First Color Animation Test

Here is our first color animation test for "Nigel." There is one drawing that's missing color at this point, hence the white flash near the beginning. Overall thoughts are that the colors need some adjusting and we'd like to go for a different approach to the backgrounds, more muted and simple. It's nice to see a shot like this to get a sense of which direction to take everything else.



I wish to thank those who have been supporting this project thus far. With so many projects going on and interests drifting elsewhere, it's hard for me to stay excited about this film all the time. I'm rather torn and just need some encouragement to keep it simmering on the stove.

Back to Scanning

After much busy-ness and procrastinating I finally got around to getting the scanning experimentation going again, by doing it in greyscale and it so far looks much better than 'black & white.' It should have been done that way to begin with, but silly me neglected to relay this instruction to my helpers. VanArts student Steve Gehl has offered to try some color tests for me this weekend and then we'll try coloring and comping this entire scene.

Temporary Halt

So at this point I'm putting a temporary halt to scanning more scenes, as they may need to be re-scanned at greyscale rather than black & white. I'm also toying with the idea of possibly shading in each drawing with colored pencil, for a totally different look altogether. Since the story is being read from a childrens' book, it might be cool if the whole thing looked more hand-crafted. I'm going to do an experiment with both methods (digital ink-paint vs. colored pencil) and see which one looks best.

Not quite as sketchy as this...

...but something close to it.

Baby Elephant in Color!

Lots more scanning has proceeded over the past few weekends thanks to my student volunteers. Earlier today I experimented with coloring in one frame with the one finished background I have, just to get a sense of what the film will look like. It's a bit of a shock at this point, because I'm not used to seeing this character in anything other than a pencil test. But it's growing on me. What y'all think?


I'm realizing that it is still going to be a LOT of work to color in all of these frames, and I'll continue to need tons of support.

SCANNERS

But seriously, nobody's head is exploding...yet.

I finally have three scenes scanned in from over the weekend, thanks to VanArts students Todd Wheeler, Katrina Gregorius and Steven Gehl (gotta keep track of all these names for the credits). I still have yet to look them over, but at least I know the ball has started rolling.

Scanning to commence...

So AGAIN Nigel has been on the back burner, or off the stove altogether. BUT the latest update is I finally found the time to sit down with VanArts instructor Jerry Benninger for a quick ToonBoom Opus tutorial on building exposure sheets and scanning in drawings. My plan so far is to have all my drawings scanned in, colored in Photoshop with Alpha channels, and imported as an overlay layer in Opus for compositing with backgrounds.

A little animated inspiration...

The other day I met another classical animator who recently jumped on board the BigFott project. He's a graduate of VFS with some fantastic animation...his effects work in particular is nothing short of spectacular. Check him out (I like to promote good art when I see it!)...

http://www.jontbrown.blogspot.com/

His style reminds me alot of New York animator Patrick Smith, with the sketchy line quality and visible construction lines. This was inspiring to me because it's the same kind of look I want to achieve for 'Nigel' where the drawings are clean but not TOO clean...rough around the edges. I can also tell that some International Rocketship folks like Marv Newland had some input into his graduate film, cuz it has some of those same qualities.

There's lots of animation events happening in Vancouver over the next few weeks with independent shorts hosted by the NFB, so I'm expecting this will give me lots of inspiration to re-visit production.