Icecream and logo/design exploration

Most of the design work is done and I think it looks quite promising for our little film. All the work we do we post on the groups facebook-page so we can get instant feedback on it, which has been VERY useful to us. I have been doing the last bits of drawing/design work now and will most likely move on to modelling. It will be interestng to see how that works ous since I have been using 3dsMax for the last four years. I have only been using Maya for the past two months - and not done any modelling in it at all so this means a bunch of tutorials and a lot of "newbie questions" to Scott, who so far have been tackling all the 3D stuff. Scott asked me to do another reference image for the icecream - since we decided to go for separate models for the various stages of the icecream instead of one with blend shapes. (The result was not as good as we hoped. and the ice-cream won't actually be melting as it is shown in the shots either so it wasn't really needed. Here is how that looks:

As mentioned in a previous post the design is now sorted and we have gone for a swirl top and a waffle-cone for the icecream. The last bit of design work I've been working on has been the condom packaging. Firstly we needed to sort out the colour:

We landed on pink and blue and I started working on a logo - We thought this would be a great opportunity for us to try and work in another gag, by being a bit clever with the logo on the condom pack.

After a chat with the group the two favourite ones where the rocket and bone®, so I went back to the drawing board to make some decent versions of them:

After a second round of feedback and a quick re-design we landed on this version:

It's a very innocent joke in my opinion, and you would have to be of a certain age to even get the point of the joke. And hopefully we'll get a laugh out of it. I must admit I had a laugh working on these!

Scene design

These are images to show how our scene will look. I did a front 3/4 perspective that shows the hilltop that Nick will be come running down and in front of the image the bench where they are meeting. The staging will probably be changed according to what we find most efficient when we start working - usually you have to modify it a bit to make it work in 3D, especially when it comes to making room for animation. (This has already been done for the bench for instance; The model needed to be stretched in order to make room for the characters and the planned animation). The front-view is also our main stage - where the audience will be looking in most of the shots so the focus in that is the bench. The last image is the hilltop where Nick will be in the opening shot - How much of it we actually will see is yet to be decided, but we need it for reference for the modelling non the less.

More assets: Icecreams, bushes and trees

As the headline says, I've been doing more asset-design. I have done several different designs to give us more too chose from when we start modelling the assets for the film. The more we have to chose from the better, and if I didn't hit it spot on with these there is always an option to "steal" a bit from one and merging with another. This has already been suggested for the icecream:

As it is now we are thinking the top from 2 and the cone from 5. So will need to do a final version of this for model-reference. I have also done designs for different bushes & trees.

My personal favourites at the moment is 8-9-10 of the bushes, but the last two might be a bit hard to model so time will show what we end up with. For the trees I like 5, mostly because of the texture/colour on the bark and have already gotten positive comments on that design from the group so hopefully we'll be able to recreate a similar look in 3D.

Assets: Flowers & Bench

Been drawing the assets this weekend. Did a really rough design for the flowers just to get the "go ahead" on the look.

I then started working on "roughing" them up a bit. So here are some variations of how they might look:

The initial idea was to go for the yellow flowers, but after a look at these designs we seem to have landed on the white ones. We want the bouquet to look really pathetic and show that Nick didn't pay much attention to it:

The design I tried to do for the bench is inspired by a style you see in cartoons such as "The Flintstones" & "The Ricky Gervais Show". It's a very simple and clean style, but with some bent, crooked and exaggerated parts so that it looks a bit more stylized. I made a model-sheet that Scott could use for reference:

And here is the 3D model:

(Image taken from Scott - posted in our group's facebook-page)

Character profiles

Me and Scott met up at uni on Friday to figure out the character profiles for the characters in the short. Em had already done a rough outline of them so we used that as the foundation and started "building" from that. The biggest change was that we decided to change the characters from American to English, because of previous experience with the voice-actors. James (the voice actor) did a pretty good American accent for our mime-animation, but it put some restrictions on the actual performance non the less, I guess the fact that he needed to keep the accent consistent took it's toll on the delivery of the lines. So we'd rather have a good performance, since the location doesn't matter to the story itself. After Scott and I had done notes on each character I went home an did the in-depth profiles for our main characters and two simpler ones for the kids. (Figure we only need to know how the main characters behave in the different situations since the kids are more "supporting acts" and only needs a brief description). Here are the profiles for our characters:

Final draft of the script

Finally, after all that feedback from Ed and the class we have our final script. We had a brief chat within the group and with the notes from the last feedback session I went home to do write the final draft. I got the opportunity to do some changes on the dialogue since that was one of the changes so I really enjoyed that bit. The funniest bit I worked on was Nick's excuse for coming late, not sure if this is how it will be in the end, since we all want to give the voice-actors the freedom to do some improvisation on that bit - that worked well for the previous animation we did. Other than that I tried to work in some more action descriptions in the script, mostly on character behaviour. Such as talking while they sit down etc, just to try and make it seem more real. Not sure if that's the way to go, since I'm not a script-writer, but it seemed to make sense to me. Anyway, here is the script:

Feedback from class & tutors

Today we had another session where we showed work in progress - And we had a finished animatic to show today, it was based on the 3rd rewrite of the script so not up to speed to the script I posted last. But what do you know, they seemed to like it - and quite a bit too! Got a lot of laughs, and laughs in the right places as well. Chris said we where pretty much "there" now, just a few tweaks on the beginning to tighten it up (basically getting rid of the flowerstall and showing Jen on the bench and Nick running late so he picks flowers on the way. Basically just show him giving her a bunch of flowers that he has ripped from the ground on his way to the date. So to be clear, the feedback Ed have given us has made us shorten and tighten up a lot of the actions, but the idea of getting rid of the second half (which honestly we as a group disagreed with) is now behind us. We are keeping the script as it was with a date - and we will be polishing a final version of the script shortly. Ed has been a great resource and helped a lot, but his last feedback kind of made our idea of a fun cartoon with slapstick gags and humour and made it a lot more serious and closer to a drama.. And with a deadline approaching we haven't really got time to start all over again either. Not saying we're settling with this because of time pressure, but the fact that an audience laughed at it today really made us believe we might be on the right track anyway.