Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Progress Update

Here's a quick recap of what has happened since my last update. 

I've gotten a new computer, this one, and installed a copy of Adobe's Creative Suite Production Premium that I got at a huge discount from a friend.  Once I got all this set up I started work on the animatic.  I wrote an awesome python script to extract all the story boards into single images using PIL instead of manually cropping and saving out each one, so that saved me a LOT of time.  As I started laying out the timeline I realized that I should have been putting boards straight into the timeline as I was drawing them instead of doing all the boards first because my timing was off.  There are parts I had to cram images in and parts I had to stretch them out or repeat them, or in 2 cases I just ended up with big holes in the timeline to fill.

I've been working on my portfolio website with most of my free time in the couple of months, so not much progress has been made on this since then, until I got a wacom tablet for Christmas and started touching up the existing boards and filling in the holes.   This is an animated gif of when his wife sees all the pulses/waves and is freaking out on him:

The end isn't working right now so I'll need to rework that, but I'm hoping at some point soon I'll be posting a video, then again I have a portfolio to work on.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

2 more scenes

Got a few more boards done.  The "they bought a house in the countryside to raise their children" and the "one of their kids is on drugs".  I'm not sure about personifying the son with the teenager look as I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible, but maybe it's okay because he's half human.


I sold my new EP121 tablet and figured I wouldn't make much progress until I got a new laptop and a wacom tablet but when I went to retrieve files from my old laptop it just started up fine.  I'm not sure what happened but it's very much still alive.  Interestingly enough I prefer drawing on this 6 year old machine over that brand new asus tablet.  The cursor lines up with the pen better and there's WAY more screen real estate.  It's much heavier and runs pretty hot, but somehow it's just less awkward.

I just realized the other day that it has now been over a year since I started this project and I'm not yet done with the animatic.  I've learned a lot throughout this process and I'm getting kind of burnt out so I may just leave it at a "proof of concept" phase once I finish the animatic and move onto another project.  Or maybe I will just try to get a shot or 2 done.  Working on the FX for the first few shots could be fun.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

A Tit-bit Of Progress

Here is some wicked progress. 2 new scenes. The guy watching his sheep bride sleep and the sheep coming home late as he stews in anger, sitting in the dark. I was going to make the sheep look drunk or have slutty clothes on but I'm trying to avoid personifying as much as possible so she is just emotionless as usual.  I hope this doesn't come across to the viewer as unintentional or uninteresting.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Did some work

I drew a few storyboards and even though I'm not going to post them yet, I wanted to document the fact that I've done some work.  I think I'm going to ditch this Asus ep121 in favor of a normal laptop, possibly a macbook pro if I can gather up the motivation to switch to mac, and a wacom tablet. The cursor on this ep121 doesn't always line up with the pen so it kind of drives me insane, not to mention you have to take out the keyboard any time you want to type anything, since the on screen keyboard is annoying and the handwriting recognition is much slower than typing.  It feels like I can do things at the same speed as I can  my phone, which is not what I want out of a laptop. I feel like once I get to the other work in this project I'm going to wish I had a normal machine to work on.

That is all.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

This is the Title of the Blog Post

Here are some more storyboards that I drew on the plane from Boston to SF. I'm thinking I might need to shorten these little montage segments if I'm going to fit them all into the last minute or so of the song.  That's what this whole animatic is for in the first place.


Monday, August 15, 2011

Storyboards, long time comin...

Here are some more storyboards.  I've been drawing in Iceland on my vacation.  Haven't had much time to dedicate but that's a good thing, I've just been swimming and visiting friends and going to the countryside and eating delicious food for the last week.



Sunday, July 24, 2011

I'm back

I'm starting up work again on this project again!  I've had a brand new Asus ep121 for the last 2 weeks but have been too busy with work to use it.  After much headache setting the damn thing up here's my first attempt with it.
It doesn't have anything to do with the project, or anything at all really, but I feel like I'm getting the hang of using sketchbook pro on this machine, which BTW I've named "Scrablet".  Scrablet and I have enjoyed a lovely morning outside of Bean There cafe.  There's a woman practicing singing like an angel.  An angel that just sings up and down the scales.  Off to band practice.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

My laptop died

My drawing device has failed.  The graphics card overheated and now I am sad.  I'm looking for another but until then this blog will suck with neglect.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Another page

Yet another page.  I just realized I saved over an entire page of boards... not getting that back.  Son of a bitch... well I'll redraw that one next time.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Bwoards

The long and steady journey continues with the greatest of all accomplishments.  More storyboards.  

I had some moments of battling with self doubt during this drawing session.  I wonder why it's such a struggle.  I'm worried about these drawings(as well as the entire project) being terrible, or rather just not being something that impresses people, or that I won't ever finish it.  I definitely need to relax about the whole thing and just make progress.  It might even help to just leave some drawings in a state I'm not happy with, just to practice "getting over it".

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Berds. Steryberds.

I got a few more story boards done tonight. Yay for me.  Certain elements won't look right until they're cut up and put in the animatic.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

First draft of ending.

Check out the about page.  I added an ending and modified some of the spoon raining stuff to flow with the timing of the music better.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Back.

It has been awhile. Screw March and most of April anyway.  Guess I'm not giving up on this project, just took some time off.  This thing is going to take a very long while at this rate, and I'm just going to have to be okay with that.  

The reason I hit another wall was because I decided to redraw the first 4 pages of storyboards, since they looked like shit compared to the later ones, and I wasn't really enjoying backtracking... it felt like a chore.(Plus I've been focusing on learning to play the drums.  I can only focus on so many extra-curricular activities at a time.) Today I finished re-drawing and I'm really happy I did because they look so much better.  I've loosened up drawing-wise, and although the drawings still aren't very consistent day to day, I'm happy with how much I've improved.  So happy that I'm even fixing up existing storyboards before I go back to finish off the end of the animatic.

Here's one I re-drew today.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Stereeberds

I've been pretty busy working on this short film so I haven't updated... but now I'm back on the wagon or whatever.  Here's another set of boards.  There's some compositing to be done on them so they may not make much sense like this.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

God damn, more

Got some more storyboards done.  I'm up to 80 boards and at the part when dude is running out of the house after getting bashed by the broom.


2 posts in 1 day!  3 in a weekend!  Maybe I"ll chill out on posting every time I get any of the work done.  Maybe not.

Momentum. Sweet precious milky momentum.

I woke up early today on this beautiful Saturday morning, went to a cafe and proceeded to draw for almost 3 hours.  I'm loosening up with my drawing, getting much better quality, and remaining very inspired by this project.  I'm going to stop posting all these storyboards though because I don't want to show them all right away.  I might revisit some of them as well.

Now I'm off to eat lunch and then set up my new drum set.  Good day.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Got some more storyboards done.

Good for me.  They're pretty time consuming.  Right now I'm at about 8 storyboards every hour. I've spent about 4 hours and I've 32 boards, which end right now at the part when the big sweeps come in.  At this rate I'm looking at about 40-50 hours to complete all the storyboards.  I guess that's not taking into account that I'll probably start half-assing it when I get tired of drawing them.  Right now it feels pretty good.  I have to go help my brother move, but here's a sample of the storyboards:
I should learn some tricks for drawing hands.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Still working... slowly

I haven't given up yet, even though it may look that way because it has been almost 2 months since my last post.  I was busy with christmas/new years/long vacation so I haven't touched this much. I'm still working on it, just very slowly.  


Currently I've hit a wall with the character design portion of the project.  It's not really my thing so instead of putting so much pressure on getting it right I'm just going to push ahead in other directions.  I started work on a 2D animatic today and got about 20 storyboards done for the first scene.  This isn't much, and it's not worth showing yet, but I'm making some progress and I want to acknowledge that and keep tracking it. I'm hoping that while working on the storyboards I'll get a better sense of the characters because I'll be required to keep sketching them over and over.  That hasn't happened yet, and the drawings are very crude, but at least they'll get the point across and help me visualize every detail of the short before starting on the 3D.


So... good job, self. You did some work.