Christmas Inspiration: The Gruffalo

After recommendations came my way i sat down to watch The Grufflalo shown on BBC 1 over Christmas. Based on the popular childrens book, Studio SOI (who frequently collaborate with AKA) have transformed the 2D visuals beautifully into 3D. Catch it on iplayer while you can, its well worth watching!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pk64x/b00pk5z3/The_Gruffalo/

I really enjoyed the visual style of this piece, and funny enough has a lot of similarities, points of interest toward our piece. Heres some screen grabs to get you inspired:

There was a nice use of texturing which created a sort of plasticine look to the characters and the world they inhabited.

The trees look like they're melting!

Some of the environment shots looked almost photoreal which i think was mainly due to the lighting. Hopefully we can get something similar going on in ours?
Heres some really nice examples of the texturing used in the short...really liking the graphic knots and grain used in the wood here, i can imagine it would work very well with our painted textures too:

The story confirmed the use of tall grass and pathways to me. Tall grass was a means of creating worry and fear, allowing the audience to understand the emotions of the vulnerability of the main character of the mouse. Shots using paths and mud etc are used to allow characters to tell the story, allow the audience to focus on the main character. Use jungles for jungles and not for the whole miniature world:

beautiful lighting used here with the sun emerging through the trees. Love the shapes of the trees too:

GO AND WATCH IT!!

character colours

Part of our 2nd pitch feedback was to reconsider the characters colours as before they blended in with the environment and generally steered away from typical gnome colours. Going back to our gnome research mood boards, it highlighted that gnomes generally stay within certain colours of green, blue, red, yellow with mixtures of browns. Straight out i did NOT wish for any of the characters to be brown, which they would have to be considering they're wearing a onesie...*ahem* So with that in mind, I quickly whipped up the following tests in photoshop using this old paper texture, as the watercolour one is fine....buuuuut when altered hue wise gives a mixture of colours (which is nice for design work but for locking down colours not so good):

Test 1: i quite like this one, although the first thing to be pointed out was that Lady Gnome would blend in with the mushroom in the environment which is a big issue considering she spends the majority of the film sitting on it.

Test 2: Hero and Macho I like, nice contrast of colours between them but im sceptical to use yellow on a character when it covers such a massive area, though Lady does look bright and cheery.
Test 3: mmm not really working for me here....Macho is NOT a blue character and Hero is NOT a red one, just doesnt suit their characteristics at all.


Test 4: I quite like Lady in green but again yellow is just a no no...

Test 5: and then its an even bigger no no putting the big tough guy in yellow!

Final character colours:

Sound Meeting

Today was our meeting with Pip from Creative Sound Design course. Since she had missed the 2nd pitch i decided to basically go through our presentation, discussing the design of the characters, environments and texturing we wished to achieve from the piece. We then played the story animatic and then talked through it so it was clear what the piece was about. I mentioned to Pip that i don't currently have an exact idea for sound at this stage, but that i thought the piece would lend itself quite nicely to a light and bouncy soundtrack, not a fully blown orchestral piece. In terms of the rest of the sound...i was pretty honest that all the foleys/voices etc needed re-recording as they aren't the best of quality and the sound levels are all over the place. Im confident she'll be able to achieve this though in the time frame we have for the project. We discussed how some of the foleys (such as the footsteps) need to sound less realistic as they haven't gelled very will with the animatic and will need to emphasis the fun/comical quality of the story.

Pip took some notes and a copy of the animatic and said she had a few ideas up her sleeve so im looking forward to seeing what she produces for us over the coming weeks. We filled her in on the extensiveness of the animation process so she was fully aware of our schedule and roughly when we should have modeling complete, animation etc etc.

Pips taken away the materials and said she'd contact me Monday with her action plan which i look forward to seeing. As for updates, I've said the group would keep in contact either once or twice a week with her to get updates and make sure everything's ok.

Anyway its great to have PIp on board as part of the team and Im really looking forward to what ideas she's gonna bring to the project!

Thanks Pip :)

gnomes at the ready

well should have written this last night but after the increbile journey over the last weekend and the drive back home, i literally went to bed like a 5 yr old.

ahem

so heres the presentation in a nut shell...

...anyway.

Presentation went well, Matt was absent but myself and Adam gave our pitch to the rest of the class as well as Mike, Dave, Dalli and that other one (haha)

It was great to get some good first responses to the animatic and when laughter broke out in the class it was great! You spend so much of your time engrosses in the story, writing, re writing, then drawing it, drafting it, scripting it, you start to doubt whether it makes any sense anymore let alone be funny, so the fact it struck a cord with everyone was brilliant.

Apologies that i name dropped you Dalli on the old "o but its about gnomes" thing but actually when I think about it, your comment was the key reason for pushing the design of the characters so hey, its a good thing.

So yeah, we ran through our research (should have put the gnome research slide in doh!), the designs we'd created and explained where we aimed to take the project. All received very positive feedback on the extent of how much we'd experimented with design for ths project and i was honoured to be compared to the workflow of Splay.

Anyway, im not going to go on and on as Adam has commented that i can talk for England (cheers Adam)

Feedback

gnome colourings: during the presentation i admitted i wasn't convinced by our colourings for the characters and would like some feedback concerning this. Dalli agreed that these colours weren't right at all for the little guys and added that we should go back to our research and look at what colour gnomes actually are which is predominately primary colours. He said they should reflect this and that currently they disappeared into their environment. It became all too apparent that this was the case when making the colour script but at leastwere finding out these things now and can make improvements on

character design: *cries* hahaha as much as it pains me to say it there were a few comments concerning the design. However this was only to consder varying the scale of each of the character to break up the group a bit more and just add that final push to their characters e.g. macho = big strong guy so he should be taller than the others. Mike suggested perhaps giving macho slightly bigger arms and Dalli suggested making Lady a little more slender to eccentuate her curves. I shall take on board these comments and try out a few sketches to see if these ideas work.

Storyboarding: no specific shots referred to, but Mike said there was some revision of camera angles required for a few shots which i think i know what he's referring to in order to bring more angles in to the piece. Mike said we could do this straight when we get into Maya but perhaps it would be an idea to draw these up so were prepared once we get into Maya. Dalli also suggested an establishing shot was required in order to show the audience the space between Macho and Hero in their own spaces and then go into our reaction shots of them looking at each other. He said this shouldn't be more than 5 seconds long so its not too much work for us to put in. Dalli also suggested that we need to show that the flower pot is precious to Hero at the start of the story that its turnaround at the end has more emotion to it (its his, macho took it etc etc) .

Apart from these points the presentation went down a treat and there was lots of positive praise so a big well done guys :) Thanks too to our year group and tutors who have provided so much support/ideas this term, im sure i'll be thanking you all again and again!

We'll meet up again after the CD and various essays are complete to talk through the next stages of the project.

p.s they are everywhere!

and i dont believe this, Murphy the gnome that travelled the world appeared on This Morning....its literally ripping off the traveling gnome in Ameile!

Murphy:

http://www.itv.com/lifestyle/thismorning/more/thetravellinggnome/

and they've only gone and made a book about it and he's got his own twitter page!

http://twitter.com/MurphyTheGnome

and he's got his own website

http://www.murphythegnome.com/

The idea as shown in my favourite film: Amelie

everyones jumping on the gnome band wagon...has the world gone mad?!

Other aspects:

Managed to get round to colouring my environment concept which i had wanted to complete for the 2nd pitch but unfortunately ran out of time. Luckily its done in time for the CD hand in this week :)

shoulda popped these up AAAAGGGGES ago but hadnt got round to it, the formalities guys...cut throat contracts!

and a rough budgeting stratergy for the team, we need to discuss the more over the next weeks into term 2 and get a finalised plan together

Cant get a print screen of the schedule as college doesn't have the program on any of the computers! Have to sort out my copy at home!

Storyboards...they should make an appearance really considering the animatic would take light years to upload! haha this is just for my half of the film

i feel the updated mood boards need a show and tell and on here just to see where the projects inspirations have come from and have grown to, not forgetting its roots but going beyond where it had been....im writing some sort of cryptic code here :S

and the slide that shoulda made it into the presentation...we can never forget these lil guys of course...

Anyway i think were completely up to date now....onwards and upwards :)

that was the weekend that was

to summerise whats been going on...

Thursday

Got in just after 9 to return the sound drive after finding a few helpful sound effects for our animatic, i think a lot will be added when we record our voices for the characters as the silence from them is huge gap at the moment! They're right at AKA...there are no silent movie characters. If anything I imagine our guys will pretty much sound like Alec with all his strange twitchy sounds (i cant explain it if you dont know Alec)

Had a long old chat with Mr Blunt (Jared) about how things were going and discussions of the ovreall scope of the project. When i happened to mention the 23 second pan down through the trees Jared nearly screamed in my face (....almost) but did sit there and count out 23 seconds (using the word elephant to replace the word second?) to my face and then go on to tell me every other second how bored he was..........

im cutting that bloody pan :P

but yeah, cheers Jared for putting things into perspective again for me and yes...making me see sense that 23 seconds could be the most boring start in the world. This was due to having credits in this pan....but then there are credits at the end...which makes no sense what so ever. We need the end credtis to aid the story progression so yet another reason why this pan should go...its going anyway but this is just my rambling on how ridiculous the whole thing is...ahem

Friday

Had my business presentation with Gareth today which i think went quite well even if i felt a bit stumbly in places i feel i was able to talk about my subject confidently and raise a bit of awareness of the industry that the guys might not have been aware about.

afterwards...

The team then discussed the plans for the weekend and were meeting Monday morning at 9am to have a run through of the pitch so were all clear on who's saying what, where and when. With everyone clear on what they need to complete over the weekend I can focus on the animatic and then prepare the slides as i get images through from the guys as Ive got the majority of my parts together. I will be discussing the characters as it was my main area of focus during this term whilst Adam will talk about the environment. Matt will talk throigh the overall texture style were after and then we'll cut to our animatic. Adam brought along a few Maya models for me to have a look through which i provided feedback on and he's gonna make changes accordingly. Its interesting to see how my 2D concepts are transfering to 3D but its nice there are so many designs to pick and chose from as were finding that some elements do work from some and some dont BUT were able to take elements from all over and create brand new designs in Maya which is great. Got Mike Q to have a look at Adams exploding pot test too and recommend a few suggestions, he said if he had time he was gonna try a few tests over the weekend although I appreciate he has his own presentation to sort out too.

Saturday

This weekends gonna be all about MULTITASKING! So i was hoping to and afro from the animatic to the presentation then to the editing the script and sending over so matt can add his half, back to the animatic, completing the model sheets, animatic again, more presentation....very busy!

Heres a look at the presentation without spoiling it....yep....spoils nowt!

Sunday

Back at the animatic again....premier doing its usual of crashing every 2 point mili seconds. I will have final cut on my mac BY next term as theres no way were editing the final film on that bloody thing.

Met up with Matt in order to cut and paste the two halves together. Our animatic is only in 4:3 becuase Apple Premier only allows me to export my films in quicktime mode and when i chose to make a projct in widescreen it stretches it tallways.....but rest assured the final film will be in HD widescreen (super glossy gnomes).

It was a evening of flitting inbetween jobs and finishing the presentation for the pitch as I got stuff sent through from Adam and files passed over from Matt. I scanned through Matts half of the animatic which was a little slow in places and required a bit of snipping, but once this was done, the piece suddenly had this amazing beat going on. Matt provided a brill animatic which really made me laugh with all its sound effects on. Matt and I then recorded the voices for the characters...then Matt spent the rest of the evening talking on the porceilin telephone.

o dear...

Inbetween animaticing it up I used the time to finish off some concept work and budgeting stuff ready for the slides and hand in later this week.

In short...i didnt sleep and generally looked like a complete zombie by the time the morning rolled on round but hey we were ready to go (well i was....matt was still on the telephone) ahem. So it looked like it be down to myself and Adam to convince the troops....into battle.

wed-mers-day

came in bout 10:30 and booked the sound hard drive out for the day so we can get some decent foleys what have you for the animatic. Matt searched the drive for the first part of the morning so i had it for the evening, as i got to have it back to stores for 9am....early enough?

Scanned my drawings i completed last week for the colour script which will be completed by Matt.

Came home for the afternoon and scoured through the entire harddrive to find any and all sounds that could be relevant to our project. Sound effects are gonna be key rather than a soundtrack as we haven't seem to found quite what were looking for there. At this stage I think we can suggest scratch sounds and introduce the fun of the project but they will most likely need to be re-recorded professionally. Found a load of sounds that might be useful for me and Matt so will see how they fit in when finishing up on the editing of the animatic.

Spent the evening working on the animatic. Although our brief states about providing a colour animatic, Im taking the creative decision to not persue this and instead focus our animatic on what its true purpose its to be: to plot out camera angles, timing and suggested poses for our characters. Since the team will be providing a colour script and plenty of colour concepts I feel it would be unnecessary to crowd the naimatic with colour when its purpose is refernce at this stage.

Whilst having some breaks from the old animatic i completed an environment concept that demonstrates how i'd like the lighting to look for the the lady gnome scenes where she's sat on top of the mushroom. I think this could work quite nicely as a poster for part of our marketing materials as the spotlight shining down is quite dramatic.

tues-mer-day

today ive been focussed on a few things

a. working on a new version of the animatic...the stretch from the old version is annoying and the only way to address is to start again. At any rate, Mikes comments mean reworking some areas anyway so nevermind. I should be able to go through this quite quickly as the drawings are all cut out, scanned, layered and imported.

b. standing outside with my mac book recording sounds/wasting a lot of sellotape recording the delightful sounds that come from it. I buried the sellotape ball shortly after.

happy days....

c. been going over the characters expression sheets. Over the course of the term, i have been doodling roughs of their expressions, so now all i have to do is pick and draw refined versions of these. I've completed them for all three characters so i shall scan them tomorrow ready to make their presentation pages for the 2nd pitch.

d. Gareth's unit...going to and frow working on my presentation pages, swapping facts, typing, colouring all that jazz. Presentation work takes its time so its something Im dedicating a few hours to every night so it all looks super fantastic for friday. Im feeling quite confident about the business unit presentation...mainly because i feel so strongly for the subject i've chosen to talk about and i think it'll promote some good discussion amongst my presentation group. Heres a look at the pages so far...

Anyway...whilst standing there in the garden, I took a few shots of dusk (my slr has gone for a walk, so were back to the mobile quality) and i've found a few dusk pictures from the internet for our research for the stick back together scene:

Afternoon sunlight provides some great highlights and long shadows. The sky and trees have a fresh looking colour to them.

this leaf looks sunburnt?! love it, great colours and distress, nice contrast to the grass.

the progression to dusk...

blue starts to desaturate, elements of whiter/yellow light start to emerge.
Dusk: the sky sort of has a two tone effect, the top half more blue and the lower half a yellow/orange colour.

heres those google images that really REALLY push the colours to the extremes:

I found a few more images on google and created a quick lighting research page which provides us with a starting colour palette for our sky for the 2 times of day during our story. These colours should help us during the grading process to in terms of possible filters we'd like to use.

monday

showed mike the animatic today to which he liked but had a few suggestions for further improvements before the second pitch next week:

the opening pan - the movement is nice but the background elements need further consideration. Mike suggested maybe seeing some other houses in the background, suggestions of families, different objects to give us clues to a modern suburbia.

perhaps cut to a CU of Hero as he walks out from behind flower pot - im not too keen on this idea as my boards bring audience from the outside and then cut close to him as he steps out, so as if linking with the events

Cut to CU of Macho when he spots Hero looking at him - will be sure to include this as currently the camera shot is too static and needs breaking up.

CU of Macho looking smitten with Lady Gnome and then zoom out to bring him back to the real world and realizing he has these pathetically small rocks - emphasizes the emotions more so again i really like this idea.

CU of Lady Gnome reaction - distracted by camera left (Heros performance)

These are just Mikes suggestions for improvement and may or may not be incorporated in due to time and whether we agree with them or not but worth noting down incase for future changes.

sat down and gut stuck on in to the schedule today. Still more work to be done on it but currently its got order in terms of its post and pre production. Areas of production are half ordered but still need a few more tweaks.

spent the evening working on gareths presentation and essay. Im writing about the lack of tax breaks for the british animation and how it could see the industry in this country starve...something i feel very passionate about.

to the drawing board!

this weekend has seen me working tirelessly (is it dramatic enough for you yet?) on my section of the animatic. Aware that my boards needed adjusting i spent the evening going over the boards in pen so they could easily be scanned. I also completed some tweens to help with the pacing of the animatic as sometimes its difficult to lay out if you don't have sufficient drawings. I've separated each character and environment background into its own folder to keep the file nice and neat so anyone should be able to tweak this if necessary. This is by no means the final one and i appreciate its a bit scruffy, but its purely for timing at this stage as were concerned how long our tale actually is.

laying out the scene....plus evidence of adobe premier when it hasn't crashed....(rare!)

currently, my half of the film is 1min 59 secs including a 23 second intro credits! Its gone waaaay over its minute limit but its felt necessary in order to let the story breath and play out correctly for the viewer. Shall show the group how its looking tomorrow and we'll have to go from there either by cutting the story down or going with what we've got. I'd post on here...but ive just exported and the movies stretched where i idiotically selected widescreen at the very beginning...stupid...utterly stupid mistake there...ahem

As it is, there could be a potential odd few seconds to be cut from this but other than that not much time can be saved from it from how it is. Pretty pleased with my skills in premier...considering its a frankly annoying piece of software to use (mine tends to crash!) but its nice to see some movement going on and see the characters beginning to act.

Were gonna have to pull out all the stops this week in order to produce the highest quality of work ready for the second pitch...we can do it...who needs sleep ay? :P

more grass speak

speaking to adam today and i feel like maya grass everywhere is the wrong way to go with this project for a number of reasons

• the grass cant hinder/block the performance space - i dont want characters wading through grass constantly to get to where they want and i want the audience to be able to see them clearly


• the world is stylised THEREFORE realistic grass wouldnt follow the style of the world

• the characters are the focus NOT the environment, the grass should be nice but not dominate the scene even though we are in a world full of it

so what to do? Adam and I discussed several options including...

• a mixture of painted planes with a mixtures of grass tufts to give the illusion of a grassy world thats a bit overgrown here and there.


• dressing the set with leaves to break up the colours with nice reds/oranges to contrast the green floor.


• creating an uneven floor surface which would break up the scene and add to the world for these characters.

Overall, i dont want the grass to be the factor that shows the ratio of these characters, the props included in the piece will do this. Seeing Wake Up World has set the wheels into motion and adam is gonna complete a few variations with his Maya set to show the group.

i quickly drew a few rough sketches of the environments layout and prop positions so adam can use this as reference as he's making the scene in Maya...should have scanned these first before giving them to him....never mind.

inspiration and environment speak

saw this in its animation stages when i was fortunate enough to be at Blue Zoo this summer and its nice to see it all finished. This piece confirmed to me (on top of my other inspirations) that stylized was THE way to go as the world is constructed out of paper and woolen elements. The piece is fun and colourful for children and the world carefully constructed which holds interest from multiple angles.

wake up world video

i love the colours used in this night shot...we've got to include some beautiful lighting like this in ours guys! maybe if the sellotape part is at night or eve/dusk?

In other matters....

after sending Mu Li an updated script he came back to me with a colour concept. Its interesting to see the environment in colour as it has much greater impact on you and send through immediate messages than just seeing things as pencil sketches. My main concern with Mu's drawing was that it instantly screamed summer to me and required more autumnal colour to represent the setting for our story. A main contributor to this was the sunflowers he'd included for Hero's flower pot which i've asked him to change to something else. There's an interesting use of staging occurring though which i'm liking with definite set ups of Machos plot in the garden and Heros patch and an almost heavenly light ascending downward to where Lady Gnome will be amongst the scene.

Mu Li's colour concept for the environment: