Nows for the Animation

So for the last four weeks we’ve been blocking our film. We made a first pass at rough blocking and now is the second pass of “blocking plus.” I’ve been working my tail feathers off.

However that did not stop me from going to see John K. give a talk at a retrospective about his work. I went with the talented Mike Stern and It was a heck of a good time. I got to see “Boo Boo Runs Wild” again. I’ve been trying to find that thing forever and I can’t seem to get a hold of it. To me, that is animation that clarifies why some gags just can’t be written down in a script. There is something about him running around and grunting like a maniac that kills me everytime.

Also I spent a fun-filled evening with some AM cohorts tossing the pigs. That’s right, you heard me. Even though, sadly, I felt my self-imposed production schedule didn’t allow for me to go to Siggraph or ComicCon, I got out of the house a bit and was reminded that AM has built such a great community of people. That’s worth the price of admission alone.

So the biggest news of all is that I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I feel so energized at this point to knock this thing out of the park. In the beginning, I have to admit that it was a bit like pulling teeth for me to get back into the flow of working and schooling after the laid back three months of planning the short. There were days during the first pass of blocking where I had a hard time concentrating. My brain gots its lazy on.

But now I’ve finally broken through that wall where this animation is mostly what I think about during my waking hours. I feel a genuine excitement to sit down and get to work. It is the absolute best. I tend to be a bit obsessive about things. I don’t get into stuff just a little bit. Sometimes it’s tricky to get myself into positive things, instead of fixating on radio control cars or board games. There’s time for that stuff later. Now’s for the animations.

Let’s see, what has transpired over the last month since the pitch. I was going to use the heavier (polite version of fatter) AM character of Otto. I liked the idea of the contrast between the fatty and the flying. But I did some pose tests of Otto and his shape seemed to always lean towards the ball and I don’t think I could have gotten the kind of lines and posing out of him that I was hoping for. So I’m sticking with good old Bishop. I like Bishop quite a bit actually. I think he’s a great character with lot of appeal and he looks young but at the same time ageless in my opinion.
The story has remained fairly the same as the pitch. There are additions of just a few more shots to clarify things but not much else. I still have some obvious timing adjustments to make. Some shots don’t last long enough, some are way too slow. Things that look perfect to me one day will appear completely off the next. Such is the creative process, I suppose. I'm still struggling a bit with his initial poses when lying on the ground. I'd love to have him lay flat on his chest, but his head is too big to get any type of pose that doesn't look like his neck is broken. But right now he clearly seems to have one-armed-syndrome. So I shall toil on it some more.

Not much more to say, so here is a playblast of the first half of the film approximately. Because it’s a playblast, all of the clouds appear to have hard edges, but they won’t when I render. The sky texture doesn’t look quite right in the playblast either. Rendered it looks good. Trust me. Now you will have some surprises for later. Ooooooooooohhhhh I can sense your excitement. It’s palpable. Look, I’m palping it right now.

Palp palp palp.