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 :)