Sound Effects

We had our screening last week. I got a lot of nice positive feedback, so that makes me feel good. I've been working on this so long I can't always tell if things are working or not, so it's great to know that people like the film.

The most common criticism I got was that the ending was slow, and I agree. Also, a number of people thought that Rhonda's 'If I had a nickel' line wasn't funny enough, so I decided to just cut it for time.

My previous animatics had a pretty minimal amount of sound effects, so I grabbed a bunch of stuff off NetMix and cut it in where there weren't effects already. It makes a lot of parts run way faster.

I put this together at home in the Bay Area, with a really cheap pair of headphones, so the levels might be a little unbalanced.

The new sound ends up changing some of the timing. Tell me if anything seems off.

Line Weights

I've been thinking about the widths of the outlines for the characters' eyes. I've heard that the area around the eyes should be darker, to draw the viewer's attention to their face, but whoever's saying it is usually talking about sketching or shading. I figured I'd try drawing James' and Rhonda's eyes with a different-sized paintbrush, and see how it turns out.

 

Original widths on the left.

I don't think it works so much on James. It ends up making his face a bit busy, and it kind of looks like he's wearing makeup. But I think I prefer the thicker outlines on Rhonda. Since her eyes are smaller, it makes them easier to see.

I assume whatever's the case with James also applies to Malcolm, since their eyes are about the same size. Darby's are dots, so he's exempt.

Animatic Zero Alpha Turbo: Champion Anniversary Edition

I got some notes on my last animatic from the fantastic Mr. David Fain, about parts to change and continuity issues to fix and/or be aware of, so I took the advice to heart and cut a new animatic. After the rewrites and shot changes, I shaved a good eight seconds of animation off of this mammajamma. Then, when I went and re-edited preexisting shots to account for the new content, it ended up increasing the total run time by about seven seconds, due to lengthening some of the holds. 

So, hooray! (?)

Here's the new, full version:

(Also on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/32135922)

Or, if you're crunched for time, the new segment by itself:

It's another one of those 'more time, less work' situations. There's less action and a lot fewer shots than in previous versions. I like how it turned out.

I ended up cutting the Vertigo shot that occurs when Malcolm looks out at the door when he's landed on the couch. I actually animated a rough test of the shot, and it kind of worked. It looked like a Vertigo shot, with the truck in and zoom out, but it didn't read at all, and would have taken a lot of time to 'perfect', so I went with the tumbleweed instead. It reads much faster, it's easier to animate, and it's funnier.

In the event that I'm unable to finish the film in it's current state before the screening, I do have a Plan B. The film would remain pretty much the same, except I'd cut the hallucination sequence. Darby's hallucination is cool, and I like it a lot, but it's pretty much just for mood and humor, and I can cut it without affecting the structural integrity of the story. 

We'll see if it comes down to that. At the moment, I don't think it will.

Rolling Along

So, things are coming as they're coming.

I have my first sound spotting session tomorrow. We'll go through the whole thing step-by-step and look for what sound effects I'll need. Then, I'm showing the in-progress film for the graduate seminar on Wednesday. That should be a nice opportunity to get some good feedback.

Also, I have auditions peppered throughout the week. I'm closing in.

Right now, I'm re-writing the 'right before morning' section so that it's shorter. I'll probably have that up before the end of the day.

Animatic 3: Tokyo Drift

I've redone the 'escape' part. The original would have been really difficult to animate, considering that most of the shots had all four characters, plus animated backgrounds, since the house is collapsing around them. In addition, a lot of the shots had confusing, gross-looking silhouettes, and that needed to be fixed.

The whole thing needed more 'zazz', so I reboarded the whole thing and added some split-screens. It actually contains more shots than the original version, but the shots are simpler and will be much, much easier to animate. Not to mention the backgrounds aren't as prominent, and, in a lot of the shots, I can replace them with those sort of stylized, 'whooshing' backgrounds that are fairly easy to execute. Ultimately, this new version of the sequence should save me at least a week of work.

Also, it just looks way cooler.

I've also cut in most of the Flash layouts I've completed so far:

It's also on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/31778778

Right now, the film runs at about seven minutes. Although it's an increase time-wise, it's actually a decrease work-wise, if that makes sense. Also, some of that added time comes from added holds and the opening title.

I plan to tighten the segment that occurs between when Malcolm lands on the couch and the following morning, so the final, FINAL film should be somewhat shorter. 

Happy Halloween!

Still working on this, that, and the others.

Here's an oldish picture of the guys in costume:

Animation Sampler #1

Some of the shots I've completed so far:

Bob Goblin

Been animating the shot with the Bob Goblin here, and I realized I don't really know what color he's going to be. 

I was originally thinking blue or blue-green, but he could really be whatever. Give me some input.

The background color will also change as the room starts to morph, so it's important that the Boblin stands out from the new color scheme.

It did a couple color sample/comparisons for the background. The blue-grey shades on the left of each are the room's normal nighttime colors.

 I didn't put a ton of thought into the hue pairings here.

These are more like saturation/lightness comparisons. 

I'm thinking it might be best to first pick which background color would be the most interesting for the room to change into, then just color the Boblin so that he complements the room.

Anybody have any opinions?

Opening Shot

Originally, the opening shot of the film looked like this:

I'm not the biggest fan of that shot. It's pretty boring. This is the first shot that anyone is going to see, so I figure it has to look a lot better. 

So, I've come up with this:

    

It looks a lot cooler, and it shows that there's really nothing to do around here.

Here are some clouds:

And here it is colored:

Much better, huh?

New Animation

It's still doing that weird artifacting thing. I'll try to fix that.

Rudolph and Bullwinkle

A lot of people have been asking me if Malcolm is a moose. Contrary to popular belief, he's actually a reindeer. 

Although both are members of the deer family, moose and reindeer have a number of physiological differences. If you look at the individual antlers, a reindeer has two distinct 'branches', while a moose has just one large one. A moose also has a 'floppier' nose area and a flap of skin that hangs below it's chin.

An easy way to think about it is that a reindeer is about halfway between a moose and a regular deer.

It really doesn't matter if people think Malcolm is a moose, though, since it has exactly zero percent effect on the story.

A couple people have also asked if Darby is a boy or a girl. Despite what his high voice and cute appearance may lead you to believe, Darby is a boy. (Not a 'boy' in the sense that he's a child, but more in the sense that you would refer to an animal as a 'boy' instead of a 'man'. Darby is actually something like 26 or 27 years old, as are the rest of the characters in the film. Thinking about them having ages feels kind of weird, though. Don't do it.)

Some of the confusion might also have to do Darby's name, which lot of people think is unisex. Fun Fact: Darby is, and traditionally has been, a masculine name, meaning 'free man' or, confusingly enough for the sake of this entry, 'deer'. People now treat it as a unisex name due to a misprint in a popular 1980's baby names book, where it was listed as female.

/ The More You Know

Casting

I put out a casting call about a week and a half ago, and the response was much larger than I anticipated. I got 60 Malcolms, 43 Jameses, 66 Darbys, and 139 Rhondas. That's about 100 more Rhondas than I would have expected. I'm still sifting through voice reels.

James, Darby, and Rhonda have been cast, but I'm still looking for a Malcolm. I have a few table reads scheduled for this week. If anybody has any recommendations, send 'em my way!

Other than that, production is going along smoothly. I'm still in the layout phase, so there isn't a whole lot to look at. Still, here are some of those 'colored line' layouts that everybody seems to like:

Animatic 2: Resurrection

New animatic's here! I like it a lot better than the original.

I met with Tom Sito last week, and he suggested I shoot a large part of the end from behind the couch, instead of the front. It's brilliant! Not only will that save me a lot of time animating, but I think it will also just make the film look nicer, since it will give the shots more variety. Thanks Tom!

A lot of the new dialogue was written as I was recording it. It's really clunky and expositional, and that's no good. I'll tighten it up and write some new stuff this next week.

Some of the shots at the end are missing Malcolm, but the framing won't change once he's added. Just pretend like he's there.


8:55 pm: I realize I keep forgetting to correct Rhonda's "You hungry?" line. It should actually be something like "What are you looking at?" or "What are you doing?"

Digitally Remastered

In prep for the new, improved, revised animatic, I've been reframing a number of shots to add Malcolm in:

 

 

 

It's fairly obvious that I just added the Malcolms in after the fact, using superior computer technology.

Animatic 2: Electric Boogaloo will be up here around 5:00 PM tomorrow. Until then, why not enjoy a video of Big Chicken sitting on top of a happy bouncing house?

One More

I think this one's my favorite layout so far:

The mouth alone is six different layers.

Layouts

As I've been working, I've found that it's much more efficient for me to compose a series of shots first, then go back and animate those shots once all the layouts are done. Composing, then animating, then composing the next shot, then animating that shot, and so on messes up my rhythm. 

So, for the next couple weeks, I'm going to focus on completing all my shot layouts, so that I can just breeze through without stopping when it comes time to animate. The nice thing about layouts is that I can do any and all of them right now, regardless of whether or not the shot has dialogue.

I only need to do the layouts for twenty five shots a week to remain on schedule, but I'll probably do more, because it's nice to get ahead. 

Here are some screencaps of my process:

I start by loading the necessary boards into Flash, then determining which parts will be on which layers. I'll often draw each piece in a different color, so that they stand out from the reference drawing.

Then, I hide the board, clean up my lines, and change them to the proper color (usually black). In this case, I added Darby in later, since he wasn't originally in the boards.

Then I add the colors.

If I'm not exactly sure what the background will look like, I'll add a sort of general color fill, to provide some context as to the time of day.

Some more layouts in their various stages:

First Animated Shot!

Or, more accurately, it's the third, since I fired off two really brief reaction shots during class last week, but those are in CS4 format and therefore I can't do anything with them on my home computer.

This, however, is the first ever shot animated on Judge Panther: The Apostle, my fantastic and sexy new Cintiq, so the header still works.

I picked the shot that is easily the least indicative of what the rest of the film looks like:

I'm still new to the Flash export process. Looks like the clip's got some mad artifacts going on. I'll try to fix that ASAP.

Cereal? Cereal.

So, I recorded two versions of Darby's cereal line. Tell me which one you like better.

Take 1:

Take 2:

The image doesn't really match up with the audio in the 2nd one, but I'm sure you get the gist of it.

I think I like the 2nd one better, but I'd like to hear what people think.

New Middle

As I said earlier, I cut out the part where they're bicycle kicking each other. This is better.

We go straight from nightfall to Darby's hallucination, then we get some Malcolm.

I still have a two-to-three line end to the scene I need to write, to set up the cut to morning. If anybody has any suggestions or opinions, I'd love to hear them.

The rewrite adds about 35 seconds to the story, but I figure that's a small price to pay for improving the film. All-in-all, it's still less than six minutes.
I've also already accounted for the increased runtime in my schedule, and I don't think it will be a problem.

The ending stays pretty much the same compared to the original animatic, but I need to reframe a number of shots to fit Malcolm in. It's been a bit more difficult than I've expected, so I'm going to try getting some help from my professors. Once that's set, I'll put up the new animatic in full.

Chapter 2: The Rockin' Sousaphones Ride Again

I'm a senior now. Crazy.

Ah! So much to do. This coming week, I plan to do a new, revised animatic, as well as try to lock in my voice actors. I also need to make a schedule. Fun stuff. 

Anyways, here's the new board sequence for the new middle. 

I've removed the part from the original boards where everybody's kicking each other. It wasn't living up to my standards. Instead, once night falls, we'll pretty much go straight to the hallucination sequence (Which has also had a few shots cut, to keep the pace from dragging). This sequence here directly follows that.

I'm going to push the composition on a lot of these shots later, specifically the upshots. Right now I'm just getting them down for the story's sake.

Not really sure how I'm going to frame that part where Malcolm's launched onto the couch. It might have to be broken up into multiple shots.

I'm still thinking of what to do for the small part between the end of this sequence and when they wake up in the morning.

The ending will stay basically the same, story-wise, but with the shots re-framed to accommodate the addition of Malcolm.