Finally Animating! 02/28/2025
After many months of modeling, storybuilding, and rigging, we’re finally ready to start animating! Our characters still need face rigs, but working on those rigs has been set aside in the interest of getting body animation done. I kinda love this idea, as it forces us as animators to add expression in their movements without their faces.
This first playblast is the opening shot of the whole film. I wanted to add some character movement, and a slow pan inward, but otherwise there wasn’t much for me to add here from it’s previous version.
This second playblast is a few shots down the line. This animation is obviously pretty rough, and lacks audio, but I wanted to give the penguin a good amount of expression in his movement. I want to come back here and give Dino some movement too, but this is where this shot is for now :)
A blog dump 02/14/2025
HI! I’ve got many updates to share with you. Firstly, were moving into staging our initial layout animatic, featuring full character and set models. There are some technical difficulties with some of our rigs, so while the rigging team irons out those details, we continue forward with the characters T-posed for these shots. Once the rigs are fixed, I’ll go back in and update the scenes to be blocked and posed. Then animation can begin!
TENTATIVE Scene 004 Shot 070
Obviously, in the final version, the characters won’t be clipping through the floor, but the rigs don’t allow for a kneeling position, so this is what we have for now.
Another big thing I’ve been working on these past few weeks is getting the Adobe Premier movie file organized and ready for the final voice actor takes and the beginning of animation. This took me a few hours, as I color-coordinated everything, named layers, and gave it the organization it needed. The file should make it much easier to insert new animation shot iterations and work on audio mixing.
A peek at the editing window!
This window can seem overwhelming to the average viewer, but it’s simpler than you think! Audio is down at the bottom, with dark purple being voice lines and magenta being music. Scene view is at the top in yellow, and as we begin to add more scene iterations, we can easily remove and replace the old ones in the timeline :)
BLOG UPDATE 11/15/24
Hi! I don’t have images to upload this week, but here are some written updates. I’ve had to go back to my character models and triple check them for penetrating geometry and polygons / triangles. This took a majority of my time these past few weeks. Moving forward, my group is getting ready to start the first draft of our 3D animatic, and we’re working on getting audio recorded with our voice talents. Cheers!
Models galore 10/18/24
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working pretty intensely on finishing all of the toy models and their Noir World counterparts. Although its challenging work, modeling organic characters from scratch, I’ve really enjoyed bringing these characters to life in Maya and I’m excited about how these models will look on a professional portfolio. This week my team got together to discuss the next phase of production, now that all the models are getting close to complete. My next step moving forward is finishing set layouts and starting on the 3D animatic for the film.
Keep in mind that these models are in their final stages, but not completely finished, as I have some smoothing and adjusting I want to do before advancing them down the pipeline. Also keep in mind that the characters look quite scary without their pupils, but that’s a problem for the texturers.
9/6/24
This week my main focus was working on the toy version and the Noir version of one of our main characters, Hopson. Figuring out the best way to model his clothes is my current challenge. I’m pretty satisfied with the way the toy version came out, and I’m excited to tackle the body and clothing for the Noir version.
This is the toy version. I'm happy with the smoothness and have clean geometry. I stuck to a pretty simple and bulky design to give it a more weighted feel in the belly, feet, hands, and head.
This one is far from finished, as I just began on the body today (9/6). The head was copied over and adjusted from the toy model, but the body will be modeled from scratch to give it more of a living feel.
Another rewrite…
FINALLY! We’ve reached a point of compromise with our story and were FINALLY ready to move into finalizing some key points. We’ve essentially had to rewrite a lot of our core story, but we came out of the meeting really satisfied as a team, where we ended up. Turns out, we were missing a key plot device: motivation. By giving our main character a reason to feel pressured and worried about finding her toy, we’ve given her a reason to breakdown during the climax of the story. Anyways, the new rewrite means a new set of storyboards, but we’re gonna start working on those next week, after we have the screenplay written out. For now, here’s what our plot looks like on a graph, with rising action on the left, climax at the top, and falling action on the right.
Time to reboard
Howdy! After our production pass last week, it’s finally time to move forward with some polished versions of the storyboards. I’m really excited to start working on these, as storyboarding is one of my passions. It’s really important to me that we’re able to capture some unique camera angles and shots through the storyboards so we have the groundwork to make our short visually interesting. The rest of my team are beginning on character turn arounds, asset designs, and finalized set layouts, which is a really fun process to be a part of as well. I work with some really talented people. Cheers!
Notecards galore!
Hey! This week, we got together with our notecards, which had screen directions / story beats on one side and rough drawings / storyboards on the other, and pinned them all up on the wall so we could see how the flow of our short film was looking, and make any edits to the storyline. Being able to pin all of the story up on a wall like that felt very professional, like a real storyboarder in the industry. Anyways, we made some edits to the beginning of the story and decided to come up with a couple of alternate sequences for the middle, to pitch during our production passes in a couple of weeks. We’ve got a lot to do before then- lots of art direction and importing our physical notecards (all 89 of them) into Premier Pro so they can be timed into a very rough animatic. Big workload for this oncoming week for me specifically, but also the rest of my team. Cheers!
A change in direction…
Back to work this month! With a new team of talented people, we’re ready to get started on the final draft of the story and we prepared for the storyboarding process. We wrote all of the beats in the story out on notecards and then divied them out to everyone in the group to do some rough storyboards on the back. In next weeks meeting, we’ll go over the storyboards we created, and make any adjustments to the story that we need to. We also took a picture together to celebrate the beginning of our short film journey! Cheers!
More Beat boards!
Howdy!
Simple update today! Three more beat boards. I’m really enjoying playing with darkness and shadows in these boards, trying to convey what I want to do with the lighting in the film; it will be darker during the search for the bear, but lighter before and after the search. I really want to emphasize the contrast between the second and third frames here, as the second one is in the very beginning, and the third is just after the boy discovers his bear is missing. The first frame is at the end when they are reunited! Cheers!
So it begins…
My very first production blog! The beginning of a 3-semester journey across my senior short. I’m super excited to begin this process, and even more excited to see my progress through this blog.
This week I started working on some beat boards for the story spine my group came up with last week. I’m SUPER attached to this spine, as the idea stems from one of the first animation projects I ever worked on. The story centers around the song “Teddy Bear’s Picnic”, which I used to love as a kid. Surprisingly, no one from my group had heard of it, but once I showed it to them and explained my idea, they were all on board. As far as the beat boards go, I only got three done before this post. Hopefully, it introduces you, the reader, to the general vibe I’m going for with this story- kind of dark, kind of spooky, but in the end, fun and silly! Enjoy these beat boards while I work on some more. Cheers!
