It’s time for 23 to 29 August 2015. This weekend I cross the five hundred hour mark on “A moment in the sun” – five hundred hours of writing, rewriting, sketching, resketching, concepting, reconcepting, modelling, remodelling, rigging, rerigging.. you get the idea. 🙂

I’ve finished the thumbnails for Scene 7 and Scene 9, leaving me one more scene to go – Scene 4: “Gronky helps Pointy unsuccessfully”. Scene 4 is looming somewhat ominously.

Scene 9 “Pointy’s mystical journey” is pure slapstick, one gag after another. I’ve been worried about Scene 9 but it came together during a lie-in on Saturday morning. I replayed the sequence in my head over and over again until it worked, then scribbled what I came up with into my bedside sketchbook. Even found a spot for an extra gag. One should never underestimate their creative abilities when half-awake and tucked up in bed. 🙂

I’ve started learning the basics of digital painting to help with the process of art direction. It’s good to be able to see things in living colour without having to sculpt and shade them in 3D. I’m not sure if I’ll ever put in the required time to get properly awesome at it but some skills are always better to have than none. This week’s image is a short exploration about what the geometry of the rocks will look like. It turned out a bit too angular so I don’t think I’ll use it. Classic cartoony round granite rocks feel like a better direction to go in.

Also this week I started writing a tutorial about making animatics and story reels in Blender. The first draft gets sillier the longer it goes on:

Did you notice the Opacity slider? It does what you’d think it does – it makes ghoooosts. Woooo. Spooky ghoooosts.

I’m not sure if the story reel tutorial is a whim project or a real thing yet. Whim projects are like fireworks – a blaze of intense energy followed by a sputter and silence. But there’s many times during the film making process where I want to let fresh ideas settle for a bit so I can come back and look at them objectively. Putting together a tut could be a good palate-cleanser. 🙂

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!