Well, as far as class goes I've chosen to do the first segment of the script. I've also got a few rough sketches for the characters done, but have yet to actually start any serious storyboarding apart from a couple of thumbnails.

After my last post the exploration of Treasure Planet pre-production continued, until I found the portfolio of one Craig Elliot. He had some incredibly nice preproduction backgrounds, like the one above, but you really have to wonder if he thought something like this (left) would ever make it into the movie. LOL. Just had to share that.

I also found 'The Art of Anastasia' in the library. I always loved that movie when I was younger, but recently I haven't been able to stand the singing and the rather poorly developed characters, even though there is some rather nice banter. Looking back however, the production design is excellent. There's one scene in Paris near the end in which all of the backgrounds are painted like Impressionist classics. It's really different.

Maybe I can find a picture... Nope. Not a single one in Paris. It's a shame really. Here's a nice one of the movie's blending of 2D and 3D however, which is absolutely excellent for when it was made.

Bye for now. Julie-Anne

Argh! I have been so shockingly slack with this blogger so far. Oh well, it means that I have a lot of things to post about right now. I will skip Oprah references etc (althought that really made me smile) to talk about things that I've done outside of class, because, well, everyone sat through the Oprah example.

There is one thing that I'd like to say about class though. Watching the video with the photorealistic drawing demonstration was good, but after a while it was tiring, and he didn't really explain anything that he was doing. There were so many times when I wanted to know what tool he was using, or look at his layers etc. Oh well.

Here are the thumbnails for the pub that I was talking about last post.




















And the finished drawing...


I got the Slither script breakdown done a couple of days after class, but I was pretty lazy with the Strangers on a Train one. I didn't do it until the night before. I did get it done though, and I suppose that's what really matters.

I've also been doing a lot of looking at Pre-production over the past couple of weeks. I had a look at the art of Kingdom Hearts, borrowed temporarily from Stacey. -Waves- Thanks Stacey! It's really quite incredible. The creativity that has gone into designing the Heartless is awesome, and it's really impressive how they've managed to combine both Disney and Final Fantasy characters and made it work.

One thing I really noticed with it though was that many of the original illustrations had a lot more expression and personality than the final 3D models.

I also explored the behind the scenes of my Treasure Planet DVD, originally looking for information on the sound for a sound design assignment, but instead finding a lot about the design and preproduction. I don't like that much Disney stuff to be honest, but the design and art of Treasure Planet is fantastic. In the extras they briefly talked about their design philosophy for the film 70% old and 30% new. I've found a few pictures on the web. They'll explain themselves better than I will able to with words.

This is a great page. Lot's of Treasure Planet pictures...

http://animationarchive.net/Feature%20Films/Treasure%20Planet/Model%20Sheets/index.php

It's fun to see some of the designs that didn't make it. Like the one on the right for example. Hehehe.

I've also got some character designs that I'm rather proud of, which I made for 2D. Basically they're just high school students (although I'm pretty sure they're psychotic). Unfortunately I can't post them because they're in swf format, but I will once I work out how.

Bye for now...

The Blogging Begins

Well, this being my first post, I've actually got two weeks worth of things to talk about, so it's probably going to be long; that is, as long as I can actually remember everything that happened in week one. Dinosaurs; yes, I distinctly remember the dinosaurs, which was incredibly interesting to watch, especially considering that I can't draw dinosaurs very well.

Hmmm..... what else happened in week one. I suppose this says more about how shocking my memory skills are than anything else.

Oh yes; inn research. But before I get to that, I would like to say how much I loved the Grimm's Fairy Tale that was picked out for us. I read the entire thing, getting very excited by the prospect of designing a lot of the things in it (cat's eyes! He has cat's eyes!) only to become very disappointed by the fact that we were only going to be designing the inn. Oh well. I suppose it's actually better to get used to designing the boring stuff. So yes.

Inn research. We discovered a few little gems on the internet, except that as try as hard as I might, I can't find the same sites as we did in class. As I think someone mentioned in our second class however, most of what we found had a lot of external shots, but not much interior.

I tried to draw some thumbnails in class, but I was completely lacking in inspiration, so they were pretty terrible.

For more research I watched 'The Brother's Grimm', and then, a few days later (ie; the night before our next class -_-;) sat down and found inspiration in of all things, the not quite as appropriate as aforementioned sources, 'The Village', and came up with rather nice result which I shall have to post the next time I'm on a computer with a scanner.

The second class was extremely useful; lot's of information about colour-coding etc. that I will have to remember. The instructional video this time around was good, but after a while it got a little tiring. Plus I really would have liked to know more about some of the tools he was using instead of just watching him do it. For example, I think he might have been using the burn tool as one stage but I couldn't be sure.

As far as the excercise for last week goes, I have it downloaded and waiting for me to do it at home, so I'll post again once I've got more time. Class it about to start.

-Ciao, Jewels