Premise: Prop Design (Part 3)

As the photograph that Kris holds is one of the more important props in the short, I wanted to concentrate on how I could illustrate their relationship with their original best friend from their old school. I made two versions, one with writing on it and one without. This was because I wasn't sure if the writing would set up the notion of Kris having moved schools in a way that was too obvious or direct.

Premise: Expression and Gesture Sheets

I made some expression sheets for Kris and Evie to reference from when storyboarding and to explore the characters further. I also made a gesture sheet.

Premise: Environment Design (Part 6)

To finish off my environment design, I designed the outside of the school as it is shown in a few of the beginning shots. To do this, I looked at some pictures of primary school exteriors to draw inspiration from; I knew that I wanted the gate outside of the school and the main part of the school that was shown to look a certain way beforehand which helped with getting it down on paper. 

As well as the school itself, I drew a close-up of the gate design to try to understand it better before I added it to the school.

Premise: Character Design (Part 9)

The next challenge was to see how these designs could transfer onto the base models that I intend to create without appearing to be too similar. I started by drawing the basic shapes of the human, dog, cat, and teacher models. As I proceeded, however, I realised that I likely wouldn't even need to use the teacher character to illustrate that certain scenes would be taking place inside of a lesson. 

This meant that when I proceeded, I simply drew out the children characters and removed the teacher. In regards to the children characters, I made sure that I considered slightly different variants of such that could be used for different outfits that I had already designed including creating a difference between those that wore dresses and those that don't. While I don't believe that the models would look like this as they need quite a lot of tweaking and further consideration of how I would go about modelling the head shapes in particular, I made sure that they would simply fit the purpose of experimenting with and comparing the different character designs. 

I drew out Evie's human form, Kris, and the original best friend, who I decided to name Lottie, first. While I don't yet know if I'll actually need to model and animate Lottie as she is only shown in photographs, but I tweaked her design a little bit by giving her a fringe, removing her freckles and replacing it with a blush pattern, edited her socks, and included her for comparison purposes. I will likely adjust each of these characters' heights for some variation later on, possibly by making Lottie and Evie slightly taller but to different extents. 

I continued with the other classmates. I feel like I was somewhat successful in diversifying the different characters even with the same/similar models, and this is heightened by the varying colour palettes and different ways that the clothes have been drawn on using the model that I made. I feel like it would be appropriate that, given the time, I would be able to model different parts onto the different characters such as hair and accessories. 

I also used some of the designs from the last set of character designs that I wouldn't have used due to them being rabbits and I worked on them to create new ones - these are the green cat girl, the Border Collie boy, and the Australian Shepherd girl. I am aware that time may be a problem and I might not get around to being able to individually rig the faces and parts of all of these characters, so some of the designs might not make it into the final film, but I preferred having too many characters to choose from as opposed to not enough, especially given the school environment. 

Premise: Character Design (Part 8)

I finalised the designs for the rest of the classmates and the teacher (if the design for her is needed for the lesson scene). This is so that I understand what designs I am attempting to transfer over to my models for the film. 

Firstly, I decided to revisit one of the earlier designs for the kangaroo character I'd made and combine it with the outline of the kangaroo teacher I'd made to create a full body design for the teacher character. The receptionist character that would have been used for the reception/office scene would have likely been a variant of the same kangaroo model but with different facial features, a different colour palette, and different clothes, but since I wasn't using that scene anymore, it wasn't necessary to design her. 

Some of the classmates/secondary characters that I designed are also based off of old designs but refined further. These include the purple Dachshund girl, the white cat boy, the Boxer dog boy, the Golden Retriever boy, and the pink cat girl. I added Evie into the mix to compare her design with the other characters and to help me when considering colour palettes for them as I wanted them all to be different from each other (especially Evie). I will probably consider naming all of these characters at a later date so that I can differentiate between them more. I think that it was beneficial to create a mix between more "natural" or realistic designs based on the animals as well as creating more brightly coloured ones.

I considered some rabbit-based designs as well, but quickly realised that a third set of base models would likely be excessive, so I scrapped the idea after the initial four designs. I will refine and transfer some of these designs when I am carrying over the rest of the classmates' designs onto the base models which I also what I intend to do next besides storyboarding and creating my animatic. 

As well as the animal characters, I also had to design the original best friend character that is in the picture that Kris carries with them throughout the short, and Evie's human form. As there are multiple human characters, I will probably have to make another base model for the human characters and model pieces on separately such as the hair as I will have to do with some assets of the animal characters. 

Premise: Breakdown (Version 2)

This is the second version of my story breakdown, which I have attempted to improve after speaking to Alan about it a few times. I am still using the foundation idea of the main character moving schools and eventually succeeding in making a friend, but went ahead with trying to fit it into a 'rule of three' structure for the main parts and trying to make it work in terms of recurring objects and symbols. I also decided to try and keep away from the idea that the main character is being picked on and bullied as much as I could as I don't like it that much.

Premise: Environment Design (Part 5)

I carried on designing the playground and canteen areas. 

Premise: Environment Design (Part 4)

I began to work on the classroom environment today, leaving me with the playground and possibly the canteen area, should it be relevant to the story.

Premise: Environment Design (Part 3)

I continued to work on the environments that I'd designed as I am not sure if I will be using all of them just yet - I ended up working on the reception/office room, a section of the hallway of the house that the main character lives in, and work on the school corridors. I decided to add extra detailing in a lighter colour on all of the environments to display where patterns are going to go (such as tiling, carpet seams, and wall paint or wall murals). 

I intend to at least polish up the canteen, classroom, and playground environments and then work on story and the final pieces of prop design (such as the photograph that the character carries with them) as well as figuring out how I am going to create foundation/base designs that can be textured and have 2D facial rigging to resemble multiple different characters including the background characters and the friend characters. I also aim to see if I can create visual differences with the environments in terms of colour, such as having them desaturated and slightly 'warped' in a sense to illustrate the main character's negative perception of their experience, followed by the current designs being coloured brightly with a warmer palette to show the positive perception that follows once their experience begins to improve.

Premise: Environment Design (Part 2)

I started working on refining my environment designs for the hallways. When I colour them, I intend to add patterns to the wall and flooring to try to enhance the 'character' of the rooms.

Premise: Environment Design (Part 1)

I started environment design for the school playground, classroom, office, canteen, hallways, and house hallway rooms. 

Premise: Character Design (Part 7)

I wasn't quite happy with the colour palettes of the two main characters, so I continued to work on them. With Kris, I found that the darker hair colours worked better with the red on the shirt and shoes, and that I also preferred the slightly lightened shorts. 

Again, I wanted Evie's colour palette to contrast with Kris' a bit more than it already was, as I found that the original colour that I used for Evie's fur was too similar to Kris' hair colour. I kept the yellow shirt and experimented with dress and fur colours/patterns before proceeding. I found that I preferred the last three designs from the set.

I then looked at shirt patterns for the two characters. For Kris, I decided to bring back the darker blue colour for a shirt pattern and to look at the original dinosaur one that I had first used with the character. I ended up picking the plain pocket shirt as I think that it looked better as it was simple. The same applied to Evie's shirt design; I kept it as simple as possible, especially because this character has more complicated patterns on her body. 

These are the two final designs for both Kris and Evie. For Evie, I ended up going with one of the first concept designs that I had chosen for her in terms of clothing, which was the purple dress and yellow shirt.

Premise: Online Greenlight Review

Toolkit 2: Animation: Acting and Animation (Part 4)

I installed the Ghost Script that we were provided and tested it out on one of my earlier versions of the acting and animation Moom files. I started out by downloading the files and installing them by placing them into the designated folders.  

I then opened Maya to access the Script Editor so I could locate the script that I'd just installed.

I then executed the script.

I opened the earlier version of my Moom animation so that I could select the mesh that I wanted to apply the ghost script to it (in this case it was the Moom mesh). I then added the button for the script to the tool shelf before saving the newer version of the shelf. 

I then adjusted the thickness of the ghost figures so that they could be better seen and tested it out some of the frames of the animation to make sure that it worked.

Premise: Prop Design (Part 2)

I finished the poster designs for the hallways and classroom environments.

Careers: Festival Planner

I created a planner for the festivals that I had looked at using the dates that were available; this means that this planner uses dates from 2019 and 2020 for all of the festivals that I had researched.