9)
Watched an awesome tutorial type video…Glenn Keane…space version of the little mermaid. The guy drew different beats of the story, the most important moments. He made it up as he went. Kind of like our pre-production assignment…we had the initial story, but then fleshed it out through discussion and little sketches. We had a lot of ideas that we discarded but a couple stuck and so far, it’s working. This whole course makes me wonder who is actually responsible for the images in features. For example, Disney’s Atlantis has a whoooooooooole bunch o reoccuring designs…that basically identify a culture. There are artifects all over the place, must have been a bitch to try and unify the design. But while these artifects are story elements, that is, they would have been described in the script, their function is so visual that a concept artist’s idea of what it looked like would effect the story due to that design’s particular functionality. There are these ancient lying machines in Atlantis. Where to start? They ended up being metallic fish that hovered and flew kind of like a jetski. But who could write that and get what they envisioned?
Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration.
Sand animation please…….

I just can’t keep my eyes open in the photoshop tutorials, the ones where the gu painting is sped up……I think its so boring because the guy is talking and telling you what he’s doing when we can see exactly what he’s doing. It’s like watching an entire movie where everything you see is narrated exactly as you see it. That kind of exposition is PAINFUL.

Also I’m not very experienced with photoshop. I find I learn better when I just play around with it, because I can’t see what tools or buttons or what purpose each of them has from the video. I’m still crap at photoshop but I’ve been playing around for concept design and it’s alright for getting some overall sense……you can tell what I MEANT to draw, haha.

Pretty sure I am going to end up a broke independent filmmaker...following the rules and plans annoys me. Can I take your order please?

Working in groups is hard. I don’t like being responsible for someone else’s mark. But then, I guess, in the industry, you’re responsible for thousands in investments…..? Better come up with a good story folks, and quick. I am good with coming up with decent stuff quickly. But I want to be able to come up with great stuff in collaboration and with planning and structure……….aaaaaaah structure! At least I am good at having-no-sleep.

Animatic: I’m having trouble trying to picture the geograhy of the area in my head? I know the general landscape features of Colorado to work with, but the script is confusing me as to how the different locations are placed in regards to each other. I can’t figure out how far away the quarry is, and whether the hill Jimy’s dad disappears behind is the same hill that the house is at the bottom of. They’re looking at the hill when they’re out on the porch – if it was the same hill then their house would be facing the bottom of a hill which doesn’t make sense. The script just keeps calling it the ‘hill’…….it needs a name. “Extra-terrestrial territory”….lame.

Re-read the script for our animatic. Found some essential details I’d missed/forgotten and made notes. It’s set in Colorado so I searched up the Colorado mountains on Google image search. No wonder they were so specific about which moutains – they’re very unique. The snow falls n a certain way and there are millions of this one type of tree that turns yellow/orange and breaks up the whole landscape. I’m going to try and capture that in my storyboards, intead of sticking with the boring cliché idea in my head of what ‘mountains’ look like. Most things don’t look how you think they do.

when falling – walking or running, constant falling

PRE-PRODUCTION
script is up

-scissors
-magic tape
-pencil
-green, red, blue, purple pencil
purple=shadows
green=same as
blue=roughs
red=re-used

FIELD GUIDES help with final line quality
LAYOUT OUTS- separate layers
-character layout
-BG layout-overlaying/underlying

Held cell- objects which will eventually move but are still atm
Match lines=
-eye direction
-give character room to move
-screen space in the direction of the eye
-need it clear-in a close up, you wan to keep looking at the characters eyes
BEWARE CONVERGING LINES
try not to have background lines touching character
ESPECIALLY do not have background line through the eyes. draws attention away from eyes


CONTINUITY
-hook up/ match cuts
-LAYOUT ROUGHS-blue

Re-pegging
CLEAN UP SECRET
-look further ahead than actually drawing
-eye leads pencil