2 Characters

I was quite excited to start this project as it was the first opportunity to have complete freedom in what I wanted to do for the film. I could design my own characters and have the narrative I wanted. I wanted to do something quite sentimental. I couldn't stop thinking about my pet goldfish that had died recently. He had lived for over 10 years and we'd all got quite attached to him, it was actually quite sad when he died, I guess its like losing something sentimental, it doesnt really respond to you or offer anything to you but when its with you for so long and then its suddenly gone it just feels upsetting. I just thought that being so attached to a goldfish was something that would seem really strange and stupid to other people and I wanted to try and maybe convey this in my film. I was thinking it could be a sort of timeline of me and the fish growing up together. I then realised that this was waaay to long a story to work for 2 characters and I also don't think its ever a good idea to make a film about yourself so I thought I'd leave that. I also thought of when my mum used to say that my goldfish used to dance when I played piano but I couldn't see that because I had my back to him. I decided to make a story based on that.

Initial Sketches

Storyboards

first storyboard

second storyboard

Digital paintings

One thing I was struggling with was how the fish would dance.....so I took drastic action. 

I thought this video was pretty funny but I just realised that I didn't want to spend about 6 weeks on this story. I decided to just bit the bullet and come up with a new idea. I did make this film for 10 films 10 days though........

ECA - Bruning - 06 from ECA Animation on Vimeo.

New story

I had a think about what film I wanted to make and I just said, a film about a snail and a sea urchin that go on a little journey. I really like little creatures with not many features so a sea snail and an urchin was right up my street. I needed to figure out why they were going on the journey. I decided that they could be following a mysterious light. I started sketching some concepts

Initial sketches

Story Boards

First story board

second storyboard

Digital paintings

Background tests

I decided I wanted to do it in maya so I started to model my characters. 

These are what I came up with. After that I started to animate each scene and gradually put together different tests for the film. 

This was my initial animatic for the film. 

After that I kept making different tests, refining the movement each time. 

After my initial test I found that the characters didn't have enough connection. I decided I need to add little interactions between them just to establish some sort of connection. 

 

This was my final test ready to show to Allan. After watching it I reslised that the pacing was way too slow and I needed to speed things up

I managed to cut it down to 2 minutes

Later I started to look into texturing. Initially I had wanted to use animated textures of ink but once I had added that in I found it to be too distracting so I just went with normal textures. 

I didn't like the way the texture looked on the snail so I just added in an alpha key and put in this texture instead. I did the same for the feelers with a flat colour too. For the after effects I used the roughen edge filter to make the lines on the characters more organic and hand drawn. For this to work I had to ender each part of the snail model separately and then add the roughen edge filter to each. 

I also started to struggle with the urchin. I tried adding in hair but found that it just didnt work and looked too glitchy. 

After I realised the hair just wasn't working I tried a couple more textures for the urchin to match the snail. The issue was that I couldn't alpha key a background onto him because you lost too much details of his movement.  

Here I tried adding a photoshop texture over the urchin but it blurred out all of the subtle movement

Here I tried adding an alpha texture behind and then having the urchin over the top again with the opacity turned down but it still got rid of the animation

I found a paint filter in after effects but it glitched badly



Most of the outcomes just didn't work I eventually textured the urchin in maya and added a roughen edges filter which worked fine. 

I found it had a line on it because I didn't make the photoshop file correctly but once I added and offset filter it looked fine. 

After that I created a textured version.  

With the texturing done I decided that my characters could really do with some eyes so I drew a concept and then started animating some. 

I also had to create and animate the leaf that the snail would fall down on in one of the scenes. 

I tried to hand draw it in flash and photoshop but it just didn't look right and it was taking too long and I usually fair better at drawing animation on paper but I didn't think I'd have the time.  so I decided to just do it using the puppet tool in after effects. 

I did a very rough animation in flash

and then tried to refine it in photoshop

I think it looks much better in after effects, obviously this needs to be refined majorly as it still looks glitchy but its a much quicker method. 

What I need to do now is draw up all the backgrounds, add the eyes and a couple visual effects in after effects to add more of an underwater feel and polish it. I also have a sound designer working on it.

Backgrounds

I like to do my backgrounds in lots of photoshop layers. here is the progression of one of them

Coral

Seaweed

Panning out