Just an update on the latest brief 'Dusty the Donkey'.

As we are making a demo for an interactive animation of one of Pauline's stories, namely 'Dusty Takes Off', I drew up a rough storyboard as a guide.

 

The page above was the first version, I decided to keep frames 3, 4 & 5 in the second version (below)

 

I stopped at this point as the full story would run to over 3 minutes and I knew we were making a short demo.

 

Above are some of the assets I made - some of which could be used for interaction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally we were going to include the airport scenes from the story but that would have made the demo too long. Now our only characters are the farmer and dusty. My role now is to create the farmer character and do a walk cycle, followed by a stop and talk to the donkey, then turn and walk away. My original character was a completely different style to the donkey character, drawn by McKinley, so she made a version in her style. I then made what I call a 'Hybrid' version (above centre), which is a blend of both versions. I had already made some animations of the first character which are posted above with the other clips.

 

 

Our latest brief is to create either illustrations or an animation for a story about a naughty donkey named Dusty, who is the main character in a series of stories by Limerick author Pauline Ryan. Pauline worked as a teacher for many years and devised these stories as a learning aid for young children, targeted mainly at 3-8 year olds. It's my understanding that she is considering publishing the stories - hence the need for the illustrations - but she also thinks that an animated version (of each story) could be an interesting alternative. This is a group project and we were given a choice from three of the stories in the series. We decided on animation, not surprisingly, and we might even take it a step further by making it interactive. From the three stories we picked one called 'Dusty takes off', which is about him breaking out of his field and going to the airport. Part of our research involved looking at children's books to get an idea of popular styles of illustration. Below are some of the illustrations that might influence our preliminary style. They are from two books, the first is 'The Butterfly' by Anna Milbourne and Cathy Shimmen, and 'Harry and the Dinosaurs Go Wild', by Ian Whybrow and Adrian Reynolds.

 

I've also added some of my character and background sketches to date.

 

'Dusty' found a new way of getting out of his field - by digging a tunnel in a corner.

 

The farmer telling him not to go out the gate.

 

I still have to do some inking in and then I'm going to have a go at painting them. I've never really done anything like this - I suppose it'll be like 'line and wash', which is something I've often meant to try but never got around to. Since making these sketches I've been assigned with creating the farmer and his family (characters), I think I'll also do some 'extras' for the crowd scene at the airport. Hopefully I'll have my 'colouring in' done before my next post.

Our second brief in 4th year is to create an Infographic, based on a monologue from a movie of our choice. Luckily there's a website that lists the top 100 movie speeches and monologues and I was able to pick a monologue from there. I chose an excerpt from the film 'Trainspotting', directed by Danny Boyle. Here's the clip, which is available online, and it's called 'Choose life'.

 

To be honest I didn't know a whole lot about Infographics before this brief came up. Naturally I did some research and it seems that it's fairly "Motion Graphic" based, which will mean utilizing Adobe's After Effects. This is really a good thing though, because I don't use this program often enough, and it is one of the more effective programs for post production.

 

I picked this clip because the character - Ewan McGregor - conjures up a continuous stream of imagery, or at least that was my interpretation of it at the time. I didn't realise just how much imagery was involved until I went about creating the storyboard. Ideally I wanted to create the graphics in Adobe Illustrator - being vector graphics they would transfer onto the big screen with perfect resolution. The only problem with that plan was that I'm not very familiar with Illustrator. I did what you might call a crash course for most of the first week (it was a two week brief), but I just couldn't get to grips with it, considering the time frame, and so I switched to plan B (always have a plan B). O.k., I'll be honest - I didn't really have a plan B. My only option, when I realised the amount of work to do, was to get my storyboard done, then the animatic, and get as much of the actual Infographic finished as was possible in the time I had available. Sometimes you just have to face the fact that your not going to get finished in time - it's gonna happen - but sure if you do what you can, then it's better than nothing.

One thing I noticed about Infographic's seem's to be the transitions, something at the end of one shot merging into an intro for the next. I did manage to achieve this - in my head - but transferring that to paper wasn't so easy. Anyway this is the storyboard to date.

 



 

You'll notice from the clip that there are a few sections where's there's no talking, so I used my artistic licence and edited the soundtrack a bit. Basically I cut out these bits so that there's a continuous dialogue. I did leave in the laugh after the "electric tin-opener" line though, as I came up with a visual to suit (the laugh) as a tin of beans gets opened and the lid pops up - amazing. I'm afraid I didn't work out how to actually do this though, in After Effects, so it'll probably never happen.

In the end I decided to create the graphics in Photoshop - it was either that or draw them on a light box. I know they won't look great but considering the amount of time I've put into this I really just want to have something to show at the deadline.

 

The animatic - to date - I would like to have had the time to have added full colour, or at least some sort of the lighting effects, or transitions, but sure ye'll get the gist of it. Hopefully in the next post there'll be something more finished, more like what I had initially envisaged (but I wouldn't hold your breath).