Finised the cartoon

and gave it in for a nickelodeon 'make me a nick toons animator' competition.

[http://blog.skillset.org/2008/04/11/nicktoonsskillset-competition-launched/]

we find out the results next week friday..

here it is anyway [the sounds a bit rubbish at the moment]:

Schedules

Here are the nine schedules I have made for this terms project, theyre a bit hectic though:
week 1
week 2
week 3
week 4
week 5
week 6
week 7
week 8
week 9

Composition..

So after finishing the work in maya and rendering out the frames, I put them into after effects and rendered out a movie. I then imported this movie into Adobe Flash and started to animate over the movie. After this I hid the movie and rendered out the swf, then I converted the Swf file into a tga sequence with alpha so i could place it over the origional movie in AE.

This is where the problems started.. It wouldnt synch. I tried interptreting the footage as 24fps for all the footage. made sure it was set to 24fps in flash, in maya and in AE. rendered everything out again a few times.. still couldnt figure out how to do it!

Eventually just rendered out the swf again with the video still in it, and then converted that swf to an Avi file. Which works, but the quality isnt so great.

After I had figured out how to do it, I noticed, in typical Josh fashion, that my movie was 50 seconds long! So I cut bits out, and eventually got it down to 35 seconds.. .still 5 seconds over the limit, but im just going to hand it in to uni like this and then cut some more out for Nickelodeon.
Ahwell, I've still got about a month to finish it before I hand it in to Nickelodeon.

So Ive finished the movie to hand in to uni, but it needs some touch ups before i hand it in to Nickelodeon, and I still need to do sound this week. It would have been good to get the sound in for uni because I think it is the deciding factor on whether the cartoon works or not, and without it it seems a bit bland.

Dvd

Starting a project to make a dvd.. Meant to be using Adobe Encore cs3, but the computers at uni dont have it installed!! so then got told we could use iDvd on the apple computers, but only 9 of them had it installed!!
I ended up making it on iDvd anyway, it seems so easy to make a dvd and its good knowledge to have, as now I can submit profesional dvds for uni and job applications etc.

Here are some first ideas anyway:

Test movies

I decided to keep the dinos face quite basic.. just a smile and an open mouth blend shape. This was because I still wanted it to fit in with the rough southpark style animation of the cavemen.

heres some test movies:

This next video shows what kept happening to me the first time I did the blend shapes:
It turns out i probably moved the model while it was in vertex mode.. therefore moving all the verts as it blended.. :\ got it fixed in a jiffy though so no worries!

Also made a few clouds.. wanted to have them looping over the 2D background, but it didnt look right:

Heres a quick run cycle.. Sorry Ive not looped it!!



Some quick testing with the flash and maya together:

Ideas

This week Ive just been thrashing out ideas for the 30 second cartoon. There were some bad ideas and some alright ideas.. but nothing really stood up as being great.. and I knew I couldnt take longer than a few days thinking about it, like I had in previous projects, because I was so far behind! So I settled on an idea and set about making it.

So here is the (not so great) script:

Roar (the dinosaur) is chasing the cavemen across the screen, who then hide in a bush.
Roar loses them, and looks around.. then hears one of the cavemen going 'shh shhh shh'
Roar roars at the bush and the leave blow off it.. the cavemen run to Roar and start shouting at him.. He gets scared and confused until he realises that they arent going to do him any harm.. and so chases them again.. the get chased into a cave and are stuck...
They have to find someone who is willing to go out and fight the beast, but noone is willing, so they play rock paper scissors to decide.
As usual, the smelly burping farting kid gets picked.
He goes out to fight the beast but gets eaten, but you can hear him still burping and farting inside Roar.
Roar gets sick, starts farting and get scared of his own farts and runs away..
The smelly cavemen was burped out so he survives.

Weight Painting!

argh! Ive spent the last week painting weights for my character.. I can safely say its the least exciting aspect of the animation industry.. but I got better at it (after having to redo it about 10 times I was actually quite good by the tenth time!)

Nickelodeon pitch

So after a weeks work I was pretty much ready for the pitch. I wasnt too nervous and it turned out alright :) they liked the concept but thought the ideas I presented were a bit too obvious, and they wanted something more intelligent, which is good because I presented ideas based mike telling us all they wanted was bum and fart jokes.. so I was quite pleased. They said they loved the style, the characters and the feel of it. All good.

So heres what I took to the pitch:

They said they prefered the 3d dino with the 2d cavemen and the collage feel background.

I just need to rebuild the dino now.. change his face a bit and rig him up etc!

Starting with Tony..

I was in a group with Tony Trimmer at the start of term, and he got into the nickelodeon competition which was good.. so i set out making his models and some more stuff...

His main character 'Bob the alien' this is a video of the character and blend shapes.

And Bobs sidekick 'SK'.. I only modelled this one and started Rigging it, but then found out I had also got into the Nickelodeon competition.. So I stopped working on this, and had to prepare for the pitch which was in just less than a week!