Weekly Update 9/15

I feel like I say this every week, but my goodness am I ever busy. And tired!

I finished inking my backgrounds! I’m currently in the process of putting them in to TV Paint to get my shots down so I can finalize my shot list and thus finalize my schedule. Its been wildly hectic of course, and I already feel behind schedule despite actually scraping by so far. But I’m sure I’ll be feeling that way right up to the final render. Joy.

Have some more backgrounds!

(The mess resembles my life – er – bedroom at the moment. Thought it was fitting.)

Weekly Update 9/9

Whelp. This week I continued to ink backgrounds. So many, many backgrounds. They’re really coming together and looking great, but there are still at least a weeks worth to go. I’ve been so busy with this and my other projects, its basically non-stop work. But I love it, always something to do, always something to achieve. It both drains and gives energy.

Next week I plan to finish inking the backgrounds (I’d been so optimistic to think I could finish in just 1 week) so I can set up my film in TVPaint and finally start getting my layout and shots down.

Since I’m pretty exhausted and should really get my sleep, I’ll just post one of the inked backgrounds here for you.

Weekly Update

For the rest of the semester I am supposed to post weekly updates (by 5pm each Monday) detailing my progress and struggles of that week.

Obviously this post is just a tiiiiny bit late. (Give or take 6 hours.) While this might not be the best way to start the semester, I will soldier on and write it none-the-less.

This week I was extremely busy, what with settling in to my new place, dealing with a slightly overburdened work schedule, trying to get classes sorted out, and also have time to spend with the people I care about before everyone has to buckle down, I wasn’t quite as productive as I would have liked. However I am happy to say that I have a) finally nailed down the style of the film and b) finished all the basic background layouts.

Next steps are to ink the layouts (so they’ll be clearer and easier to understand while also progressing on towards the finished film) put them into my progressing animatic, lay out the shots and character movements and then….

– Paint Backgrounds – Finalize animation schedule – Begin animating and shooting reference footage – and so on.

I would also really like to get on top of finding a composer (and possibly a sound designer) as soon as possible. (Definitely on the top of my TO DO list this week).

As this post was late, and it IS and update after all, I’ll give you a snippet of what the backgrounds are going to look like!

Animatic

My latest animatic!

Happy Story Animatic V04

Some Concept Art

IzzyTurnaround_v02 — Elephant Ears and “long, slender” Feet

Aside

Happy Story is a short animated film created as a thesis project for my final year at USC in the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts in the School of Cinematic Arts.

It is a story about a struggling family and a young girl’s vivid imagination that brings them together.

Enjoy.

When I was little it was often hard for me to fall asleep, and I would have even more trouble after waking up from a nightmare. I would run out of my room and slip into my parents’ to crawl in bed with them. My dad, perhaps in a vain attempt to avoid my kicking presence every night, taught me to tell myself a happy story before falling asleep at night, or when trying to fall asleep after a bad dream. He would always start it “Once upon a time” and would give me a few lines about a young girl who could fly and lived in the clouds, or who loved to read and lived in a huge library, or who climbed a tree and found her very own treehouse. He would set the stage, as it were, then leave me to tell the story. As I grew I began to set the stages for myself, and my stories became more and more complex. Sometimes I would tell myself a story before bed, only to pick it up again the next night, and the next and the next. It was these stories that I turned to when my parents fought, when I was stressed about school the next day or when I was going through some social drama. It became something more than a self soothing method, as the stories seeped into my daily life, mixing with my ever constant drawing. I started trying to pull the stories from my head, to stick them to a page or in a computer. Sometimes it was like trying to catch smoke in your hands, they would simply drift, unformed. Other times the stories fought back, like trying to grip a wriggling fish or a thrashing cat. But every now and then, they would flow onto the paper with my pen strokes or through my dancing fingers and they would stay. Loyal and present as the faithful dog, they would stick with me. Happy Story is one of them.

Happy Story

A Short Animated Thesis Film