Dragon Bait and Animate

With the Beano project almost finished (just tidying up some loose ends and sorting through sounds) I realised I hadn't uploaded the final kitchen scene here. The kitchen was modelled in Maya and rendered with Maya Software using a Toon Shader with a little noise to help break up the flatness. I threw in a couple of little 'Easter Eggs' that will probably go unnoticed in the background. The 2D Art of Ping and Noodle belongs to Anna Nilson Axenstig

So far the Beano Project seems to be going quite well. We've set up a little production line where Anna would do the sketches for Ping and Noodle, Tao would line them and separate their layers and I would colour and export as transparent PNG files. This way we can layer up the images in Adobe After Effects and animate each layer individually if we need to. This is how I've set myself up in Photoshop to colour the images: I had also done a couple of little experiments in After Effects to see how Noodle might animate but since then Anna has done some nicer animations! I also messed with the colour in the kitchen scene and so I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to tidy it up for the background renders.

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation. Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.  In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we...

I've spent a little while working on how the kitchen is going to look for Ping and Noodle and our Beano Studios project but it's taking a lot longer than I would like... Trying to get the shader to look the way I want it to is tough but I think I just need to have a bit more patience! However, I think if we take the shots we need and do some post in Photoshop we can get a look we need for the background. My plan is to render them larger than we need i.e. more than 1920x1080 so that we can crop in After Effects/Premiere to what we need and use them to pan around a scene.

Today we had some great feedback from Beano Studios on our animatics for Going Live. We still have around a month to finish the project and so we're starting on animating now. Our plan is to do most of the animation in Adobe After Effects using the puppet tool and I've found what looks to be a good tutorial here: And then in more complicated scenes we'll break down the animation more and do some frame by frame animation. I think we're sticking to the Adobe Suite but we'll see how it all comes together in a couple of weeks. In other news, I was working on adding a toon shader to the basic kitchen scene I had set up in Maya. Luckily, it worked (after a couple of attempts) and my plan now is to rebuild the kitchen so it matches the animatic and use renders from Maya as our backgrounds in the final animation. We can also do some basic camera animation in Maya and then import it into After Effects so that seems like a good time saver! Here's a test render wi...

We started work on our storyboards sometime last week and after the Beano's feedback we had another meeting and discussed how we could incorporate their feedback. We had a lot of back and forth and eventually managed to tighten up our ending and keep our pacing and momentum throughout the short. Anna and Tao created the storyboards, basing everything on Anna's art and I pulled together the animatic and adjusted the timings. We also added a little music to keep some interest. And here are a couple of my favourite storyboards from Anna and Tao.

Today we had our pitches for Going Live 2018 at the Beano Studios. Our pitch for Ping and Noodle focused on the personality of our characters and how they would work together. We pulled together what research we had done on Ping and how we could modernise it. All the work below belongs to Anna: We added in our narrative in a more defined sense for the client as follows: In the kitchen, Ping wants to make some dinner for himself and Noodle but Noodle has other ideas. The mischievous ferret decides he wants to order some pizza instead and when he doesn’t get his way, things get chaotic. He pushes over pots and pans, spilling pasta and meatballs forcing Ping to stretch and twist until he’s completely tangled! Noodle sees his mistake and helps Ping get untangled and after seeing the state of the kitchen, the two order up a pizza and relax. All in all I think the pitch went really well. I think they liked our sense of humour and the simple nature of our idea which shou...

So for Going Live 2018 my team has chosen Ping and we know the narrative will be happening in a kitchen so I sketched up a rough floor plan as well as some assets that might be in the kitchen that could fit in with Ping's design already created by Anna and Tao.  With this idea I constructed a rough base in Maya that represented the 3D environment of Ping and Noodle's (the ferret) kitchen. This could then be used as a base for 2D matte painting as well as staging the characters.  So I tried out some different colour combos as well as angles that might work to set the scene. Before placing Ping and Noodle in the scene to see if their colours balanced

Part of our course involves working to a client brief. This year, our client is Beano Studios in Dundee and they've asked us to take one of their old IPs and create a 30 second short film. We were split into 4 groups of 3 and of the four characters provided, our group decided to work with a character called Ping, the Elastic Man. This character had a very small run in the Beano comic and was virtually a blank canvas so we thought with him, we had the most potential. We started drafting up some rough ideas over the next couple of ideas, thinking both about the narrative and how we could modernise this character. We also briefly talked about how we would animate this short film but haven't been able to come to a solid conclusion yet. We decided to give Ping a sidekick so that he had someone to bounce off of. We also wanted this sidekick to be a contrast to Ping who we had decided was a fun-loving friendly guy. Anna immediately came up with some great sketches of a ferret and ...