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'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.