May 2 2005

Now That Takes The Biscuit

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Lots of updates! For one, the short film I’m work­ing on has finally been named: “Now That Takes The Bis­cuit”. A name that reflects the story in more than one way!

Here’s just a lit­tle teaser:

Now that takes the biscuit
The pro­duc­tion is pro­gress­ing nicely, with all that’s left to do is the ani­ma­tion. For that I have a few more weeks, so I’ll hope­fully be fin­ished by May 20th. Both char­ac­ters are rather aged and stiff, so for­tu­nately there won’t be a lot of bouncy, hi-​​speed ani­ma­tion work for me to do. Just two old fel­lows sit­ting on a bench wait­ing for their train to arrive…

The char­ac­ter rigs on the other hand were giv­ing me a lot of trou­ble, espe­cially in areas of fine detail such as the hands and fin­gers. At one point I was so fed up with Final Rig that I decided to start all over with Ani­man, another free char­ac­ter rig­ging sys­tem. While that one isn’t per­fect either, it works pretty well now. And after all, it’s free!

Now that every­thing else is run­ning, I’m still not too thrilled: It seems that any time I just want to ani­mate some­thing, some ran­dom part will break and I’ll have to go into the char­ac­ter model and fix it! Hugely annoy­ing! And not a very cre­ative work­flow at all.

November 3 2004

Making progress!

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This evening I fin­ished writ­ing the script, which is good because I can now start get­ting some real work done. The story has changed from what I reported last time, but the premises remain the same and the pro­tag­o­nist is of course still my lit­tle dragon. Some of the sto­ry­boards are already done, and with just a few left to draw I’ve already started design­ing the char­ac­ters and the envi­ron­ment.
Expect a highly styl­ized appear­ance with a very car­toony main char­ac­ter… lots of work to ani­mate this beast! On the other hand the back­grounds will be fairly sim­ple, I’m still exper­i­ment­ing with a sort of “water­col­ored” look…

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