Help for Kelly Brooke's 2D Film Trailer - 'Blessed Curse' - Title Screens

Kelly asked me on board to create this title sequence for her film using After Effects. She emphasised that she wanted the colour red to play an integral role in setting the style and tone of the sequence - complimented by a 'scripted' style typeface designed in Photoshop - topped off with a 19th century victorian wallpaper pattern acting as a background element that helps complete the piece. From what I know of the film, it will be a Japanese/Tragic Fairy-Tale fantasy love story - and those genre components were important to integrate here, hence why the title/font teleports in, slowly revealing itself as though it was a fairy tale character coming to spellbinding life, ominously revealing itself. In the end, the darkness creeps up from the bottom right of the composition and consumes the piece - to really build on the tragic atmosphere. This, lathered in a hue of crimson/red reflects the tragedy of the romance in the story and I believe as a whole, the piece reflects everything that Kelly is wanting to create. 

Title Renders!

Rather Happy with the way these turned out in the renders, just a quick note to share them!

Dinosaur Update...

Here I am working on the Vanilla'd Walk cycle for my Show Reel.  

And a Roar, in it's early days, but I can't possibly resist doing this, as not only will it look explosive on the Show-Reel, but to have such a great, functioning rig at my disposal for this mini project, I may as well make the most I can out of it. 

Dinosaur Animation Piece development...

So one thing I do want to improve is my ability on Walk Cycle's. I feel like there is a constant need for improvement on this subject for me, especially in Autodesk Maya; so after looking out at the rigs I can use and testing out some... I came across this one

Modelled and rigged by Harry Gladwin-Geoghegan of CreativeCrash.com, I found this rig to be versatile, easy to use and as a firm believer that the animator has to feel comfortable using the rig; I found this enjoyable to move around, so i'm looking forward to having a play around and seeing what i can make her do. 

Trying a little Motion Capture with Autodesk Motion Builder...

James Ensor and I have been getting to grips with a little Motion Capture. It's been something that we've wanted to try for a while now and we wanted to learn the fundamentals behind using it in the Production pipeline. The video above shows a sequence of Motion capture (A C3D file that is readable in Autodesk's Motion Builder) that is moving in realtime. We took the movement and assigned a figure to it, and learned the process of exporting the file, sequence and character movement to and from Motion Builder and Maya - and we wanted to discover where we can go despite our lack of knowledge in the subject matter and our limitations, but we will be moving forward on attempting to assign a character to this rigged movement in the near future.

Skeleton and motion points joined up to create the human anatomical structure. 

And a rough character model applied to the motion in Autdodesk Motion Builer. 

Explosion Complete...

Thumbnail Keys for Boom Boom Explosion scene...

The other short Animated sequence I previously mentioned will be an effects piece of animation that will again make use of my ability to draw well - this in turn will compliment the bird sequence. But it will essentially follow the same principle as The Bird, that narrative and design will flow through into the piece as well, so it's not just some silly explosion that blows everything up! Below are a few thumb nails and little sketches that I am currently working on.

1 - The Snap, that simulates the explosion quickily,

2 - The Explosion emits from a central point from on off side- lower right position and cushion the next frames until the explosion fades out. 

3 - Cushions into 4

4 - Then breaks into 5 where the central hole begins to show. 

5

6 - With some inbetweens bridging the gap between what will be key 5 and Key 6, this will all cushion nicely. The explosion beginning to fade out as the central hole of the explosion appears to get considerably larger with time and the edges of the explosion begin to thin out and meet eachother at the ends. 

The Bird Development Drawings

Whilst applying a bird-cycle animation to this scene, it's important to get to know the design of the character I wish to apply this to, and so here I show the processes and sketches iv'e gone through to bring the titular 'Bird' to life. 

In regards to the colour palette, I have chosen the top line of colours, due to their bleaker nature, which in turn will compliment the layout's colouring. Anything too bright and poppy - say the pink hues in the second line of colours may distract from the overall feeling of the piece that I wish to convey.

'Boom-Boom' Early Concept Work...

This piece I envision to precede 'The Bird'...So they are the ying and yang of one another. I have written that I visualised The Bird to Pan upwards from the ground. So with this preceding the latter, I intend to start at the sky and meet the other shot at the ground and provide a link between the two.
Hence...

Getting some colour... 

Inspiration...

For this piece, I wanted to create something that felt like a slick, richly stark 1980's movie, that takes place in downtown Los Angeles rural area with high contrast colouring and a general 'neon' night-life vibe that added a sense of electrocution to the piece artistically. This

All layers are finalised and ready to go as PSD layers. This will be taken into after effects as the finished Photoshop file, with all layers uncompressed, so that when I apply a 3D Camera to pan down, it will read the layers seperately and give a sense of depth of field to the layers as it pans down to the base of the scene. 

With succession, this is the final output from Photoshop. It is of simular size as the composition of my video, which is 1280x720 however, a little bit of room has been extended at the sides to allow for any extra camera shake, should I need to shake the camera to emphasise the explosion that will take place in the composition. 

Early Days... The Bird

Because my show reel is about Animation, I want to make sure I can get some great quality animation pieces in there. The number is not so important; as long as the pieces are of the best quality. Two things that first sprung to my mind that I have not animated and up to present remained hesitant to do, is an explosion (which yes I have done before, but I wish to attempt one on a bigger scale, and play with timing a little more) - an effects piece of animation, and a Bird-cycle. Now to integrate these into a narrative piece, I intend to foster these animation sequences into what I like to call 'Mini-Movies' which are contained little pieces that are immersive in their own right, for just long enough to keep an audience hooked on it, but it's not such a loss when the next piece begins amidst the reel.

To begin with 'The Bird' as I call it; The Bird will be an inspired little bird-flight cycle that I intend to hand animate using the Wacom Bamboo. Below are a couple of concept sketches and colour-keys that I have created in the last week that I hope i can get working in the final piece.


Mood Board/Section of design inspiration...

I love the Golden Age Limited Animation cartoons. They are the ultimate source of inspirational fuel for my own work. The impression of illusion that they achieve through their limitation in artistic direction is what gives them their ultimate charm. The very idea that these artists would use only triangles to create the impression of tree's - versus the use of more intricate artistic methods to acheive the same result, when to an audience more interested in gags and characters, it's just a tree is truly remarkable. And I find myself revisiting the area that I feel a connection with and adding a new piece of animation (a bird-cycle that iv'e never tried before) that will compliment the piece, and 
push my animation abilities even further at the same time. 


So from the mood board, here we have the earliest sketches that I mocked up, that just visualise the art style I wish to visit for this piece - any sketches that can run away with themselves in this style, just to develop intricate shapes and designs to make the mini-movie ever more appealing will be an asset to the final piece.

More environment development... Shape development. 

Early morning Cloud Sketches, 

The Final Storyboard and shot - plan. 

So I want the shot to pan upwards, from the ground so that it helps create that sense of place - establishing that, before showing the bird in flight will make compliment the piece visually, but also make the bird seem more convincing in it's environment. 

The road that i decided to integrate into the final design is, I must admit a homage of sorts to the Matte-Backdrops used in 1939's timeless 'The Wizard of Oz' where the yellow brick road's perspective is artistically warped to look almost normally impossible in the far distance in the backgrounds. This illusion not only gave Oz it's distinctive look, it helps separate it from reality and keep it in it's own strong world basis - which in my own design, is something that I wanted to create. 

And Colour Mood-boards, and finalised colour choices. I wanted to make it feel very natural, and not so artificial, and not stray towards something that did not feel natural. I am afterall warping reality to my advantages and turning it on it's head essentially, and so I feel that using the right colours and lighting practices will not only help pull it down and make it more plausible and recognisable naturally without force, it will also look like it's meant to, which is very naturalistic. 

So extracting colour idea's from the images above, which are taken from forests scattered across the U.S State of Oregon, I have presented this colour palette - which allocates sectors to my deisgn. The greyscale in the finalised design allows me to also recognise my depth in my shot as of when it comes to applying colour. 

Hence...

I do however, want to put a little visual twist on the character animation. I don't really want to use the 'clean-look' character line use in Limited animation. Instead I want to break the mould a little bit, and integrate a little bit of my raw, visceral sketching line quality into the polished piece. So essentially it looks a little bit like a coloured in-pencil test. At this moment, i'm also thinking that the rawness of the line quality will also help give the bird some character - of it living in the wilderness and it not being well groomed like a zoo or home-kept bird. This in turn will give the bird character.