Tripple Final: D4M + TMBD Conojoined Project

New Intro, Tower Remix

Gathering the pieces

In an effort to avoid the embedding issues I’ve been having with Vimeo (giving me a text link instead of actually embedding the video into the page) I uploaded the pieces of what will become the finished animatic/ teaser trailer thus far.

The portion above will be the beginning, and will introduce the main character as the end of his journey to this monumental tower thats filled to the brim with the enemies hes sworn to defeat. He stops at the edge of the surrounding city and is attacked, at that point he retaliates which faded into the next scene where hes entering into the actual castle.

The weakened and helpless townspeople who populate the area closest to the tower watch as he enters. Since its been suggested that I redesign the tower to be more foreboding and menacing, I’m changing the townspeople into more beasts and monsters who are too scared to stop the main character.

After an upward panning shot the scene changes to his first confrontation with the “spirit of balance” who has become trapped within the tower. They trade blows, the spirit expels blades from its body which the main character dodges. He then backflips and fires his guns which leads into the fight with the spirit of destruction, a fiery lava monster that uses a stone shell. The destruction spirit takes in air and fires its flamethrower which the main character dodges and fights against, breaking the spirits stone shell and releasing it. There will be two more fight scenes with the spirits of greed and fear.

This portion will serve as the middle of the piece, and features the beginning of the battle with the final villain.

The very end of the piece will be a continued battle between the main character and the villain and will also shed a a little light onto the significance of the tower and the state of the character’s world.

Gear Twisting

My research and judgment is going to focus on figuring out the clarity of my actual animatic. I’m going to be asking what elements read clearly keeping in mind that my audio is going to have  narration that describes why things are going on from the main character’s point of view. The narration will circle heavily around his motivation and will give important hints to the overall plot.

I also want to get advice about what elements would make my idea clearer ( more plot, longer action sequences, clearer frames, etc.)

And finally I want to gather advice on an appropriate color scheme. I have one in mind but since color isn’t really my strength it would be helpful to have some directional nudging.

Last Weeks Post

I thought I had this up already. It kind of slipped my mind. I’m trying to collect up some sound effects right now (gunshots, explosions, etc.) as well as some light music.

Redone Animatic (no audio) from Nelson Givens on Vimeo.

Rough Intro Animatic

Rough Animatic from Nelson Givens on Vimeo.

Story Path Exploration

In these rough storyboard panels the main character is getting roughed up be a few goons in an alley. He then grows bored of the situation and shows them just how strong he is by backing the guy holding him into the wall behind him. The main character, once freed then turns around and hits the goon to the ground. The good partner comes lunging at the main character who redirects his punch and takes advantage of an opening, leading to a crushing blow to the goons chest.

I’ve been throwing around ideas for what I’m going to develop for this story. I’m not going to really tackle the entire thing, but instead try and polish a select part like a beginning scene, a fight, or maybe even a sort of preview/trailer kind of piece.

In this collection of panels the main character is entering the tower that is literally sapping the energy from the planet. He pulls out his pistols as the camera shifts to a shot of the towns people who are just as scared of him as they are the tower. He then shoots the doors open and walks inside.

Character Exploration

The original story had my main character ascending this space tower as a pert of a larger competition that streches across galaxies and dimensions. The space towers would be like mobile boxing rings stacked on top of eachother, making getting to the top only possible if you’ve beaten everyone on the lower levels. I wanted to have these ships being manipulated by a faw away enemy or group who wanted to obtain the strongest and more powerful life forms for study and replication. Then I thought about it and realized I wouldn’t feel comfortable with this large shadow organization unless my main character confronted them at some point.

Then the time it would take to establish setting, characters, motivations for these characters, plot elements like what the space tower is and why its there, the battles between the characters, a realization of the larger picture, the time it would take to get to the final manipulating shadow organization, the time it would take to actually confront the shadow organization, etc. was way too much.

Right now I’m trying to develop a much smaller explanation for these characters and what they’re trying to do.

D4M:Final Project: In Class

For my project I wanted to dig deeper into a story I’m currently developing for Time Based Media Design. I’m still working through the characters and the exact logistics of the story.

Inspirations

Its kind of hard pinning down my artistic inspirations since I don’t usually think about where I’m drawing from. However when I really sit down and examine how I draw and the directions I’ve pushed myself in two sources seemed to really stick out.

The first being Hiroyuki Imaishi, the animation director behing Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (pictured above), a crazy fast paced anime about the the a group of the few remaining humans on Earth revolting against the opressive beast men after being driven underground. His style is very frantic and dynamic in both coloring and linework. There used to be some videos of rough key animations on youtube but I’m guessing they’ve been taken down since I’m unable to find them again. The best I can come up with as an example is this anime music video.

My second biggest influence is the artisti style of the manga Hellsing by Kohta Hirano.

I’ve come to enjoy his style because of hthe way he pays such close attention to detail one page while breaking shapes and forms down simply to convey dynamic motions the next.

I suppose my ideal animation style would be a clever blend of the elements I like about these two artists, a nice mixture of rich detail, functional lively abstraction of forms, and dynamic movements and actions.