Astro

 

Astro is one of many working titles for the short film I'm working on. It is a sci-fi comedy, the animatic is currently running at 2 minutes which should be do-able. I've spent months working on the story and reboarding it to improve it. I'm trying to tie down the animatic so I can start animating with set shot lengths. Once I'm animating I think it will start coming together quite quickly. I will be posting more progress on this in the coming weeks. Below is the sketcbook page for the image above. just to show how messy and crazy my page is when working these things out.

 

 







K-9Lives Episode2: I thought I would post some background info on the making of this film. It has been almost a year since the first episode and that in no way reflects how long each one takes to make. But I have been busy inbetween, working on another comic strip Bloodwhat which is up to 124 strips! And The Von Spleen Experiment which is a graphic novel in progress.

The K-9Lives comic strip has come to an end in its current format. Now I'm hoping to make the most successful stories from the comic into animated episodes for the website. When I have about 5/6 episodes I will edit them together to make a 12-15 minute short film which I intend to submit to festivals and hopefully develop some further interest.

I found the work of David O Reilly quite an inspiration for this method. His film "Please Say Something" was created in 30second episodes online and went on to win all sorts of awards when the final film was finished.

Episode 2 took me 2 weeks to produce, working full time (with some late nights). I always planned for these films to be quick and simple... because I wanted to see the finish line. Rather than spend 20 years working on an idea that may have been flawed from the start, working like this lets me see my finished work and learn from mistakes and develop and progress.

Storyboard Comparison (read bottom to top)

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I thought it might be of interest for some people to see the story sketches I did for the animation below. As you can see I work very roughly, on various scraps of paper. I find it is easier to get ideas on paper if you are not feeling too precious about the result, It doesn't matter how it looks to me... so long as I have the idea. Then if it needs re-working I do that when I approach the scene in animation.

I chose this shot as the first animation test because I was happy with the shot, I knew it would be in the film.... wheras some other things in the film are shifting and changing still. I have probably half the story worked out, with the rest roughly mapped but needing some things adding. At the moment the story reel is running about 6-8 minutes and we're about half way through I think. So probably it will end up being about 12-15 minutes. I have about 1 minute of finished animation, so we're on our way!