Thursday, December 23, 2004
Today I was watching The Triplets of Belleville and I sort of had a revelation on how to draw characters (well, how I'd like to draw characters anyway; and Sylvain Chomet's character style is probably the closest to what I've always tried to accomplish). In short, I realized how important the shape of the body is to action. I knew about "lines of action" before, but I think I always took a really stiff anatomical approach to drawing the character and wound up not really conforming to the line of action at all. This might just seem like mumbo-jumbo, and it probably is; I'm not sure how to explain what I'm talking about. But let's just say I've discovered new horizons in character design.
What this means, of course, is that I have a lot of new momentum for the production of the long-awaited My Name Is Jake II, which has officially been given the subtitle At The Gym. You see, a long long time ago, Jake and I recorded a lot of his classic vocalizations with the intent of making a MNIJ sequel, but later I wasn't really happy with the soundtrack edit I put together so rather than fixing it I gave up. A long time later, today in fact, I was playing around with the new character design and got so excited that I invited Jake over and we recorded some more of his voice for the project, and I'm now going to put together a new, better edit.
I like animation.
So, because of my tendency to take everything so bloody seriously, I'm going to keep a sort of production diary in this blog, to chronicle the making of this epic film. This one, like many sequels, is higher budget than the first one (which was a fairly horse-and-buggy operation consisting of me tracing on note-cards against my dorm window at UNM), and is going to take a lot more work. But I'm a FUCK of a lot better at drawing and animating than I was three years ago, and dammit, this project is not going to go away. I need to finish it. Winter break is my golden opportunity.
I've put together a checklist of things to be done.
1. Concept
2. Soundtrack
3. Lip Synch
4. Storyboard
5. Background sketch
6. Keyframes sketch
7. Inbetweens sketch
8. Background render
9. Frames render
10. Special effects!
This may sound totally ridiculous, and I'm hoping no animation biz types are reading this because I honestly don't know what the real terms are for these things. So I've gotten past step one... pretty easy, with MNIJ movies you just figure out the setting (with the first one it was a grocery store and with this one it will be a gym) and you've got yourself a concept. Steps two and three are what I'm working on now: putting together a final soundrtrack edit and going through it frame by frame to figure out the timing of all the sounds and speech. Step four is pretty simple, basically just making a long rough comic strip that sums up the events of the movie. The rest of the steps are the time-consuming ones.
(Let's see if I can be goal-oriented). My goal is to be ready for step five tomorrow.
What this means, of course, is that I have a lot of new momentum for the production of the long-awaited My Name Is Jake II, which has officially been given the subtitle At The Gym. You see, a long long time ago, Jake and I recorded a lot of his classic vocalizations with the intent of making a MNIJ sequel, but later I wasn't really happy with the soundtrack edit I put together so rather than fixing it I gave up. A long time later, today in fact, I was playing around with the new character design and got so excited that I invited Jake over and we recorded some more of his voice for the project, and I'm now going to put together a new, better edit.
I like animation.
So, because of my tendency to take everything so bloody seriously, I'm going to keep a sort of production diary in this blog, to chronicle the making of this epic film. This one, like many sequels, is higher budget than the first one (which was a fairly horse-and-buggy operation consisting of me tracing on note-cards against my dorm window at UNM), and is going to take a lot more work. But I'm a FUCK of a lot better at drawing and animating than I was three years ago, and dammit, this project is not going to go away. I need to finish it. Winter break is my golden opportunity.
I've put together a checklist of things to be done.
1. Concept
2. Soundtrack
3. Lip Synch
4. Storyboard
5. Background sketch
6. Keyframes sketch
7. Inbetweens sketch
8. Background render
9. Frames render
10. Special effects!
This may sound totally ridiculous, and I'm hoping no animation biz types are reading this because I honestly don't know what the real terms are for these things. So I've gotten past step one... pretty easy, with MNIJ movies you just figure out the setting (with the first one it was a grocery store and with this one it will be a gym) and you've got yourself a concept. Steps two and three are what I'm working on now: putting together a final soundrtrack edit and going through it frame by frame to figure out the timing of all the sounds and speech. Step four is pretty simple, basically just making a long rough comic strip that sums up the events of the movie. The rest of the steps are the time-consuming ones.
(Let's see if I can be goal-oriented). My goal is to be ready for step five tomorrow.
