MoTR Production Update: Week 28
Damn. Week 28 of updating this Production Blog. What even is time?
Current Status:
General:
How goes things in the life of Charlie? Welp, I ran out of ADHD meds for about 2 weeks and ho-boy did I feel that ADHD scatter brain come back with a vengeance.
With that said I've recently managed to get some more and I'm back on the MoTR grind.
So the focus for the past weeks surprisingly hasn't really been on the storyboarding for episode 1. Instead I've been working on a much bigger Scribble Short than my previous ones that goes into introducing MoTR to the audience.
Unlike the other Scribble Shorts that are usually 20 to 30seconds long and feature one character on a screen at a time. This one involves multiple.
So that's what I've spent about the last week doing. Previews in coming.
Scribble Shorts:
SO!
The next short is a big one! In fact it's the biggest we've done so far.
I've been planning this one for a long time because about half a year ago now, Perogi (voice actor for Potas) decided to record a small little song he came with for Member of The Revelry, in character! It was awesome! Thus, since then, I've always had a vague plan to use it in a short that would go into further detail explaining what MoTR is.
Now. I have spent the last 4 days or so animating the first song part of the short. Which you can view here:
There's still more work to be done. Primarily I will be working on the "explainer" portion of this short, in which the characters break the 4th wall and go into details about what MoTR is and how the audience can support the series.
All the VAs got a line or two, Shannon worked her audio editing skills and get everything sounding as good as possible and Adam edited the Scribble Short theme song to be loopable. Teamwork baby!
So this will be my focus for the coming days.
To be honest I'm not sure if I should animate the characters saying the lines the during the explainer part or resort to using titles and credits like I've done in the MoTR Crew page. The titles would certainly take less time... but also feels kinda lazy? And with regards to MoTR I always feel the urge to go the extra distance. ... Mostly in the hope that the effort will eventually translate into success. :P
Storyboards:
As you've read above my focus for the past weeks really has been primarily on the Scribble Short. But before I switched my focus to that I had been focusing on the boards, which I'm raring to get back to.
So I've made so progress but not as much I was ideally like. But for a good reason. Never the less I'm pretty happy with how the last boards came out as it was a complete rework of an older shot.
Old vs New comparison:
Yep doing this again!
So the old version of this short was this:
As we can see, the original idea was for us to be viewing the shot from a semi top down perspective that pans across with Hawkins. This was the shot chosen before we had worked out how we would be going about animating this series. As such in retrospect it would be VERY difficult to do.
Not least because of the angle making it that we would need to use many 2D layers to make the character look correct in perspective, but also we'd have serious issues in regards to shadows be cast by the 2D layers on the 3D model of the ship.
So let's the see the new version of the shot:
As you can see I've elected to zoom the shot in far closer and have the camera follow Hawkins during their fall, keeping them in the centre of the frame and at a locked distance.
This should mean that the animation portion of the production on this shot is far easier. The animation itself uses far less layering, the shadows cast by the 2D animation on the 3D model.
I also think from a narrative perspective it adds to that feeling of instability and being lost which Hawkins, at this point in the story, is 100% feeling. Furthermore, the impact of Hawkins hitting the board is far more impactful from this angle.
My plan is to add a new shot after this, from directly in front of Hawkins, who will go through the same motions as in the old animatic of this shot.
Looking forward to getting back to boarding.
Future work:
Yep. The coming weeks are focus on the same old. Get the Scribble Short done and the move onto the storyboards and power through as much of it as I can before the next update.
Every day, more progress. Day by day.
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