This week

Well this week has been a very busy stressful week with finishing off our Animation putting the final touches onto it and Rave On Air mid-week and creating our showreel for our Pixel animation exhibition.

The main focus this week has mainly been the animation exhibition promoting our work as a part of Rave On Air for all types of people ie.. other students, people from industry, and schools. This is a was a great chance to talk to a few people about our work and to show them what we have been doing of the last year.

Sound other stuff

We have now added the sound Fx to the animation this has really brought it to life, and can appreciate what we have done over the last term. The title and end credits sequence are now done and ready to be put with the animation.

All the hard work has paid off

so...Post production

So we basically coming to the end of the project really and tying up a few loose ends with the project.

Once we was happy with the animation and every thing was in the scene and lit well, we render the animation out ready for editing it in Photoshop.
We had the image of what different filters we would like to use for the whole animating to give it a stylised feel to it. We went about recreating this for the whole animation.

When we play this back in After Effects we notice that the effect that we added in photoshop move around within the animation. This was very noticeable and distracting to watch. Even though we had found a perfect filter for it, we had to find away of not making this move in the whole animation.

We toned down and change some of the photoshop effects so it wouldn't move in the animation, but we lost some of the desired quality that we wanted it to look like.

hum...........................

Clouds

For the sky it needed some clouds in it, as was too plain. So I set about how to create some coluds with the particals to have like fuffly clouds.




Here are some of hte test renders that I done.

And here are the clouds in the scene. We didnt want to many in the scene as would detract from the forground and he animation.

visual style

After deciding that we were going to move away from the pocoyo look we started doing some tests in photoshop.





The second one is our favorite but we want to try and work in the cut out shading of the third.

Animation progress

The first pass of each of the shots shown here is the initial block out and timing of the animation, the second pass shows my initial breakdowns and inbetweeny stuff and the third show the changes i made after talking to Dan. He suggested I put in some character movement that continues from the first shot into the second to get rid of any staticness so look out for that between passes 2 and 3. I was also having trouble with the licking of the ice cream. Initially I had it so her tongue kinda pushed the ice cream away, Dan suggested that I drag the ice cream down instead and you can see how much better this looks from pass 2 to 3. I added some stretch and bend to it as well to add to the "drag"

Timed out animation

Block out for the Environment

These are some very early on block outs of what we were trying to achieve in the park environment to show where the scene would be set.

Brina textured

Here she is in all her glory... Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Tato tests

Here are some Spud test textures for the character Tato. I started off at the top of the page and the one at the bottom is the one we went with!

This is the final one we setting on going with. Smashing !

3D models

Here are some of the models that ive been working on for our envrionment.

Here I have started on making the textures more dirty and not soo washed out looking, So it gives it some realism.

About our pitch to Nickelodeon

So from pitching at Nickelodeon which was more informally then I expected and was more of a discussion, then a pitch. (Which was good!) They like the character and the gags that we had to present, but there main concern was that it wasn't really for there audience. They said if you had children form ages 3-5 they would be wanting to watch and do things that thier older bother or sister might be doing. For them to watch a cartoon or advert that might be Bellow there level they would switch off.

Plus they didn't like the theme tune music, as it wasn't either potato or fat girl, but its going to be hard to find some thing that will fit into the category. hum...............



So over the weekend we tried to think of idea that could appeal more to older children which they could engage in, but this was proving more difficult.

We came up with ides that we could introduce a third character in the the equation, maybe a bully that goes to lill tato but then birna scary him off. Having a third character would be better but will the time scale against us this would be possible. The other option would be to make the environment more realistic and grimy and not so washed out. This is what we are tiring to achieve and move away from Pocoyo style.

Post pitch thoughts... or something

After pitching to the fine folk at Nickelodeon we came out with some useful feedback. The main point was that the style is too young for their audience. To fix this we need to think about altering either the characters or the environment. Jared suggested that we introduce a third character that kids within the target age range could relate to, such as a human bully character that picks on Lil'Tato. Being as stubborn as I am and wanting to hang on to everything in the initial see saw idea I thought this character could just be heard from off screen and then kick a football at Tato's head. At least for that particular episode. As far as the environment goes, we thought about moving away from the Pocoyo look and going for a more realistic, gritty look. Things could be covered in graffiti for example. Also, due to the fact that the see saw is quite a kiddy prop and that I am having a hard time considering parting with it, we though we could have other more 5-10 year olds props in the background such as goal posts and basketball hoops.

3d characters yo!

Environment

Swings and slides

Here are some quick sketches of some of the apparatus in a park.

A few more Storyboard

Here are some more situations that we can do for the characters.

Pocoyo

This is for a little insipration for a colour scheme and style that we are think of using for our animation.

story boards

To show camera angles.

Animated idea

This basic animation show what is going to happen in the animation and not necessarily the camera angles.

Colour concepts

Research and Reference pictures

Here are some pictures that I have taken of my local parks, since the animation is based round a park play ground, I thought I would take some pictures for colour reference, shape and ideas that we could possible use.