"Acorns" Skipping Shot Progression

For the past month I have been getting production on my film well under way. At the moment I have animated a quarter of the film and those shots are currently going through the various stages of clean-up/colour/compositing. Needless to say I will be very busy getting it all done!

As I haven't had the time to put together the line tests of my animation yet, (and also unsure exactly how much finished animation I should be putting up online) I decided to edit a special video to show the shot progression of a short scene. This is Amber and the Spirit skipping together in my montage sequence. The final example shows the shot as it will appear in the film.

It is also available here on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBIsJdQC4Lk

The music is by Benjamin Rusch who I will be working with again in a month or two to re-record the final soundtrack.

I am extremely excited with how the film is turning out so far, it's just a case of getting it finished on time! At the moment I have a few animation students from other years helping me out, two clean-up and colouring artists, one colourist, and two in-betweeners. Hopefully I will get more assistance after Easter as first and second years have less work to do in order to help third years. It's more than most people get but this film's production is huge!!

Now that my dissertation is finished and handed-in (that took place on the 15th last week) I have turned my full attention onto the film and aim to have as much animation done as possible for our rough hand-in on the 23rd April.

That's all from me for now, I'll update occasionally with animation and promotional materials, but otherwise it's full steam ahead!

All the best,

Gemma

More Colour Palettes

Final Colour Sheets for Amber and the Spirit in Winter, Spring and Summer. The last sheet will be Amber at night time and a couple of other lighting conditions and prop colouring. These also represent final character designs.

The Spirit changes colour throughout seasons as well as Amber's clothes, my idea was to give Amber pastel-like primary colours and the Spirit secondary colours as well as appropriate colours for the scene/seasons, so Autumn is warm and orange (but red when danger is near), Winter is cool, clean and blue, Spring is fresh greens filled with colourful flowers and Summer is hot and rich in greens, blues and yellows.

It's important as well for these colours to complement the backgrounds as well as each other, so I will have some colour/mood sheets for those too.

Autumn Colour Palette

Well there's no more denying it, production has officially begun on Acorns! I already have some interest from 2nd years and MA students at Newport willing to help with colouring and effects, so I'm getting everything organised so they can get started as well as animating new shots to be cleaned and coloured.

For this I have completed a colour sheet for the three Autumn scenes to make the production process easier when enlisting the help of digital colourists! I included the # number of the colours as well so that it will stay consistent.

Should have more of these (and eventually some pencil tests too) very soon!

Watercolour Concept Art

Since my rediscovery of using watercolour, now with the ability to paint without permanently crinkling the paper, I have taken the technique to some new concept art for Acorns. Using some new A3 watercolour paper, I sketched out some new and old character poses on one sheet and character expressions on a second sheet and did some pastel watercolour washes over it.

I'll be using the expressions sheet as reference for some of my character performance later on. They were largely inspired by character sketches by Hayao Miyazaki in art books for Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo and Oliver Jeffers gorgeous watercolour imagery in his children's books.

The Art Of Kiki's Delivery Service

Oliver Jeffer's Lost and Found

I love the storybook quality to using watercolour with pencil sketches in this way and would love to do this for an entire illustrated book of my film... if I only had the time! I've really enjoyed using watercolour and may introduce it further in my film for backgrounds or at the very least using the bright, pastel-like colour palette for my digital clean-up and colouring.

More to come in the new year! :)

Concept Art and Pre-Visualisation

I wanted to try some watercolour to compare colours for the seasons for the Oak tree, with reference to Oliver Jeffers and My Neighbour Totoro and Ponyo for colours.

I particularly like how the colouring for winter has turned out and plan to do more of these over the Christmas break.

And here is a pre-visualisation test using rough pencil lines and digital colouring. I dropped in a sketch of Amber and the Spirit as well to see if they fit with the background style... I think it works quite well!

Model Sheets - Seasons

For my Production Bible, I drew some more model sheets for the costume/colour changes for my characters over the seasons.

I've changed the colours for "Autumn" slightly and experimented with changing the Spirit's colour for each season. I think "Winter" and "Summer" came out well but I'll try out some extra colour schemes to see what works best between characters and against the background too.

Original uncoloured versions:

 I also coloured in a couple of my sketches as character pictures for my production bible. I particularly like giving Amber primary colours and having the Spirit as the only character who is green and therefore in sync with nature.

Model Sheet and Sketches

Here's a new model sheet for Amber and the Spirit of the Oak Tree. The designs are nearly final now, this needs a little work on maintaining proportions and perspective, but the line quality is pretty much there and I've done a coloured version too.

I've gone for bright primary colours that are toned down enough to almost be softer pastel colours. I've avoided pinks/purples for Amber, instead going for more neutral primary colours and a bit of lime green so she is more of a tomboy. The Spirit is a warm amber colour that fades where it will become more transparent. The ear leaves are a more faded green to try and avoid carrot comparisons! Not sure if that is successful yet!

And to finish off, more character sketches of Amber and the Spirit together, showing lots of emotion tests. I'll sort out an expressions sheet for them soon.

Pre-Visualisation Test

For my Pecha Kucha presentation last Monday, I did a pre-visualisation test to get a feel for how my film might look. The aim is to draw and colour a 'finished frame' of your film to suggest the look and colour scheme without having to animate.

I was inspired by Winnie The Pooh (2011) backgrounds and the colour scheme of a painting, The Strangest Autumn, by Patricio Betteo on DeviantArt (see these below respectively).

This is the pre-vis I created in Photoshop using these as references. I used a grainy brush to simulate the pencil line and a large brush on low opacity for the colour.

Personally I think it's suggesting the tree, sky and hill too realistically like in Winnie the Pooh. It's not as detailed, but it's not stylised enough for my story. I'm considering looking at more historical art and old Welsh/British/Celtic styles to get the traditional and mystical feel of my local history but in a modern setting.

More pre-vis tests very soon!