Whillock: April 2012

I made an owl out of material scraps. Model-making and thriftiness practice.

Audacity free audio editing software (above) is rather nice for getting rid of noise and doing a bit of audio editing for someone with my degree of knowledge of soundy things (ie none).

Big thank-you to Ashton Lewsey who was kind enough to narrate my piece with her more dulcet tones than mine. All done in the recording booth in the sound studio at uni, which was a first for me. Definitely worth getting into the habit of though. Thankfully I have a nicely edited narration to work with now, and along with the three piece sof music I've picked out, the sound is well on it's way to being done.

Should make some of the animating coming up much easier too!

So the time has come to get back working in flash again for the 2D animated segment of the animation. Hopefully I'll remember a few bits and bobs from last time so it won't be like starting from fresh again. This time I'll be working with assets created in photoshop rather than creating them in flash itself so will able to do a few nice textural looks etc.

Fingers crossed anyway.

During the course of this project, I'm getting help from the very talented Michael Price. After seeing some of his other work and models, I was very keen to get him involved on the fabrication part of this project, so gave him the task of designing and building one of the main puppets, namely, the priest.

I gave him a few doodles and ideas over a chat about what I wanted from him, and he disappeared and came back with some great swanky design and idea sheets for me to mull over:

From these, I narrowed down a few of the design choices and left a few up to him, and sure enough, he disappeared again, and returned with a final design sheet for the character, which was spot on what I wanted:

And so he's disappeared again, this time with a few puppet making supplies, and I can't wait to see this appear over the coming week. I'll keep you updated, but in the mean time, check out his blog and have a nose at his work!

Another bit of digital drawing practice, getting used to new things and learning on photoshop. The more practice the merrier. Some days you feel like you're improving, but some feel like you're going backwards, just have to keep plodding on. Lots of mistakes on this one, but it's done and done.

Just testing out some avatar ideas for the end-of-year show stop-motion people. The idea was to keep it simple and tie all the people together, but keep it quirky and obvious as to what the medium was.

Guess what' it's called? Seriously though, I think I'm pretty happy with that top one, below are some of the earlier goes and ideas:

Doing another set of storyboards to make sure I've got all the scenes nailed down, and adding a bit of colour to it as well. Also, getting the 3rd set built, little bit of stained glass style work to be going on in this one: