021111_Accomplishment

Rather miraculously, Ben, Stephen and I made our KickStarter goal in 3 days, about 57 less than we expected to accomplish that feat. Our project was even made Project of the Day on the Kickstarter homepage! It was a pretty spectacular moment in our short project's history, but made us all very proud and grateful. So here we are.
This is one of t the cards we printed on Wednesday to match the Robo-san one as a way of creating interest in our project around campus. It was typical meishi (business card in Japanese) size, and had our blog info on the back side of it. Oh, by the way Wan-chan is saying "wan wan" which is a Japanese onomatopoeia for the way a dog "speaks." Essentially, "wan wan" instead of "woof woof." I hope you all learned something today!

eth.

020811_KICKSTARTER

Hey everybody! So the Robo-san and Wan-chan animated short film is still trucking a long and we're making great progress with it every day. We'd really love to send the film to different animation festivals and film festivals when we finish it, as well as produce an art book for it, but we need YOUR help!

Check out our Kickstarter page below and you can watch a video about what we're doing and how we're doing it and then you join the fight to share Robo-san, and get cool stuff in return!
Thanks for reading and for your support!


eth.

020411 ending shot color key

Color key for the end shot! Super-colorful since it's some kind of emotional climax in the movie. It's a challenge to learn how to use colors this vibrant and bold. Don't think I captured the distance quite as well as I could but that's something that I'll mess with when I go to final. The extreme verticality of this color key is so that we can make the shot scroll upwards so that the short ends where it began, in the stars.
eth.

012511_color key

This is something I've learned recently. If ever I'm stuck on how to paint a particular background for a shot. I try painting it from the opposite direction. This doesn't mean it is uncomposed, it just seems to me that I tend to put all of the interest right in front of the "camera" so to speak, and everything behind it is rather simple. This is really great when I'm struggling to figure out how color is going to work in a scene, or something like that.
If I've learned anything from the Robo-san project, it's that nothing is simple, nothing is easy, unless you really make it so. You could paint a completely barren desert landscape and it could still be intensely complicated if you were really trying to construct a believable space.
eth.

011911_cloudy_background

More background painting. I love how good of practice they are for learning to create space through shifts in hue and value. Fun times.
eth.

011611_scene_6

Here's what I end up with...

eth.

011111_storyboard to background

Today Stephen and I were working together on Robo-san stuff for 7 hours or so in my apartment as the snow came down outside all day long. Pizza, a friend and digital painting is always a good time, right? Right. So after finishing the texture map for the body of the rock monster I showed the arms of yesterday I got to working on Scene 6.

Scene 6 is a troublesome beast because I decided it'd be a great idea to have some radical perspective shifts in the animation. The nice thing about it is it's a more exciting shot than our previous idea and it allows for flexing of some cinematic animation muscle. And since that's the medium that Stephen and Ben are working in, it's good to push it any way we can. Gotta look good in the showreel, after all. The problem for me, as I said before lies in the perspective shift and I banged my head against the wall in black and white for a while before manning up and trying with color. I ended up trying to subdue the angle a little bit for a while before realizing that was a crap idea and going back to the storyboard version shown above as my reference. The background image is really going to be much, much larger than this, but I wanted an example to talk about.

After figuring out all of that nonsense, I think finishing it will go a lot faster. Whether slow or quick, I'll just be spending a while painting clouds tomorrow...so many clouds....


eth.

011011_texture.

So when you're working on a team, I've learned, you don't always get to do the absolutely most fun things in the world. One of those things (in my opinion) is texture maps. Though when I think about it, they're only not as fun as painting full paintings, like yesterday's cave study, because they're not a space, they're just a wall. Regardless, they're important and they give me an opportunity to practice my use of edge in a fairly monochromatic manner.

These are some rough samples of the UV mapping I'm doing for a character in the Robo-san project. I'm currently horrible at edges and I've been struggling to make the maps work. Luckily, I'm privy to the fact that this fellow (seen above) is on screen for all of 10 seconds at best, and you'll never see some parts of him. Still, I'd like to learn how to texture better. Any suggestions?
I'll show more interesting things tomorrow

First shot of Robo-san film.

You can now see the first scene of "Robo-san to Wan-Chan" on youtube! Look out for more in the future!

eth.