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?