for now :)

Wait, Only One More Year to Go?!

Not sure how I feel about that.  Third year felt very different than the first two years though.

I'll be posting my contributions to our third year film soon, but I have to wait a little longer with that.  There should be storyboards, concept pieces, layouts and animations posted sometime... in the summer?

We had a final assignment due for life drawing which I could post.  However, with my sleep deprivation and limited available time due to having to finish the film, I really couldn't get the assignment to come out like I wanted it to.  I even restarted halfway through until I literally had to get back to school to submit it.  Oh well, I learned something from it, and that's what counts.

Long story later: I'm not posting that final assignment, although here's my final life drawing portfolio of third year.  I did quite a few life drawings in my sketchbook this semester, so I included some of those too.

New Things Don't Always Work

Our life drawing assignment a couple of weeks ago had us do four character designs based on costume drawings from class.  I wanted to try something different than the usual duo-tone style I often use, so I did a more painterly approach to the whole thing.  I was very much inspired by the awesome work of Corey Loftis, so I tried to work with basic shapes for all of them.  I couldn't really get them to come out the way I imagined it, but there are parts of these that turned out alright.  I did not have too much time to finish the chef, so that one is a bit rougher than the rest of them.  Yeah, sooo... here they are!

And life drawings from before the break.  Some of these were in my portfolio and some of them were not. Yup :)

"Tiger Forever"

So yeah, this is the post I had originally planned to write at the end of last semester.  Then sometime during the winter break.  Then sometime in January.  And now it's the end of February and I'm finally ready to post my action analysis!  I learned so much from this though, and that is awesome!  Here is the final thing:

Yup, an upshot of a striped tiger sidestepping: no big deal (extreme sarcasm).  I've never done something this hard and I had a lot of difficulty drawing the tiger from this angle.  Part of the reason I went with a tiger was because I wanted to force myself to learn more about feline anatomy, which worked out well.  I had quite a bit of group-film stuff to work on, so the action analysis became kind of a side-project during the last two months.  Whenever I had some free time to work on it I would slowly progress this thing, hence my friends started naming this "Tiger Forever".  Anyway, I have a lot of people to thank for this assignment.  People helped me by explaining how rice paddies work, how to get more appealing poses, how a cat would act, what colours to use, etc. etc.  The list goes on and on.

I did a lot of little character development drawings at the beginning of semester 5, so I put a bunch of them together here:

Then here is the workbook for the layout.  I made quite a few changes in the end, but it was a start.

Concept drawings for the final look of the whole thing:

Then the rough layout.  This one changed quite a bit before ending up with the final version.

The animation itself took the longest.

Originally the tiger was going to be a white tiger, but since the whole thing ended up being an upshot, I figured it was better to show the tiger's belly as a separate colour for readability.  And then suddenly the tiger became orange!  It actually worked nicely with the colour scheme of the background, the final painting of which is here:

I ended up breaking this down into about 50+ levels, meaning After Effects was not too happy with me.  Neither was Photoshop, actually...  Oh well :)