MoTR Production Update: Week 4

AHOY SAILOR-ROOOoooosssss!

Never said "Sailoroos" in my life but here we are, new horizons.

Another week has passed. Things are getting hotter. I did archery earlier this week. It was good. I apparently have a natural archer stance... Also managed to get more golds then anyone else #humblebrag.

Current Status

General

Yeppers, we're plugging away where and when we can.

Around Christmas time we created and sent a PDF of Member of The Revelry to the Annecy Animation Festival MIFA scheme. Hopefully we'll be hearing back from that soon. Regardless of if we get placed or not we'll hopefully be attempting to contact other festival and animation meetups in order to show off what we have for MoTR.

At the end of the day this project flies or falls based our audience. So no pressure. ;D

The Design Guide

We're almost done with the design guide. All the expression sheets are done and now we're onto creating pose sheets then hand sheets and mouth sheets (which should take much less time than the pose and expression sheets).

Expression Sheets

MoTR Expression sheets for Hyppos, Cassettel, Reveller and Lamenter.

Doing these expression sheets was interesting for me. All of these characters (despite being part of the main cast) are characters I haven't drawn nearly as often as Hawkins, The Powder Monkeys and Eliot. As such I was learning some of their expressions as I was drawing them.

In Hyppos' case his head is rarely ever going to been seen from the front. It was important however that I show that his snout can extend and contracted based on his expression. It was also important that everyone be aware that one of his eyes is covered with an eye patch, he has a scar across is mouth and one of his smaller spikes on the side of his head has been cut off at the end.

With Cassettel it was interesting to include her facial tentacles in her expressions which was an element of her design I hadn't considered before. It was also really fun to really lean into the more cartoon eye symbols to help illustrate her moods.

Reveller is a character I am both very familar drawing and not. She's the character that went through the most amount of redesigns during the conceptual peroid. With that said, throughout the shorts and Episode 1 (in which the first pass of the boards has been completed) her emotional range hasn't been too over the top. So learning what her expressions would be in more emotional moments was fun.

Finally Lamenter. Lamenter is a character who actively tried NOT to emote. It's part of the reason she's missing facial features. Still as a character she needs to emote enough so we can potentially read her mood, despite her efforts to cover that up. It was a challenge to figure out how to get a character to emote facially without traditionally emotive features such as; eyebrows, mouth and with only one pupil.

Pose Sheets

A pose sheet for Hawkins and The Powder Monkeys for MoTR.

With the expressions sheet completed for The Design Guide I've moved my focus onto completing a series of Pose Sheets to better understand how the characters move and interact.

To that end, and with a focus on character interaction, I've decided to group up the characters based on who they would most often interact with. There's always subgroups in a bigger group.

So to start, we have Hawkins interacting with The Powder Monkeys. It was important to me that these poses include examples of the characters drawn from above and below, to show The Powder Monkeys running (on their hands) and poses that are examples of the characters personalities.

I always enjoy drawing Hawkins and The Powder Monkeys interacting. They're just fun. :D

The Coming Week

1rregularCharlie

Directly after I finish writing this update I'll be continuing the pose sheets. the next one focusing of Eliot, Cassettel and Campus. Gonna be fun.

After the design guide is done I'll be moving onto getting the shot list of the 2nd short completed with the toonboom files ready to go. After which I will be, FINALLY, begining rough animation on the 2nd short, updating and adding to The Animation Guide as I go.

My hope is that we can try and tackle the rough animation for the shorts and slowly introduce other animators and artists to lift the weight of production off of our shoulders a tad. Obviously however to do that we need to have a good grasp of HOW this series will be animated and be able to convey the technical aspects comprehensively. Essentially we're trying to build the pipeline of an animated production piece by piece.

For me personally, I've been a little out of sorts this week. Think it's probably due to my usual daily schedule being pushed out of order and being who I am, I'm quite sensitive to that. :P

Natka

Natka is currently busy at FUMI right now their game; Mouse: PI for Hire is coming out this month! She's worked on this game full-time whilst I was hired as a freelance rough animator for some of the bad-guys. Very proud of how this game is looking and the team behind it are lovely. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nrmJSgqYTI

Mouse: PI for Hire Offical Launch Trailer.

Katherine

Katherine is in the thick of her studies right now but is still making progress on the ship model when she can.

THAT WAS THIS WEEKS UPDATE. SEE YOU ON THE SEAS BETWEEN NEXT WEEK!