Concept for style of Painting

This is a little late, but I wanted to include it as a sort of style guide for the graffiti part of the film. Using some work from a german artist called Anus One as a basis, I took the scene where the bird confronts the smog skull and re-rendered it as a conceptual painting.

I wanted to keep a blocky line style for the characters while still retaining a sense that the characters are distinct from the background, so I used a double line of a dark colour encased in a light colour. This also lets me distinguish between characters with very little difficulty. I also figured out that the background looks better when there's no linework to clutter it up; using block colours with a slight gradient is a much more effective way of rendering the background.

the problem I have is that the background is way too busy and needs to be brought back into something simpler if I want it to work in the context of the film.

All in all, it was a good experiment.

Final storyboard

Here's the storyboard I used in order to make the animatic.

I forgot to post it earlier, but voila;

In-depth Plot summary

here's a write up of all the events that take place during the film so that I don't forget about them, and that everyone else can see how I plan to structure the film in terms of its narrative as opposed to visually;

• Film starts with an establishing shot of a back street in Southwark.
• A Man is walking down the back street, hunched over and clearly in a hurry to get somewhere. In one hand he carries a briefcase full of paper.
• He checks his watch.
• The clock ticks very rapidly, representing his restless attitude.
• He begrudgingly looks back up and continues marching towards work.
• Eventually he gets to a railway bridge and walks under it.
• As he walks under the bridge, something flies around behind his head, causing him to stop and look around.
• It then flies in front of him, fully catching his attention, causing him to follow its movement with his head.
• The camera track-pans out as we see what has caught his attention; it's a huge street painting covering the entire of the wall next to him.
• The man raises an eyebrow at the painting, thinking of it as little more than another piece of 'yobbo grafitti ruining the nation'.
• As he looks at the painting, the Falcon at its focal point starts to move about, startling him and causing him to fall backwards onto the pavement and drop his briefcase, scattering the contents all over the pavement.
• He looks down at the pavement and panics, trying to pick up all of the papers he's just dropped and put them back in his briefcase before they get dirty.
• As he's doing this, the bird circles his head, eventually stopping to land on the brim of his hat.
• The man is unimpressed by the bird and tries to shake it off his head, dropping the papers he'd just picked up.
• The bird flies off and back into the painting.
• The man, angered by the bird, gets up and tries to follow it into the painting.
• He collides with the wall, hitting his head and knocking himself back onto the pavement.
• After pulling himself back up, he rubs his head, then gets distracted by a light source coming from the wall. He looks up and stares at the wall in disbelief.
• The entire painting has now come to life and is now moving as if it were a film.
• He looks around him to check for film projectors, but doesn't see anything that could be used as one.
• His attention then gets caught by the bird again.
• Now thoroughly intrigued by the painting and the fact that the bird seems to want him to look at it, he gets up again, slowly walking towards the painting to examine it more closely.
• As he moves in to look at the painting, the camera suddenly zooms in and tracks the back of the falcon as it flies through the different scenes represented within the painting.
• It flies through a medieval street and up towards the old London Bridge.
• The camera does a swivel pan so that it's facing the side of London Bridge as the bird flies alongside it. One or two birds are doing the same thing in the background.
• The sky begins to turn red as the bird flies alongside the bridge.
• At the end of the bridge, we see that the sky was turning red due to the great fire roaring on the other side of the thames. 
• The fire consumes the bird and the buildings.
• After a few seconds, the bird breaks out of the fire and into the smoky clouds over 18th century London.
• It spots a low-flying pigeon and begins to tail it, flying low into a victorian/ edwardian street as it follows it.
• The pigeon flies into a cloud and the Falcon follows it.
• In the cloud we see what looks like a searchlight.
• As the Falcon flies through the cloud, the scene changes again to the sky over London during a WW2 bombing raid. Searchlights move across the dark background
• We see the pigeon again, though this time a package containing a letter is strapped to its back.
• The falcon attacks the pigeon, catching it out of the sky.
• As it attacks the pigeon, a Spitfire flies into view, trying to shoot down the falcon in order to recover the letter attached to its back.
• The Falcon escapes from the Spitfire and into a cloud of thick smog.
• As it flies through, dead falcons begin to drop out of the sky.
• The background changes to 1960's London, during one of the infamous 'Pea-Soupers' -poisonous smogs common during the 60's in London-
• The smog rising from a nearby factory begins to morph into the shape of a wispy skull.
• The skull lunges out and attempts to eat the Falcon -pollution killing the falcon population-
• The skull's jaws clamp shut around the Falcon.
• The Falcon the breaks out of the Skull, causing it to explode outwards into wisps of smoke.
• It flies towards the Tate Modern, flying into the modern era, showing that despite all the hardships its species has faced, it's still living in London to this day.
• The camera pans out of the painting to show the man, looking at it in awe.
• Eventually, the sounds of the city of London start to fade back in, and the man suddenly realizes how long he's been staring at this painting.
• He looks at his watch to check the time, then looks at the floor, noticing that his papers are still scattered all over the pavement.
• He starts panicking again, this time trying to pick them up even more frantically than before.
• As he puts them back into his bag, he hears mewling coming from the sky above him.
• He looks up to see an actual falcon flying over the city of London
• He then looks back at the painting, feeling unsure about the fact that he's panicking again.
• After one last look at the painting, he calms down, looks at the papers on the floor, then slowly picks them up, puts them in his briefcase and stands up tall and proud, comfortable in the fact that he doesn't have to worry or panic about his life. 
• He walks away from the painting, feeling happy with the experience that he just had.

I feel that there are still aspects I can work into in greater detail during production, but for the most part this is what I plan on doing script-wise for the final film.

Final Animatic

After weeks of procrastination and doing other tasks, I finally got around to polishing off the animatic and getting it to work as well as I could make it work within the time frame I'd left myself.
admittedly it feels a tad fast in some spaces, but that can be fixed once we start on animation;

Link to Final Animatic on vimeo

Final designs for minor characters

After speaking with Neil on Monday, I also chose which designs to take forward and finalize out of the thumbnail sketches I did of the pigeons and smog monsters;

If I had more time, I'd have rendered the designs in full colour, but I'll admit that I left this too late to do anything aside from the lineart and a turnaround for the least complex of the two designs.

Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze those in before the PDF for pre-production needs to be handed in.

final composition for painting and colour script

Most of the this week was finishing off the last bits of work and doing all of the tweaking to make it all fit together, as such I tried to focus on three main things; finishing the third animatic, getting my colour script done and coming up with the best possible composition for the street painting.

With the colour script I tried to keep it as loose as I possibly could as all I felt was necessary was to give a vague idea about what sort of colours I'd be using for the light and the dark areas in each shot.
Given that the film is really short, I didn't have to compose too many variations.

Following the advice I received, I put the Tate on a third and re-composed the rest of the painting around that, resulting in what I feel is not only a more dynamic concept, but also one that feels much less cluttered while being much more appealing to look at.

Painting Composition and Flight Path of the Falcon

I forgot to post these earlier, but while explaining some aspects of the film to Emma, I drew up a flight path to show how the falcon would navigate the painting (not literally, just as a demonstration showing which era it would fly to based on the layout of the painting) as well as a redesign of the painting's composition.

Here's the re-composed painting and the flight path;

I've already spoken with Neil about it, and I currently need to re-jig the composition of the painting so that the Tate (the building in the centre of the painting) lies on a third instead of dead centre.

Tomorrow's going to be a busy day.

thumbnails for environment design

following a chat with Neil earlier on this week, I finally realized how to tackle getting a feel for what the environment would look like in this film; treat the buildings as if they were characters of their own.

I also did some sketches for a spitfire and a pigeon that show up during the WW2 segment to get a feel for what style I'd go with when I design them.

Pose Tests

I left this a little late, but here are some pose tests I did for the two main characters in the story. I mixed up some of the actions happening within the film itself with a few reference poses that I reworked in the style of the character I'd designed, keeping them rough so as to keep the dynamism of the characters.

next I need to start conceptualizing the key shots within the film.

Character Turnarounds and Preliminary colours

After getting the first design done, I jumped into finishing the turnarounds and the second design. It took a lot less time than I thought it would, however. I must have just nailed the style of the film with the first design;

I'm not sure about the colour palette I have for the Londoner, so I'll need to experiment a bit more before I can officially say that's done. It might just be the fact that I stuck with red lineart instead of a solid black, so I'll have to mess around with that until I figure out what works.
As for the falcon, I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out.

Character Design work: Londonder

After polishing up the second animatic to make sure it fitted together nicely, I started working on the design for the Londoner. The thumbnail I felt that worked the most was actually number A3 from the tumbnail sheet as opposed to the design that I'd been using in my storyboard. The main difference between the two is that the storyboard design is a lot stockier, whereas A3 is much taller and thinner.

I chose this design over the original as I felt that a taller, thinner character would feel much more like a London-based middle class office worker than a short and stocky character.

As I was designing him, I kept in mind Carl's design from UP, as I wanted to add a few small curves and circles dotted around his body to help emphasize that he isn't as stubborn or inherently evil as he might first appear, while still constructing his body primarily out of squares and triangles, however, while drawing up his head, I was also reminded of the Tove Jansson's Moomin characters, specifically Snufkin, so I pulled up a few reference images from Google to help me get the placement of his eyes right relative to the brim of his hat.

I'm in the process of doing a breakdown of all the details of this character, and should have it posted up here by Friday.

Preliminary Animatics

Following the mass of storyboarding I did over the last week, I eventually managed to compile everything into a solidly timed animatic. It was a little shorter than I was expecting, though. Instead of being about 3-4 minutes, it was closer to 1 minute:

Click here to view the first animatic

I then bought this in to show the tutors and received immediate feedback about how to improve it, so I knuckled down and changed the overall pacing of the film. I also expanded on a few key shots here and there to really hammer in the importance of the items within those shots: 

Click here to view the second animatic

First Storyboard Revision

I decided the fastest way to get started on the animatic would be to upload the Sketches I did in my hard copy journal straight to the computer and use them as templates for the digital board instead of trying to replicate them straight without any on-screen guidelines. 

After I'd taken the photos and trimmed them down, I messed around with the order of the last few to get it flowing a bit more naturally, then I decided to upload the storyboard here. Admittedly I need one or two more frames in the beginning to help show that the Londoner's watch is another big part of this story, but I can add those in when I put the animatic together.

Bird thumbs

I knocked these thumbnail sketches out really quickly, so I felt that before I started finalizing my storyboard, it would be a good idea to post them here for future reference.

I used frontal poses because I felt they'd be better for capturing the feel of the falcon's character.
Once I've done the storyboard, I'll return to this, pick out the best designs in the batch and then do a bunch of silhouetted side-views.

Thumbs for Londoner

I started thumbnailing the Londoner who finds the Graffiti after I'd got a solid idea about where the story was going and what was going to happen in it. I wanted to try and stick to a theme of 'grumpy, stubborn and a bit snottish'; the attitude of your average middle class lawyer. However, beneath his harsh exterior is a man who just wishes to find something that can make his dull, blue-collar life just a bit more interesting. To start with I gathered some references of the kind of urban character I was looking for and compiled a moodboard;

With that in mind, I started drawing the ideas up;

I grouped them based on the overall shape I tried to stick to when designing the character, so there's a group for Rectangular, Spherical and Triangular iterations of the character.



... now, back to figuring out how I'm going to tackle the falcon's design.

Beatboard frames

After doing a full storyboard, I went back to try and do a beatboard. A lot of the beats turned out very nicely, but there are a few I feel could convey the story a lot better.