Animation Critique Showreel

And the character run on its own;

Pitch Presentation

Fantastic Voyage Commission Pitch Presentation by megleslie

Presentation Animatic

The final, mostly-timed animatic, complete with sound. The sound is not the final music that will be used in the animation, this is simply a placeholder to show my intentions for the soundscape.

Rather a Lot of Things

So, muggins here has been working in the dark again, even though she promised not to.

To begin with, here's my definitive influence map. I've been on a bit of a Daniel Danger kick lately, and it really shows in my lighting.

 Composition and colour thumbnails. Those last three were where I really hit my stride with the lights.

A little .gif testing how I might animate the glow effect, which I ultimately scrapped in favour of the light-fixed-to-camera idea.

A couple of paintings with which I got into arguments.

And some concept paintings of, from top to bottom, a centrosome containing two centrioles, a group of vesicles approaching a mitochondrion, and the nucleolus within the nucleus.

Commission Script by megleslie

One script.

A rough, not-quite-finished storyboard that's finished enough for me to know what I'm doing.

And an utterly unfinished animatic; there's no sound, and it's almost completely un-timed. The fades are to indicate that the film will be made up of a single continuous shot, with no hard edits at all to suggest a continuing movement through the cell. The animatic will be complete by my pitch on Tuesday.

So there you have it. And only 15 minutes after Sunday ended, too.

Commission Thumbnails 1

 I have two minutes to make an audio-visual revision tool (try saying that ten times fast) on the structure of eukaryotic cells. I won't be going down the heavily stylistic route or the 'whee look how cool science is' route (science is already cool), instead I'll be making my animation for people with a degree of prior knowedge. This is due in no small part to the fact that I am a terrible teacher.

 Studies of cell components. There will be more of these in the future.

A very simple map of the cell. Nothing is labelled, but I know what everything means.

This is one possible 'route map' for the animation. Not this particular camera move, obviously, but the 'itinerary'; nucleus, nucleolus, smooth ER, rough ER, ribosome, Golgi complex, vesicle, mitochondrion, centriole, lysosome. This path roughly follows the movement of RNA and protein through the cell, with some license taken to fit everything in.

As I'm not going to be stylising the structure or anatomy of the cell, I have a different problem in creating visual interest. Therefore, I'll be focusing on my screencraft, particularly lighting. At this point I have two possible 'gimmicks' for my lighting, one being lighting inside the cell components themselves that switch on and off, and the other being a light locked to the camera to give the sense of an explorer carrying a torch, or a submarine and its light. I have no doubt more light setups will follow.

CGAA ACT Speedpaint Challenge 01

All right, all right, so it's twenty minutes past midnight on day two. I'm nocturnal, don't judge me.

In other news, abstraction and I still don't get along. We had an agreement; I didn't like it, it didn't like me. We were considering a mutually beneficial restraining order until this came along.