Welcome to 19 to 25 January 2015. Hectic task switching at the dayjob this week sucked a lot of my energy away so I didn’t get much done after hours, but it’s the Australia Day long weekend this weekend so I’m modelling an Australian animal. A quoll to be precise.

This quoll is slated to appear in two shots of “A moment in the sun” from the waist up. Since both appearances are waist up, I’m not bothering to model any legs. Waist-up is fine. Just like a newsreader.

I started doing a screencast recording for the quoll’s build process (just like the old days!) but for some reason the screencasting was interfering terribly with sculpting. So, no screencasts until I’m ready to retopo him. Maybe tomorrow. Making a screencast, in particular doing the narration, is time I could be spending dragging the movie towards being finished. Admittedly so is playing Far Cry 4, but some days you just want to hop on a friendly elephant and trample goons.

The rewrites are still ongoing – at this point the story’s done and it’s all dialogue and gag rewrites, just trying to funny it up, give it more snap. The biggest story and design task remaining is Pointy. He’s coming along well but I’ve yet to nail a voice and character tone for him. I’ve got a running gag for him which shows some promise, a good character bit. 🙂

Over the week I read The Noble Approach, a book about the renowned animation designer Maurice Noble. It made me realise that I have done precious little production design for this project, yet at the same time the book gave me a solid idea of what points design is involved when making a cartoon. It’s a solid and wisdom-packed book which I can highly recommend.

Hopefully the day job eases off next week so I can get stuck into the movie again and shunt it along from rough animatic to planning. If my whole working year is like this though, the movie’s going to take a very very very very very long time to find the energy for. Wish me luck!