Pencilled scene sketches ,

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Here is a double pager spread that ash has drawn up, I will be painting and inking them tonight. We have decided that it will be a good idea for Ash to initially draw the scenes and for me to ink them up as I've had ample of practise with the ink (coloring, shading and brush work), I'm confident in using them, as ash is a confident perspective drawer so were helping each other in doing it this way. It should improve productivity quite allot. This is one of the scenes which involves our main character walking along the river bank, Ash has left cedrtain details out so that we can paint the parts and animate them separately too.

Experimental scene,

Here's an experimental scene, I cut up the waves and house from one of the pictures that I made. I think the waves look niece and so does the sky. Though the foreground image looks a bit static, maybe if I'd of animated the trees moving and the house chimney smoking the scene would of looked a bit more lively. Still though it was good to play with after effects and mess around with effects. Tomorrow ash is going to start drawing out some scenes for myself to color over, these scenes should have a niece oriental perspective, they will be posted up to the blog shortly.

The Story board

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Here's the storyboard for our book. We have constructed a series of events. Though this story isn't concrete for we preferably want to find some traditional paintings that we like, and try and create animated versions of these. Me and Ash don't believe that the piece has to follow a precise story, we believe more so that it must be visually appealing. More of a journey and a presentation of tradition.

Scans from a painting सेस्सिओं.

Scans from a painting session


Unfortunately the main scan of the house and foreground of this piece isn't included up here. This because the scanner misread this image for some strange reason. This will have to be added at a later date.

I painted the above images over the last couple of days. I now hope to cut these pictures up in photoshop. So that they are ready to be pieced back together and animated in After Effects.

I put the house and the fishermen on a different page, so that I could animate them individually move along the piece. I may have to mix Flash with After Effects to create an convincing smooth effect- like the kind of smooth finish Hokusai's book has (previous post). We don't want to make are story book just the same as this for Hokusai is a Japanese artist and we want our book to have a more distinct Chinese feel to it. For the Damian Albarn song Pigsy In Space is based on an ancient Chinese novel.


More tomorrow,

Eddy.

Hokusai, animated sketchbook+ Japanese/Chinese art - the difference

The other day Ash stumbled across this Hokusai animation. I find it quite remarkable as it seems very similar to our original idea. There are definitely effects in this that we could utilize in our book. Unlike this book though our book is going to be animated in a kind of real time environment, where some one turns the pages as it goes along. The art style too will be pretty different, as this is quite blocky Japanese art work. Our art work will be more like the brushy textural feel of the Chinese art that we have looked at.

Certain elements though, have been good to see. Like the way the clouds and smoke move. In this clip you can see that not everything has to move for the imagery to be emotive and visually stimulating.

We do still plan on making more things animate though across the scenery, for if its going to be a music video, there's going to have be a lot happening to keep the viewer interested. We want to make the scenes look like they are alive.



Written and directed by Tony White.

To be honest I am glad this has been made, but it does seem something of plagiarism to edit someones work who has no consent over the matter.

Anyway back to painting, for a test scene.

Mood Board

Here are some of a few of the things that have influenced us to make the book, features such as the great wall and the terra-cotta army may not be included, its just there to give us a feel for the brief story. We have been thinking about including the farmers as there's a simple of general living in Rural China and this is something we'd like to cover. We think it would be niece to include dragons at a point in the video though not in the story, as we don't want it to be that abstract.

Moving book

Is a good representation of the style we would like to create are book. We were thinkng we would just let the book animate itself simply within itself. Though I've watched this video and decided it may be good for things to actually float out of the book and away. I think this would make the imagery more interesting to the viewer rather then the images been limited to the book itself.

a look at the terracotta army,

We have been loo0king at traditional Chinese art work, in hope that we can create an oriental atmosphere in the movie. In rural China some farmers stumbled across the army when digging for springs. Then archaeologists were encouraged to search across the rest of the area. Overall they unearthed just over 8000 statues, ranging from 6 foot to 6'5(smaller rankin soldiers being smaller and officers being taller) . I thought it would be a good idea to have a soldier modelled on one of these statues trying to find his group. I think this would work well as there's a lonely feel to the song.