See "V for Vendetta"!

Terrific movie, see it!! See it twice. It's a bold and original screenplay and a terrific performance by Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving as "V". Awe inspiring and thought provoking. Conspicuously lacking the usual Hollywood tag lines and glorification of violence, though it is a violent film. I wish that I could strap G.W. to a chair and peel his eyelids back with tape and make him watch the whole thing three hundred times!! Unfortunately, the dialogue is so clever and well written that I'm afraid he still wouldn't understand the film's meaning.


Anyway, I don't see that many movies, and I see even fewer I would recommend, but - Bravo!!

Some character designs for "Corn"

A few initial sketches, just getting started.

Storyboard Animatic

Well, I have the Storyboard animatic up, its a bit slapdash, none of the design is close to final, thats the next phase. I have been thinking about the look and feel of the characters and the film in general as I scribble these little drawings out, I think I'm starting to grow comfortable with a few ideas. more exploration to follow. This animatic is close to timing, obviously it's hideous and makes me look like I draw with my feet in the dark, (which come to think of it I should try some time, I may improve) but the timing will change a frame or three here and there, but for the purpose of showing the basic narrative elements to the band for feedback, this will do.

Will I ever finish this film? Brian Larson seems doubtful. I think I can, I just hope I can finish it the way I want to. My wife Petra doesn't like the three little pigs gag I wrote in, I think it will be funnier animated, but she thinks it detracts. We'll see if it ends up in the hopper or not...


Animatic (32MB)

"Corn" Music Video started yesterday

www.looseacoustictrio.com
The band linked above, Loose Acoustic Trio, recorded a great little song called "Corn". It's very catchy and fun. The Accordion player, Richie Lawrence, is my wife's uncle, and a great guy. I am going to produce an animated music video for the song, which I hope I can get the thing done before summer. Actually, my hope is do get it one by May.

I expect the storyboards to take the longest, I have to decide exactly what I'm going to do, which for me is the hard part, at least on this project. I had a sit down with Richie to discuss ideas, which was really productive, and we came up with lots of great ideas, in fact I thought we had the whole film figured out until I sat down and started the boards. I quickly realized we had too many ideas, and that we had conceived at least 4 minutes worth of story for a 2 minute film!

So my chore now is to get the best and most cohesive 2-minute story out of all of that. I will post the boards as they develop and ask for feedback that I can ignore.

Cheers.

"Mirage" is a good name for it.

Just a rant here. I spent the last three days evaluating the downloadable version of Mirage. A 2D video paint tool that has mutated into what the makers like to call a "2D animation" tool. I have evaluated a lot of software, and this one is by a long shot has the worst User Interface and worst usability of any I have seen. I got into a flame-fest with some of the cronies on their forum, this was by far the most entertaining aspect of the whole experience. It started off simple enough, with me requesting a tutorial or some help on how to do a simple scan>paint>composite process using hand drawn images on paper. That was answered by a few different people, giving me different kinds of advice on "techniques" for doing this. They ranged from 20 step instructions on using a luma key to key out the white of the scanned image before I paint to using one of Mirage's custom element panels to remove what they called the "substrata". I guess thats a fancy programmer word for "white".

Anyway, the thread was hilarious, and ended with one of the guys from Bauhaus.com closing the thread down. I sent him a note saying he was a fascist for ending it (in not so many words) and I moved on.

So Mirage, I have decided, is aptly named, from a distance it looks pretty good, twinkly lights, nice price, but once you get up close, it all just turns to sand. Probably just another reason why programmers shouldn't try to animate, and why animator's shouldn't try to program.

Rant over, new film "Corn" starts Monday, tomorrow.

~E