Sunday 27 March 2011

Some Keyframe Tests


Sarahs Keyframes: the first quarter of the animation


Claires Keyframes: 3rd quarter of animation

Lillys Keyframes: last quarter of the animation

Monday 14 February 2011

Script

Marlo the Magician walks in, tired, slumping on his coat with a cup of tea in one hand as he gets ready backstage for a show.
He takes out his magic wand. While sipping his tea, he zaps his slippers into shoes, and makes his bowtie tie itself.
His beard gets dragged into the knot. Marlo notices, quickly puts his tea cup down and untangles his beard in a panic.
Marlo vanishes magic wand between hands and slides up sleeves.
Picks up first glove, puts in on and wiggles fingers. Meanwhile, the other glove comes alive and starts walking away.
Marlo goes to pick up second glove, notices its not there. He spots it about to jump off the table and catches it.The glove continues to walk while he holds it in mid air.
Shakes glove,annoyed, and puts it on. He then picks up his top hat, brushes off dust, holds it over his head and takes a deep breath.
As soon as the hat is on his head, he straightens his back and becomes the performer.
Marlo bows, fans out some cards from thin-air, makes one card jump to the other hand, shows the card.
Carried away in the moment, he takes off top hat, shows the inside, goes to introduce...

Marlo is in the same pose as the old poster in the background, which depicts a young Marlo introducing his magical assistant Merit the Ferret.
His happy face droops, upset and emotional. Marlo sighs, reaches his hand out to the poster of Merit, looking nostalgic and sad.
A black hole zooms into the magician and his long lost companion.


-courtesy of Lilly

Tuesday 8 February 2011

Final Marlo and The Beginnings of Flash Website

Here is the turn around, emotion sheet and simplified head proportions for the final design.



After a chat with Sharon, our tutor, we decided to simplify his hairline and beard from the first two, to look like the third image. Much easier to draw, and much more consistant :)

On another note, this week we've begun our Flash Website brief, for which we have to create a main start page, with 4 links to our own seperate pages, with each of our pages including either a game or piece of animation etc about Marlo... if that makes sense. Flash seems to be a pretty cool program. Yesterday we briefly learned how to create buttons, and animations etc etc which was fun. But now the real work begins.

So far, we have Charlie creating a page about his past, Sarah creating a dress up game, Lilly creating an interactive dressing table and myself trying to create a rhythm game (which seems to become more and more a bad choice the further i look into it). With the tutor, who will be helping us on this project, admitting he doesnt know too much about scripting (he just copies scripts from the internet) Im wondering if I'll be successful with my choice of game. Nothing like jumping in head first.



Monday 31 January 2011

Marlos Design

Last week, our group got stuck into the design process of Marlo. With only one week to complete our individual visions of the character in, it was quite a hard task. And knowing that only one design was going to get picked made the time scale harder.

A visiting tutor, Ewan Green, gave a few presentations on character design, and helped in the studio with the process, and, since our own tutor wasnt around, his guidance was much appreciated. Thanks Ewan :)

Here's some of our work from the week. Please excuse some of my scannings...


These are some thumbnail sketches of the general poses Marlo may find himself in. (Lilly)


And some expressions (above: Lilly) (below: Sarah)




We also fleshed out some fun character poses from the thumbnails:

Claire


Lilly
Claire


Sarah

Lilly

Claire
Sarah
Claire


A model turn around sheet was also required for the character "pitch" we had to do (in which we basically showed our work and the rest of the class chose the character design)

 Heres an example of Lillys turn around. I havent yet scanned in the sheet for the character that was chosen. And I also dont have any of our 4th team member Charlies work :( I'll hopefully get that soon and post asap!

Enjoy!

Sunday 23 January 2011

New Blog

With a new semester comes a new project, and with a new project comes a lot of work. So i decided to create this blog for others, and ourselves, to keep track of whats going on in the land of Marlo the Magician. We'll hopefully update this blog regularly with new and exciting developents in character design, line tests, animatics etc etc. So check back regularaly!

Here is a general outline of the brief:
"Your group’s character is dressing or undressing when he or she notices something unexpected about his or her appearance or his or her clothing. Alternatively, something unexpected could happen externally to the character, ie, he or she hears a noise, sees a light or object. Whatever the unexpected incident is, it should be relevant in some way to his or her back story. After the incident, the character’s focus has changed – his/her body language has changed, his/her emotional state has changed."

- Claire