Animation Major - Week 7

First pass storyboard has already been finished, so this week I went over it to add various shots to more clearly illustrate character actions. Because my characters are void of facial emotion, I realise that more emphasis on subtlety in character movement would be necessary, thus more closer shots were inserted. Having some extra time on Tuesday, I got around to drawing up a height chart for my characters to convey the height difference. Since I wanted to convey a reverse parent-child relationship, the infant-like robot is significantly taller than the penguin.

Animation Major - Week 6

A short entry until I can update the status of the 3-D scan of my penguin character. So far this week I have been concentrating on both first draft storyboard and going over the joint and skinning tutorials from Jack's class up to this point. On Friday I went over my clay model again to fix up some irregularities and it was scanned in the same day.

Animation Major - Week 5

Having thumbnailed and second draft scripted the animation; I'm more or less ready for first pass storyboards. As of yet I'm uncertain about how many shots I will have, as I'm toying with the idea of having just the one fixed wide angle shot. This will likely change over the coming weeks as I continually visualise the story. I'm hoping to refine the robot's design, making him appear more intimidating than he did before. Hopefully I'll have the basic story elements locked down within the following weeks.

Animation Major - Week 4

This week, I've completed a script and redid most of my thumbnails following the various changes the story has taken. Since the walrus character has been removed entirely, along with most of the backbone of the original story, my concentration is focused on the remaining two characters. I've also more or less designed the robot, pictured below. I kept in mind the limitations of time and the fact he's the more mobile of the two characters, so he has a lot of ball joints and places to hide limbs, the head, etc. that will make animating him as stress-free as possible. We're currently creating a clay model of one of our characters to scan in 3-D, so I'm hoping the penguin won't be too difficult to model from there. As for animating it, I spent a while on the weekend observing penguin movement on nature documentaries. Hopefully this insight will serve to help create the character's performance.