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And into 20 to 26 September 2015 we go.

This week I cobbled together a new mid-movie scene from the old intro and the end of the mid-movie scene that was already there. In rough form it appears to work just fine.

I don’t have a firm idea for a new intro yet, just some tentative ideas that don’t fit together well yet. Not to worry. It’ll come.

Other than that, not much new to report. It’s been a quiet week for creativity – pain and painkillers tend to do that.

Another three weeks at the dayjob then it’s time to head over to The Netherlands again for Blender Conference 2015. I’m really looking forward to going back to Amsterdam to do the tourist thing, hang out with some fellow Blenderheads for a few days, visit The Swan at the Rijksmuseum and maybe even pay a visit to KLIK! Animation Festival too.

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Don’t panic, Gronky! It’s only 13 to 19 September 2015.

This week in Australia we had yet another mid-term switch of Prime Minister. Inspired by his innovation-loving speech, I finally bought http://quollism.com/ and started setting it up. There’s not much up at the moment though you’re of course welcome to play with the floating quoll head.

I’ve also picked up bursitis in my right shoulder which is pretty painful and slowing me down somewhat. It’s exactly a month until I arrive in Amsterdam for Blender Conference 2015 and I hope the stupid bursitis doesn’t ruin everything.

Moviewise, there has been progress of a sort. I’ve put the story comic in front of two other people and the feedback has been pretty consistent – some of it is laugh out loud funny but it doesn’t gel together.

In short, this exact version of the story goes no further. It’s rewrite time!

A key scene – The Dance – is getting axed.

The feedback I got was confusion and puzzlement over what I was trying to do. The Dance is an emotional crisis point for Gronky and leads to the turning point from despair to hope in a humourous way, so its more concise replacement scene has to do the same thing. But I can’t leave it how it is.

The introduction also needs rewriting. I’m making a list of stuff to cover off in the introduction and being as brutal as I can – I’m aiming for the barest amount of back story and character development I need while introducing the comedic causes and effects in play. There is literally a list of bullet points to cover. The quicker I can do that, the quicker I can get to the gags. 🙂

The rewrite only affects two bits of the film, the bits replacing the rewritten bits are going to be much shorter and tighter, and much of the work I’ve done so far – more than half of the story – will remain as is. As rewrites go, this is less comprehensive than the one I did in June. So there’s that. 🙂

That’s all for this week.

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Welcome to 6 to 12 September 2015. This week’s graphic is a version of Scene 2 that’s being reworked. Read on to find out why..

Enough time has passed since I finished off the story art, so it was time to decide – good enough? Needs more work?

Late Sunday evening, I took a look at the story comic. I decided that it was all crap and I suck and why the hell did I ever bother to start this stupid project, what the hell made me think I could do this. Self-knowledge prevented me from taking this emotional outburst at all seriously. I waited ten minutes and looked at it again. This time I was full of enthusiasm for the project and affection for the characters and how could I not go ahead with this?

Sometimes Sundays are hard to get the hang of.

I left it until the following evening to make the call that yes, the blueprint I had was good enough – definitely not perfect but certainly good enough to make a film out of.

Then came the exciting part that every film maker looks forward to: spreadsheets! Shot lists, dialogue sheets, asset breakdowns..

..but then I remembered I hadn’t shown anyone else what I had. I’d missed a crucial step.

The thing is, I’ve lived with this story for so damn long that nothing about it confuses me. I know how it works. But is it going to make sense to anyone else? And even if it makes sense, will it be clear what’s going on? Only one way to find out…

Today I showed the story comic to a friend. The big thing that came out of that feedback was that at first he thought the intended entertainment value was a case of schadenfreude watching Pointy come to grief. We talked it over and he said if it was more about Gronky trying and failing to help Pointy, I should establish that Gronky is a helpful person – his suggestion was that Gronky should help out a worm before he gets to Pointy. That way his upset at failing to help Pointy would have a clearer context.

This is where it helped to know my characters. Gronky is more henpecked by his own conscience than a desert-faring boy scout, and Gronky’s already aware that helping Pointy is not going to be easy (though the audience doesn’t quite know why yet – it’s hinted at, then revealed). The whole reluctance to help Pointy out is shown in Scene 2 (this week’s graphic), but this is animation – instead of hinting, I can manifest Gronky’s conscience as an actual character that literally nags him into helping Pointy out. No shame making the context a bit more obvious.

This of course means the story comic and spreadsheets will have to be adjusted very slightly once I’ve worked out the specifics. And if I go ahead with the conscience thing, I’ll have to do some concept art and tech dev for Gronky’s conscience. But it’s only a little bit of work. Probably.

See you next week!

EDIT: The day I posted this, it had been 500 days since production started – a production anniversary!

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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!

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16 to 22 August 2015 calling..

It’s been not the best week for making cartoons. I’ve drawn scene 6 and an incomplete version of scene 7. Monday to Friday was almost a complete write-off from doing training for work. I was up early and had no energy left for making cartoons in the evening – not that it mattered because I had to be in bed early too. Living off-chronotype sucks.

As promised last week, some words on Scene 6. Codename: The Dance. Here’s an example of how a key sequence can evolve over the course of developing the story.

“The Dance” first showed up back in November last year: Pointy is steadfastly refusing to get out of Gronky’s shadow, so Gronky playfully leads Pointy back and forth across the screen while prancing around like a buffoon. In a dialogue-heavy short, it is the big physical comedy bit and everything until then builds up to it.

In animatic form it has reduced multiple people to tears of laughter.

As the story changed around it, it made less sense to keep it as it was. Keeping it where it was took more and more contriving. People began to ask questions about what it was doing there. It stuck out to them.

It didn’t stick out to me because I wrote it.

Stories get changed in chunks and stop fitting together (thematically, tonally, pacing-wise, etc), so once in a while everything has to be made to work as a whole again. If a particular bit of the story is really awesome, I maybe don’t care as much as I should about making it work as part of the entire story. I might re-tool it a little bit but I’m often reluctant to really get in there and fix it – where "fixing” sometimes means “getting rid of” – because I’m afraid of screwing it up.

What it comes down to is that it’s a damn funny scene and part of me wants people to see it even if it means sabotaging the rest of the film. Sometimes it’s hard to tell genuinely valid intuitions from reluctance powered by self-doubt. So it goes.

Over time it became clearer and truer to me that it was not the right scene, even if it was a good scene.

When the scene was first devised, Gronky was much more playful. In that context, The Dance worked. To start with, Pointy was in Gronky’s shadow to try to shame him. Later in the “dodgy entrepreneur Pointy” version, Pointy was staying in Gronky’s shadow because he’d tricked Gronky into starting a mobile shade service and he didn’t want let his new cash cow out of his sight. (There’s a full animatic for this version. You may even get to see it one day…)

In the March 2015 rewrite, Gronky’s objective changed a little bit. Instead of getting Pointy out of his shadow, he wants to distract Pointy with the dance. To say any more would only reveal how crappy the character work in that rewrite was. Too crappy. Wasn’t on my radar. The desperate urge to feel like I was making progress overwhelmed my better judgement and long story short I made an eight minute 3D animatic without writing the story properly first.

In the July 2015 rewrite which focussed more on character and pacing, Gronky is no longer playful nor dumb. Pointy is no longer an angry shadow-hating citizen or a scheming entrepreneur. The character motivations and character dynamics leading up to that point have changed entirely. Of course the scene had to change.

All along I’m asking myself: “What can I keep from the original scene that will still work in this new version?”

I’m not sure if this new Scene 6 will be as funny as the old version. I haven’t seen it in action yet. It feels less like an isolated show-piece and more like part of a story. For the sake of story-craft, I’m happy with that. I just hope after all this it’s still going to be able to reduce people to tears of laughter like the old version could.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you again next week. 🙂