Kakapo Walk

I decided to start practising on Toomboom, as well as start to get an idea of how the Kakapo moves. Here I'm trying to get a child like feel into how the Kakapo walks - like a kid kicking up leaves or pretending to tightrope.

Set Design yet again

With my character designs all but finished now, I have no choice but to move onto finalising my set design.

First I worked out a very rough floor plan of what I wanted for the set.

At first I attempted to do some of my own designs, with little success. I also decided to change the sign in the original concept, so that the sign fo the school is hanging from a dead tree. To give over the idea that very little can live in this place.

Seeing that I was struggling with this, Sarah offered to do a concept for me:

I like this concept alot, and so I did a quick photoshop colour job on it. After Dan pointed out that the tree on the cliff was too similar to the set design that Matt has done for his film, I decided to move the tree. The tree's sign is also, for story purposes, inadequete and needs to be reversed to face away from where the camera is in this drawing.

Still not 100% happy with the set design, so more shall follow.

Turnarounds

Hey there, finally got around to doing my character turnarounds. First off we have the turnarounds for the main protagonist, Kakapo.

Then we have Owl.Then I moved onto the Crane, going through various colour pallets along the way.

I finally decided upon this colour scheme.
Then I moved onto other characters. This is Pigeon. He goes in line before Kakapo, he's very energetic and gets into scrapes alot and thus has many bandages and bruises. His design process will be uploaded later.

And hereis Humming Bird, he's in line behind Owl. He's mad in short but may be cut out for various reasons.

Lastly I threw together a height chart, so you can see how tall the characters are in relation to each other.

Something old

Here's a test I did quite a while back, when I was still doing the penguin character.

This demonstrates the pipeline for my animation. I drew this in Photoshop, imported into AfterEffects to composite it with the skyline and ground.

Enjoy

Set Design Again

Hello! Just a quick update today about my favourite area of this whole production, set design!
*groans* I really don't like sets so in the film my set is going to be a cell shaded CGI element upon which I will composite my animation on. I've already got Jenn agreeing to model the set for me, but I still have actually design it. This in mind, I took a deep breath and plunged into the icy depths of set design. Basically the whole short takes place on a cliff which overlooks what at first was going to be nothing, but now I've replaced with thorns and brambles. Partly to make it more threatening, partly because with those the Kakapo could theoretically survive. He'd just be in horrible, horrible pain rather than being dead. Much cheerier. Also thorns and brambles are green, and the Kakapo is green, so you get the idea in your mind that he's supposed to end up there. The rest of the set, in keeping with what I said before, is paler colours like yellows and browns. Still not happy with the colour scheme here, but I am happy with how the concepts came out. Still want to do a couple more that being said.

I also hate that sign.

Laura's Workings

Hello Again!

If you've visited Laura's blog lately, then what you're about to see is going to be very familiar. Laura nicely asked me to do a few character designs for her. She said she was having problems with her moon character. She wanted him to be a cheeky shocker kind of character that moons the audience. The first person who came to mind was Johnny Knoxville so I did a design along those lines that she seemed to like. Main issue with this is that because of his shape, the bottom half looks a little phallic.

The second character she wanted me to do was the character of Venus. Using the god that the planet was named after, she wanted to make the character. Laura had already gone for a Marylin Monroe type imagine, which I felt was perfect, so I merely expanded more upon that.
After that came Mars, who Laura wanted as an Arnold Schwarznegger type. I sort of went down that road, but went away from the body builder side and more towards the Bruce Willis action hero type. I also put him in military clothing to reflect the 'God of War' that the planet was named after.

I also began to do some work on the aliens that inhabit Laura's film, but around that time I fell ill so the design dropped in quality.

I am not finished designing for Laura, and this will be updated when I have done.

More Character Designs

I've been back on the character designing again, and I've now worked out that the character design of the main character - the Kakapo - is now entering it's final stages. I feel the design has enough appeal and I don't know if I can improve upon it. If I keep trying I could end up ruining the character and wasting time. I've now began to work out the character sheet for the Kakapo. I've devised the rules for how to draw the Kakapo, in case I need to have someone else do in-betweening for me.With the Kakapo finished, I've now moved onto working out the design for the secondary characters. I moved onto doing the Owl first. I didn't really like the first design I did, because it had a 'Totoro' look to it. So I went 'back to the drawing board' so to speak and tried to go for a more 'flour sack' look to the Owl. I like how linear and sharp the character designs, it gives a nice contrast to the Kakapo's softer and rounder appearance. I also think this element gives a little of the Owl's character away as well. He's meant to be rough. He's meant to be mean. He's meant to look like the sort of bloke that if you coughed in his direction would headbutt you in the face, and I think that's coming across in the character's design slowly but surely. It's not there yet, as Sean rightly pointed out, the Owl needs to have a few of his features defined in a way that makes it more recognisably an Owl. In my previous entry I said that some of the colour tests looked more falcon like, and that shouldn't have happened. That was the result of the character design not being up to task. So while I feel the Owl's design is getting stronger, I don't think it's quite there yet.

Moving on from the Owl, I started to look at the other secondary character in the story, the Crane. The Crane has been a source of constant frustration for me, as I can't seem to nail the tall and lanky design that I wanted to do. The character comes across as snooty and elitist alright, but something about the design lacks appeal. An issue I'm having is the neck, I just have no idea what to do with it. No matter what I do the neck seems wrong to me.
That being said, after a meeting with Sean, a set of drawings i did which I'd initially decided were bad designs were suddenly brought to my attention. Sean stated that he preferred this design in a lot of ways, and with fresh eyes I could see why. The character's pose is perfect, and the blocky shoulders I have given him, give the impression he's wearing some kind of blazer without having actually putting a blazer on the character. I still feel that there are some places it's needs to be tightened. The eyes are too small for my liking and it's not really that clear he's wearing glasses, but this is heading in the right direction.

Below is a drawing I did, mostly for myself, so that I could get an idea of what the character's heights were in relation to each other. The Kakapo is definitely the smallest, whereas the larger Owl and Crane are a lot taller, with the Crane being tallest overall.


Lastly, I have started to look at the tertiary characters, the other birds at the school that appear mostly in the line. The first of these I looked at was the only one with any real movement, which is the Pigeon that goes in line before the Kakapo. Not really got many ideas at this stage, and have been jotting down basic sketches to try and get a feel of how I want the Pigeon to look.

I'm not sure what other birds I'm going to use yet, but I suspect they will be dull looking birds, as to fit in with the colour schemes I'm going for.