The final twelve weeks of my degree… a bit scary. As such I’ve decided to completely throw myself in face first, flailing and screaming into the bottom of the deep end of the pool and opted to make a 15-20 minute animation for my final major project. Now, twelve weeks? Thats fine right? Just dedicate all your time to the thing and you’ll be peachy. Thing is I also have the Macmillan book competition to enter AND a 5,000 word dissertation to re-jig. The plan is to just not have fun for twelve weeks (well about nine now). I have made some exceptions to this but those are all on the provision that I get a decent chunk of this work done, for example a friend of mine from college is coming into london on wednesday to catch up and have a drink then on the 2nd of march i’m going to visit my best friend for the weekend and then the wednesday after that I’m going to my dads comedy night back home. So hopefully i wont go too crazy over the next few weeks.
I thought I might start a little bit of a diary for the task though, just to show my work in progress and discuss problems, faults, what went well, what went awfully. I’m really excited about it however I dont think my facebook friends are too excited when I post yet ANOTHER picture or status update of how its going so I thought maybe i should make this a bit more official and post it here then they can read about it if they want, and if they dont want to hear about the chair i just made move across the screen they’re saved the aggrivation.
Like I said I have been doing this for about three weeks already so this is sort of the first dump of everything so far.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m continuing my Under Milk Wood animation. I have posted my first one minute one from my last project on here so this is really a continuation of that. As the play itself is about an hour and a half long I’m having to do some careful editing and picking and chosing of what bits I want to animate. Believe me if I had the time I’d attempt the whole shabang but as time is scarce I have to just make do with what I can… erm… do. So, sacrelidge I know but cut me some slack I’m trying to do it justice. So far I’ve got about five-eight minutes storyboarded and while i feel like I’m super ontop of it all I’m actually moving really slowly and need to get my bum into gear a little bit.
My desk was for a week and a half just covered in sheets and sheets of paper scribbled over with red marker pen and with notes scrawled over them. Luckilly I’ve now organised them into a tidy folder but actually I think I feel much more involved when the chaos is all around me. Needless to say it may well get like this again soon because I need to storyboard the next bit very very soon.
After that came starting to draw out all the different pieces and bits and bobs to be scanned in. I had an advantage which was that a lot of the backgrounds and things I needed I had already made for the first part so I didnt have as much to do as i could have done. It was just the time it took to get everything drawn. My seemingly preferred way of colouring these days is using tiny lines so it takes FOREVER. But as long as I’ve got some good music and a nice cup of tea next to me I can sit there and just get on with it.
For this one I’m also trying a few new bits a pieces. For the part where Captain Cat is dreaming of the dead i’m trying my hand at stop motion. I’ve never really done it before and I just love the way it looks so hopefully it’ll turn out alright. I’m using mostly drawn pieces but I bought a pack of beads shaped like skulls in all sorts of different colours which I’m going to use for the dead people talking to him so it should look pretty cool!
Fiddling around working out what it could possibly look like, layering etc.
colouring the background for captain cats dream sequence.
Finished background. Spooky!
Also, I’m going to try and use some real footage in with the animated drawn stuff. My frist try: Putting mouths over a drawn background. I sat in my room all night on wednesday mouthing words into my web-cam trying to match them up with the words in the script. Whats more, I decided it’d be really cool to paint my mouth like a clown and then it’d look really freaky. Yeah, sensitive skin and facepaint never usually go but really dry lips and skin that has been playing up a bit over the last few weeks plus facepaint? Definetly doesnt go. That was a night of pain right there. But it was pretty fun.
Send in the clowns!
So I’m well on my way to something potentially really fun and good and potentially a really good mark at the end of the year! But mainly something I can be proud of because lets face it its taken me long enough to find what it is i’m good at! Although we have reached a bit of a technical hitch at the moment. After Effects keeps crashing and I cant seem to figure out why. Spent ALL day yesterday trying to work but failing. I didnt even have any money for tea so was working on 0 caffine levels. Yesterday started out so well but then I headbutted the bathroom tap while spitting out mouthwash and it was all downhill from there. But no mind because today is another day (even though i seem to have contracted some sort of stomach bug type thing from somewhere… yeah thats not fun by the way) and I’m going to make a cup of tea and get back to work! More updates to follow, watch this space.
Over and out!
