MoTR Production Update: Week 31
Would you look at that. I skipped a week. WHAT GIVES CHARLIE?! Hold your horses, I'll get to that. ;D
Current Status:
General:
So how's my life going? Ehhhh... mixed.
There's a bit a bit of death in the family lately. I wouldn't say I particularly close to any of them, but my parents were, whom I love, so when they're sad I'm sad. :(
Love you Mum. Love you Dad. <3
Never the less, There's been lots of good moments these last 3 weeks! Finn A. (voice of Eliot) ran a one shot DnD session for myself, Katherine, Olivia (Lamenter) and Perogi (Potas) and it was SO MUCH FUN. Myself and Katherine were mostly sat marvelling at the vocal talents of those around us. Plus I got to play my depressed divorced dad character, who's made a bad deal with a demonic sword; Peon Nickles. It was pure chaos and great fun. Now I'm trying to find time to potentially put together a home brew campaign to play with the MoTR crew.
As always, I have a million ideas and zero time.
I'm also very happy to say the Scribble Short I was powering through last update has been completed and actually lead to some more changes to a few character designs! More details further down this post. With the longest Scribble Short out of the way I've turned my focus back to the re-storyboarding efforts for Episode 1. It's been going really well and I've been liking the results though I'll admit I get a little frustrated going back over work already done. Though I do enjoy improving them. We'll go through it further down. ;D
TLDR: Some death in my family. But MoTR is progressing. Some alterations to character designs. The longest Scribble Short so far has been completed and I've gotten back to storyboarding!
Scribble Short - What is MoTR?:
Like I mentioned above, the longest, most ambitious, Scribble Short animation that I was working on in the last update has been completed and posted online! Check it out:
Phew! This was a lot of work.
Big props to the whole team for chipping in where they could and the whole VA cast for being so game to do some voice work. Honestly, we've somehow lucked out and gathered some of the mostly lovely people to work with. :D
Our man Perogi gets an extra big shout out for recording that lovely little ditty he sang at the start. He actually recorded it about half a year ago and I just let it gather dust all this time.
Fool that I was.
Reception:
Across the board the reception to the last short has all been very positive, with lots of encouraging comments and even some donations into our KoFi to help us along (all of which is greatly appreciated and keeps wind in our sails).
It was actually because of these lovely comments that I took a step back and decided to stop worrying about view numbers. I'd love for it to be higher but I don't want to warp the format of the shorts to better fit the algorithm across these social media platforms. I've decided to simply enjoy the back and forth with the commenters and be satisfied that knowledge of Member of The Revelry is spreading.
With that said, reposting and sharing the shorts around to any whom might be interest helps us out a ton. ;D
Coloured Characters:
So this segment is mostly here to seamlessly lead into the following segment where I discuss the particular character design aspects that were changed as a result of this short.
But before I get to that I want to mention what lead to that decision.
As you've no doubt noticed, the Scribble Shorts are only really semi-animated. I do not bother animating lip-sync, animate on 1s or line and colour any of the characters. This is literally just to keep the production time down. These shorts are meant to be simply little bits of animation that introduce the audience to the MoTR characters on a basic level and give me something to practise on.
So having the characters actually be fully drawn and coloured for some of these shots was kind of the first time I've actually attempted to draw all the characters grouped up, fully coloured, in a single shot and it lead to some discoveries...
Edited Model-sheets:
Initial Thinking:
It was the shot above that made me realise that I had made a few mistakes in character design. In particular; the colour palettes of various characters.
See, I always try to keep my character designs relatively simple for ease of animation, whilst still being distinct enough that their respective silhouettes are unique and fit the characters themselves.
But this also extends to colour palettes. My thinking initially was that by having a lot of The Revelry share specific colours I could emphasise the comradery and found family aspect of the crew. But what we discovered is something I should have realised far sooner.
When the characters are grouped up, they blended into each other.
Honestly I should have realised this issue long again, but hey. Better late than never.
Natka pointed out this was probably going to be an issues ages ago... As always she was correct. :P
Eliot Recolour:
So the first redesign I tackled was a simple colour shift of Eliot's bodysuit.
Eliot's clothing is meant to be a direct copy of Captain Reveller's due to their absolute hero worship of her. The issue arose however that when their limbs stretched over one another (such as Eliot loosing balance and his leg kicking out to try maintain it, over where Reveller was standing from the camera's perspective) the colours blurred together.
So the solution was very simple:
Simply slightly changing the colour of Eliot's body suit really solved the problem without changing the overall design at all. Now instead of being Reveller's plum colour, it's now a dark purple.
Carbo Recolour:
So with my notion to have a lot of shared colours throughout the Revelry characters broken, I decided that I should actually colour the character's clothing based on what suited them rather than following a uniform colour palette.
Hence the SLIGHT change to Carbo's hoody, which was previously coloured the same was Reveller's bodysuit. Now it's more of a lighter maroon colour.
Potas Redesign:
So here's where I began actually altering some of the designs of the characters.
With Potas I went back to giving him more a blue focus like his original concept. I changed his shirt and wristbands to a blue shade and decided to augment this change by giving him a white under shirt with torn off sleeves. Giving his shoulders a bit of a white fluffy rim that I think goes with his rocker vibe.
Not going to lie, I did debate giving him a straight up denim war vest, covered in sewn on patches of bands and designs he likes. Maybe when he's older... and I have the patience/help to animate all that.
Sulfu Redesign:
Sulfu got the most amount of redesign.
Why?
Because I was never really satisfied with her "final" design.
I actually wanted to redesign Sulfu with the safety gloves she was wearing throughout the Dream Science Scribble Short, but it was only when all this came up as an issue I really dove into it. So now Sulfu is rocking a whole engineer get up, complete with giant MAD SCIENCE gloves and a thick brown leather apron. I also changed their plum vest into a dark grey one.
I'm actually really happy with these changes, particularly on Potas and Sulfu because the changes are not so extreme to making animation difficult(er) and still better characterise them through design itself.
Storyboarding:
As always my effort to completely redoing the storyboards of Episode 1 of Member of The Revelry after our rewrite of the original script goes on! Since I completed the last Scribble Short this has been my primary focus. So let's take a look!
Old vs New comparison:
YEPPERS I'M STILL DOING THIS!
So let's take a look at the same sequences between the old and new storyboards (please excuse my terrible audio mixing):
First the old.
Personally I look at these and cringe.
When I began boarding the 1st episode I actually began with the boards with this ACT before the others and I think it really shows. The characters are off model and the transition between shots is very clunky in my mind.
I was also not aware at the time how we would go about mixing the 2D animation and the 3D environment so I chose shots and angles that would actually make our job far harder.
Never the less, it does act as the basis for the updated version.
Here we see my updated version of the same shots.
You can see the initial shot of Hawkins loosing their balance and crashing into the side of the ship and then sitting back up in pain has been split in two.
I believe I described the reasons for the change in another update but I'll breifly go over it now. With the camera locked on Hawkins in profile during their roll to impact the side of ship we simplify the animation. It should mean that we won't need to worry about layering for the rolling potion of this shot and by maintaining the distance of the character to the camera should make the rough animation portion of this production far easier on this shot compared to the old.
The reason for the shot split was that I wanted the camera to be closer to hawkins during the painful sit up and reaction to the canon blast behind them. This way the audience really gets to see Hawkins' reaction and when they turn around to peak over to look over the edge of ship the transition to the next shot is smoother.
The pan out to reveal Hyppos strapped to the front of the ship has been left largely unchanged in action but looks for better in the newer version. Largely owing to me being better at drawing the characters, the use of Melotea's lovely skyscape image in the background and Katherine's continued work on The Grand Vagabond 3D model, even untextured.
The following shots are largely the same except for the changed dialog in regards to Mr Hyppos' lines and better placement and drawings of the characters.
I also pulled the camera back to make everything feel less crowded and added some movements where it felt like appropriate (like Hawkins' recoiling as Cassettel invades their personal space).
Future:
So let me breifly touch upon the things I need to go through in the coming weeks (mostly to remind myself).
Fristly, I need to get the next Scribble Short scripted and to the VAs to work on. I want to be somewhat Halloween focused and feature Lamenter seeing as Olivia is lovely to work with and I feel bad I haven't given her enough vocal work to have fun with. Got something in mind, so I'll be working on that once this is typed up. ;D
Then I got to keep burning through the storyboards and remember to go back and edit boards from ACT 1 and update the designs of the Powder Monkeys where needed. Shouldn't take me too long but might require me to get rid of some of the old boards I had been using from the previous version of the animatic.
Then I basically keep going with ACT 2 and mentally prepare myself for a very tricky chase sequence it will be VITAL to get right.
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