Lights, camera, animaction!

So here it is. I've finally decided to start a blog for this little short film. This has been my brainchild for the last nine months, having to be fed, nurtured and educated into something that can stand its own as a story. The ironic part I guess is that I've just started with animation now after 9 months, so its almost like the thing is being birthed after a sort of intellectual pregnancy period. Strange metaphor, but it's the way I'm thinking about things at the moment.

At present, about 90% of the short's assets are complete, with some polygonal detailing, and a bit more shader and texture work to be done once animation for the whole thing is locked down. Story is for the most part, locked down as well. I'm a sucker for this, and maybe its a weakness, but I do often come up with cool or funny things the character could do between sequences, or during a general action. That stuff is sort of all still unplanned and left to impromptu thinking. I'm on a bit of a steep schedule for animation at the moment, needing to do 90 - 175 frames per day. After that, I will build on my arcs, poses, and other principles until I just go bonkers and can't do it any more.

A lot of future talk here though, the best is to take it one day at a time and make sure I'm working towards concentric short term goals. It's so easy for a creative to get bored and frustrated with their end goal and just give up. I promise myself to not focus on the end goal just yet!

It would be unfair of me to just talk and not have anything to show for it, so here are some of the initial concept sketches, with more pre-production content to come further down the road: