Term 2, Week 2 - Starting the animation

This week I will be start producing the animation based upon the storyboards I made last term. I did over the Christmas holidays start building a scene for the roller coaster sketch I had planned. In other show reels I watched last term I noticed that the backgrounds in the animation scenes where very plane because all the focus is on the animation. That was what I had originally planned for the roller coaster scene, however I thought the joke of him crying because he doesn't want to go on a roller coaster even funnier if the roller coaster was for kids like 'It's a small world'. Not going over the top but having images of cute animals and bright rainbow colours would I feel add to the joke visually. This is adding more work and I know the animation of the character is the most important part of the sketch so that'll be what I'll focus more. This background gag I'll add and work on over time.

screen shot insert of scene

For the obstacle course like I mentioned in my last blog post I was going to use the spaceman character rig I received from a 3D magazine. Over the holidays I set myself the task to get used to the rig by creating a walk and run cycle animation with the rig.

One of the storyboards I had in my block out show reel I had a guy dazing all loved up after seeing a girl who caught his eye and an old man seems to think he's looking at him. I have since presenting this storyboard I've Incorporated this gag into my short piece of animation I'm doing for my Independent Studies. However I'm still wanting to show the animation I've done for this module in my final show reel.

Figure. 2.

Term 2 week 1 of PPD 2

Moving from PPD 1 over to PPD 2 this module now consists of me developing everything I have planned for my show reel from last term. My show reel was mainly going to be animation based containing various little sketches, an obstacle course and work from last term Game Development. A few changes from my original plan, I was planning on having a character model in a small environment which I would create based on a piece of  concept art in the module Advanced 3D Modelling. The plan is now to work on an environment based on the concept art from the film 'Flushed Away'. This is the only real change to my show reel plan.

The plan of my showreel now:

Roller Coaster Sketch - Animation

Staring at me Sketch - Animation

Flushed Away - 3D Environment

Obstacle Course - Animation

Super Collateral - Animation In Game Footage

Animation Footage from my Dissertation

At the start I wanted to use a variety of rigs in my show reel to make it more interesting, rather than using just one rig throughout the whole show reel. Over the Christmas holidays I searched the web for different rigs to use. The first new rig I came across was a Spaceman rig free with a magazine. The spaceman has cartoon style proportions and I felt this rig could work great for my obstacle course segment. I could set the obstacle course in a space style environment (not too over the top)and I've already started working with the rig creating run and walk cycles.

Fig. 1 Spaceman Model

For the sketch segment of my show reel I'm planning on still using the ideas and storyboards I worked on in the past. However I may incorporate one of them into my Dissertation work where I'm looking into comedy techniques used in animation and I would like to include my work there into the show reel.  

Image Reference

Fig. 1. Spaceman Model [Screenshot]