Charlie Character Expressions

As I am preparing to compile my works into my Bible for pre production,  I am now completing the final touches,  and have found that that  I don't have any facial expressions examples for characters, which for me I always find helpful in deciphering how the character will act and feel. So Ive completed a couple of expression sheets for this character Charlie, one is colour, which is a rough colour scheme for now, as I haven't really decided on a style. The other is more rough, just in grey scale.  

Colour Expressions:

Grey-scale Expressions:

Deep Shot update

As the Deep project is drawing to a close in a few weeks, it has finally come to the animating stage. Luckily, as time was running short we have gained another animator, and it looks as though we should get everything done. We all have 3 shots to complete, and as its all in black and white, its mainly a process of key framing the main action, rough animation and then clean up. Today I have managed to do the rough animation for all 3 of my shots. Below are the shots.

1: Fall down shot. Caroline ends her short sprint by falling to her knees at the dead body.

2: Turn over shot. Caroline reaches to the body on the ground, turns him over and gasps.

3: Close-up lip sync shot. The boss greets caroline and gives her a talking too.

Im reasonably pleased with these shots, but they are still in the rough animation phase. The next stage is to confirm the movements and sort out any alterations, clean up the line, and colour in the shadow.

Concepts, More Concepts!

After developing Ron a lot, I am now focusing my efforts onto the kid, who I now know I want to be around the age of 10-12. And male. Before I felt he needed to be a young man rather than child, but having a kid means for more emotion, and empathy.

Here is an early concept of the boy / child 

I really liked the style of this character, but I felt I made him look alittle too old. So I attempting to make him young in the next piece, also playing around with a bit more of a stylized look to see if I wanted to pursue it. I didn't. 

This final concept is one that took around 7 hours to complete. I particularly like this style I've managed to achieve here, and although it needs some work I think the age of the child is right here, so am going to pursue this character type further into another concept. 

:)

Pocket sized grandparents Concept

Just a rough concept piece for this 3rd year project, of which i still Haven't found a new name for!

A few developments I have decided on are that there is not longer a female, grandma character. I feel having another character would cause there to be two stories, a love story and the relationship between the grandparents and the boy. I really want to focus the story on the relationship of the boy and grandpa, so am developing this idea further.

here is the concept, playing around with scale to emphasise how much Ron is shrinking. Also my first time attempting matte painting, so needs a bit of work still! 

(the hand is a placeholder for now, and the piece is a WIP) 

Pocket Sized Grandparents: General Update

So after last week, where I presented my idea / character for a second time I received some pretty good feedback. Firstly I need a name change for the whole thing which isnt a massive issue anyway as the title was always a working title. Secondly my character designs seemed to ahve gone down well but I need to develop some actual concept work rather than just character sketches. In other words put the characters into situations that they would actually find themselves in within the film. For example Ron and Iris would constantly struggle to find clothes that would fit them, so I need to develop some images that would suit that idea. 

Last night I quickly drew up some more sketches of Ron, of which I feel I have a good understanding of as a character now, how he would move ect. 

Ron perhaps after he has lost Iris, and only has her wedding ring left (which would have been to big for her fingers as they shrank) 

Ron cloth less, with just a few rags he has safety pinned to his scrawy body. 

Lastly, and most importantly, it was mentioned that my main character should be the boy / teenager that is looking after Ron and Iris. We decided that this film would focus on two points, the struggle of getting older and the struggle of looking after your grandparents, but decided that the main focus should be the latter as its the only that I could personally relate too. I hadn't given a thought to what the teenager would look like, so have now got to work on that. Below is a rough concept I have after a bit of research and design.

Pocket Sized Grandparents: Ron Update

So after posting my last update I decided that Iris needed a lot of work, so
thought I would quickly try and get a solid picture of Ron down so I felt comfortable with him that I 

could spend the rest of my time working on Iris. I thought It would give me a better idea

of how he might move by doing some gesture poses. Following this, I decided to do a very very rough 'take' animation test of Ron.

So here is there the very rough test of Ron, sort of a 'take' of sorts. This was just to give me a rough idea of how he might move, but am going to do some better tests this week.