Jazzy Storyboards

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! It's 2013 and 2012 is in the past. (who would have guessed we would have made it past the end of the world on Dec 21 2012). I thought I should start the year off right with a nice post for my readers. Remember a while ago, I spilled the beans about a new cartoon that I am working on. Well here is the next installment of the creative process. These pages are the results from the gag and story idea sessions I had (unfortunately I was by myself and had nobody to bounce ideas off of). Haven't really worked on it lately though. I bought a car six weeks ago and while the weather was nice, I spent most of my free time working on it. Then once it colder, I took the top off of my desk and stripped the old varnish off, cut half of it up and made a hole in the middle for the animation disk. I finished that a couple days ago and I am currently letting the danish oil finish dry. I don't know how much protection it will provide. I might have to put a poly(polyurethane) coat for durability. Finally these last couple of days I have been painting and playing around with calligraphy, which I am really bad at.

Spilling the Beans

Well, these last couple of weeks I have been working in complete secrecy, in the dark, damp underground cartooning lair that I call home. Slaving away day after day on a new animated short that I want to make. Right now I have it storyboarded, and timed out on barsheets (explanation to come in another post).

Lets start off from the beginning though. Where it all started. I wanted to start with an incredibly simple premise.
     - Two guys have trouble getting into a club, and then once they are inside, they find a girl and have trouble inside the club.-

Stay tuned for more titillating images to come.

ArtRage Demo

I've been writing up a story so that I can animate a new short, so that has been occupying my spare time. This time though, I'm going to do it right and take my time. Drawing is coming to me a lot easier than it ever has before and after taking those special effects animation lessons for Adam Philips my animation and timing is much better. Now, I need to focus on everything else, mostly story, music and sounds and backgrounds (my weakest points).

I'm planning on composing my own music, and just making it a very simple jazz tune, but one that correlates perfectly with my story. Then once I have the basic timing and structure down, hopefully one of my buddies can elaborate on the tune. This post by Stephen Worth at animation resources has been my biggest inspiration for composting my own music. I played piano as a kid so reading and writing music is coming back pretty quickly. To write the music I am using a tiny keyboard, but it works well enough. I've been doing gag sessions by myself, which doesn't work very good, but as long as I take some time away from the drawing board, once i get back to it, ideas flow out for a while. It's pretty hard to change an idea about how the scene will go that you are already envisioning, but for some things I'm glad I was able to brainstorm some better ideas.

I have also been wondering about what program to paint my backgrounds in, seeing as how I'm not the best painter. I just downloaded the demo for ArtRage Studio Pro, and this program is sweet. The learning curve is small, and it mostly just mimics traditional drawing and painting mediums. And it only costs 59$ right now!

Here's my second painting I did with the program.

Not the style that I plan on doing the backgrounds, but I gotta play around with it more.

Right now I am scanning the rough story sketches and the my gag/idea secessions, so I will be posting those shortly. Next up will be storyboarding, then composing the music. Also, I have no time goal for this project, meaning who knows when it will be done. I should be able to work on it though, because I am only taking 6 credits starting on 9/24.