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.