Happy Halloween!!!

With a thesis film as spooky and ghost/monster-oriented as mine, I’d be stupid to not make a post like this. Happy Halloween, everybody!

 

(It’s a Jack-O-Lantern with the Mean Girl’s face carved into it) (“Carved”)

Anyway, in more official news, I did my voice actor recording today! It went really well! It got a bit stressful though when I had like, 2.5 characters left to record and I was suddenly informed that I had only 50 minutes left… but I managed to get it all in!!! It was funny, I got all the actors to do their lines and I finished that at EXACTLY 6:59PM (one minute before my time was up) and as I was about to pack up, I was like “Oh I can just do the lines that I’m voicing next time” (As the main party monster) and the ADR booth technician I was working with was like “How many lines do you have left?” and I’m like “Just 3” and she was just like “Eh, whatever, let’s record them anyway.”

So I really did get everyone’s lines recorded!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY. All I need left to record are the party monsters, and lord knows that’ll be a hoot, haha!

Woo Woo WOoo Woooooooooooooooooooooo!

Happy Halloween! And MUCH more to come, now that I finally have my audio!!

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I FINALLY GOT THE VOICE RECORDING SESSION FOR MY FILM BOOKED, AND ALL MY VOICE ACTORS CAN MAKE IT!

 

Aaaaaand?

 

It’s TOMORROW! ON HALLOWEEN!!!

NOTHING COULD BE MORE

PERFECT

Time to CELEBRATE!!!!

CERTAINLY More to come!!!

Concept Art and Modelling and Stuff!

So my friend/former-fellow-Dreamworks-Intern, Theo Aretos, agreed a while back to do concept paintings for my thesis film! Which is GREAT because I fucking SUCK at designing things. (and yet I took on the challenge of designing my own characters, but whatever, what’s done is done)

 

Anyway, he has so far gotten 2 paintings done: The exterior of the Monster Mansion, and the initial Hallway inside the Monster Mansion that the Hero enters before stumbling upon the party room:

 

And to be quite honest, I am absolutely swept away by these paintings. They’re exactly what I asked for, too — Not super-finished, sketchy paintings that get the shapes and colors down, but don’t bother too much with the detail. So before you get all concerned, I purposefully asked him to keep the paintings sketchy. Because that way, it gives me more freedom when I model these structures into real life! And really, the important thing that these paintings give me is style  and color composition, which are the two things that I am the absolute WORST at when it comes to film-making. So thank you so much Theo!! And I can’t wait to see the rest of the paintings! (That’s right y’all, he’s designing the School Yard, Kid’s Room, Kid’s House, and Party Room as well! And he described his idea for the Party Room recently and I pretty much died with how awesome it sounds, so YEAH BABY shit is getting DONE.

 

Anyway, and just in case you’re concerned about whether or not I’ll be able to model these paintings into real-life 3D models, worry no further!

 

These are 2 production shots of the exterior of the Monster Mansion. It’s not finished, as you can obviously tell, but already it’s looking pretty fancy, in my opinion! I really only need to append another handful of structures and fix some of the sizes before it’s time to start texturing and lighting it! Wooooo.

 

BUT IN OTHER NEWS~

 

I have officially gotten my entire cast-list for voice actors for my film! YESSIREEE! And without further adieu, I give you the list (In order of appearance):

 

Hero: Jesse Pilchen

Hero’s Mom: Celia Rivera-Baron

Mean Girl: Christina Cook

Mean Girl’s Friends (Archer, Bil, and Edgar): Michael Malconian

The Party Monsters: Whichever of my Fraternity Brothers feel like going into a recording booth (none of the party ghosts have any real lines, so it’s not a big deal)

Main Party Ghost: Me!

 

Yes, I’m doing one of the voices. After watching my Animatic through all its stages, I’ve realized that, while I can’t really pull off a middle-shool-boy voice, and CERTAINLY not a middle-school-girl voice, I definitely CAN pull off a goofy Ghost voice. The rest of the actors, however, are other USC students, and I’m SUPER excited to record them! I’ve been struggling to lock down a date with the ADR people, though, but with luck, it’ll happen this coming Wednesday (yes, on Halloween. I’m aware of how perfect that is.).

 

ANYWAY, ONE LAST BIT OF NEWS~

 

I’ve officially decided on which 2D animation software I’m going to use for my film! This was a point of concern because I really don’t like Flash or Toon Boom, because they both function in Vector-Based lines, which quite frankly look like shit in my opinion. They just don’t look like the lines that I draw on paper, whereas animation software that works in Bitmap Lines end up producing work that looks WAY better. It requires more work, but I know that it will pay off in the end. Also, I’m considering having the party monsters be colorless (just filled in with white) both for simplicity’s sake and for style. After all, juxtaposing a full-color world with 2D black-and-white monsters will be… quite jarring, won’t it? 😉

 

Anyway, after shopping around for free (or very cheap) animation software, I found that the best match for me was PAP, or “Plastic Animation Paper,” which is a really fucking fantastic free program that can import footage, animate bitmap-cels on top of it, and it exports that animation really beautifully.

 

I only got this program a couple days ago (and I’ve been partying this past weekend due to Halloween) so I only have a very rough sketch-up of the first bit of 2D Animation I’m doing for the film:

 

 

…and even that rough sketch of the animation isn’t done. I did all of that today though (including figuring out how the goddamned program works, which took time in of itself) so as you can see it’s a fast, lightweight program that, if I put the effort into it, will produce good product. So yay!

 

Oh, and P.S. to those non-animation peeps reading this, the difference between Bitmap Lines and Vector Lines is such: Bitmap Lines are based on pixels, and when you scale them up in size they lose quality. Vector Lines are based on mathematical points in space, and when you scale them up, the points get scaled up, and the computer just fills in based on the new numerical location of those points. So as a result, they lose no quality when they’re resized. However, Vector Lines (because they’re so geometric in nature) don’t look nearly as natural as Bitmap Lines… it’s sort of like the difference between buying a cake from the store and making it yourself. Although the quality isn’t necessarily as perfect as the store-bought cake, there’s more heart in the home-made one.

 

Anyway, that’s all for now! Hopefully this is enough progress to show to my class tomorrow (it’s my group’s turn to present and I’m kind of nervous because I spent 2 of the last 3 weekends either partying or going to NorCal, soooooooooo yea I didn’t actually make that much progress in the last 21 days, gulp) but yea.

 

More to come!

Well…

So this weekend I didn’t do anything. Like, I did a little bit of revision on the Mean Girls’ Friends, but like… yea I didn’t do anything.

 

My excuse, though? I was in NorCal the whole weekend celebrating my dad’s 60th birthday. And if there’s one thing I’ve found to be true over the years, it’s that when I’m spending time in the house I grew up in, I can not do ANY work WHATSOEVER. It’s just a fact. I’ll sit at the computer, I’ll try, but there’s just something in the air, and suddenly I’m off doing something else. Usually looking at Facebook. But basically, this past weekend was a mini-vacation for me, haha.

 

But even though I didn’t do anything, that doesn’t mean that progress wasn’t made on my film!

 

First of all, I did Voice Auditions on Thursday, and while only 5 people came out to audition, I really liked 3 of them, and over the weekend I confirmed with those 3 actors, and I now have voice actors for 5 of my characters in Phantoms In The Dark!!! (One of them will do 3 different characters) I won’t reveal their names yet, however, because I still need to find an actress for one ~very important role,~ but I know who I’ll audition for that, and so in a few days I’ll probably have my full cast list ready. Woohoo!

 

Also, over the weekend I got my first round of feedback for a couple of shots for my film! I submitted W.I.P. playblasts of the shot of the main character climbing over the wall, and the shot of him getting grabbed by the tentacle to two people who I worked with/got to know at Dreamworks, and they both got back to me on what they thought of it! They both thought that my animation of the kid struggling with the tentacle worked really well, which is REALLY exciting to hear, woohoo! They also both agreed that the tip-toe needed work, and they both had suggestions on how to fix that, as well as the wall-climbing. But yea! It’s nothing I can’t do, and I’m super excited to put those shots into their final clean-up stages and get them ready to go! WOooooooooooooooo

 

(here are the shots by the way:)

 

😀 😀

 

Oh and wanna know one other thing I did over this past weekend? I got tickets to see the Misfits live in LA on November 18th.

 

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

More to come!

MEAN GIRL FRIENDS MAKEOVER!!!

Hey, remember those 4 kids I designed to be the Mean Girls’ posse? They have been hardcore revamped based off of comments I got from people I showed them to. And I gotta say, they are looking MUUUCHHHH better. Check it out:

ARCHER (old)

Archer was my favorite of the 4, but he still needed some fixing. His shirt was too informal, and he almost looked too stylish. (One fellow student of mine, Sullivan Brown, made the really apt observation that all of the kids in this posse were looking too stylish, and that kids in Middle School who are trying to be stylish will only ever hit the nail 60 or 70% on the head, unless they’re the son or daughter of a famous person)

ARCHER (new)

And as you can see, I didn’t actually change that much with Archer. I tidied up his shirt a bit, and shortened/rounded out his head (which is actually something I did to all of them).

BIL (old)

Yes, Bil really is only spelled with one L like that. Because I said so. Anyway, as you can see, Bil was looking preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty homosexual and just flat-out weird when I first birthed him.

BIL (new)

But now he’s gone from ‘Mo to ‘Bro! Bro who plays basketball, that is. (You can’t really see it in this photo of him, but the sides of his jersey are blue. How American!) And just like Archer, I also rounded out/shortened Bil’s head.

CASSIDY (old)

Cassidy was my least favorite. Ugly hair, boring clothes, and he looked like a bizarre 40 year old man.

CASSIDY (new)

…And to be honest, I’m still really not impressed with how he’s turning out. He looks much younger here, his hair is slightly better, his clothing’s ok, but really, I don’t feel like he’d fit in with the Mean Girl. She’s too pretty and stylish, and this is just a mess (and his face, ugh).

EDGAR (old)

I kind of know why this happened, but it still surprised me when literally my entire animation class burst into laughter when they saw this guy. But I guess it makes sense — his shirt is unbuttoned down to his bellybutton, and those suspenders, and THAT HAT. It’s all kind of ridiculous. And by “kind of” I mean very.

EDGAR (new)

I like this Edgar MUCH more though. He’s cute, he’s skinny and tall (which is ok for a Middle School boy I guess), and the hat is, needless to say, much better.

Here’s a better look at the hat, btw:

Anyway, I may change the colors of his clothes a bit, and I need to fix his face some, but I like where he’s going otherwise.

Anyway, with that said, I must make an ~important announcement~:

I WANT TO GET RID OF CASSIDY

Shocking, I know. But he’s really just kind of an unfixable mess at this point, and I also realize that reducing the number of kids in the Mean Girls’ posse from 4 to 3 will be very smart for several reasons:

1) Less to animate

2) People will still get the point that she has a group of guys that follows her around

3) All great evil things come in threes! Like Cerberus in Harry Potter, or Draco Malfoy and his two friends! Oops, those were both Harry Potter references. Whatever. Anyway, all bad things come in threes, and so I feel like this makes more sense.

So yea, meet your new friends, Mean Girl! Archer, Bil, and Edgar. They’re not totally done yet, but they’s each at least 80 percent there, I’d say. Woohoo!

More to come

On The Verge

Hey!

So I’m on the verge of getting many things done. Let me list the ways!

– I’m finally getting on the ball and will (*fingers crossed*) hopefully have completed some voice-actor auditions by the end of this coming week. I still need to lock down the room though so that’s in the air.

– In order to avoid becoming super fucking lazy, I went ahead and started up the Scene-Files for 14 of the 30 Scene-Files that will comprise my film. (Before today I had only started up 4). Now, I haven’t actually animated in any of the new ones, but just the fact that they’re set up now means I don’t have to get over the mental-block/procrastination-fodder of  “I don’t wanna have to set up the shoooottttt” anymore, because it’s already all set up. Time to animate!

– Speaking of animation, I’ve gotten 2 shots ready to show to people who I trust to give me good advice on how to improve it. And so that process shall begin like, 30 minutes from now!

– I got a message from my OTIS student friend, Theo Aretos (who I also interned with at Dreamworks) recently saying that he’s almost done with the concept designs for the environments for my film. So soon I won’t have ridiculously-crappy-looking standin-environments for my film! Wooooohooo!!

– I heavily revamped the 4 friends of the Mean Girl of my film (and by this I mean I changed their bodies) and all that leaves is fixing their faces some, and then I’ll have a second pass on them to show around to people! Woohoo.

So basically, there’s a lot of potential in the air. Will I persevere and continue to make progress? Or will I just open up a bag of Doritos and never finish my film?

Just kidding, of course I’ll persevere. PERSEVEERREE!!! (I really need to stop making these posts after 2AM)

But in the mean time, here’s at little something I did for homework for another class:

You’re probably wondering what the fuck this is. This is my homework for my Lighting And Rendering class, and we had to demonstrate Caustics (aka when light is refracted through transparent objects like water or crystals) and Subsurface Scattering (which is used to make skin look real). So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put the Mean Girl from my film into a sassy pose and turn her into an ice sculpture and a skin… sculpture… thing. She kind of looks more like water in the ice sculpture one though, and she looks a little waxy in the skin one. But whatever. I’m not trying to be a surfacer…

More to come!

I Is A Lazy Muddafuckah

…Because I feel like it’s been like a week or something since I’ve last animated anything. I’ve become very lazy these past few days/past week. And yesterday was officially the first day where I legitimately didn’t do ANYTHING in the way of working on my film. WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME. AAHHH. I NEED INCENTIVE.

Anyway, despite my horrible issue with perception of my own productivity, here’s the official first-ever lit-and-rendered frame from my film!!!

AKA this is me trying to give myself incentive. But wow, check that shit out!! Yes, I know the lighting is all wrong, but just goes to show one really important thing (that I already kinda knew):

Lighting makes everything look a thousand times better than it looks while I’m animating it.

Don’t believe me? This is what the exact same frame looks like in Maya with no lighting:

…yea. Even his facial expression somehow looks better in the lit version! Sometimes  man, I don’t even know. But it’s working for me, thank god.

Also, this makes me really happy because like………. I DID ALL OF THIS FROM SCRATCH! And this also the first scene I’m animating that involves more than one Character Rig at a time, and I haven’t run into any issues with that yet! (I don’t know why I would find issues with that, but you never know. You neeevvverrrr knowwwwww with Mayaaaaa….)

But yea. I dunno, seeing this first lighting test really gives me hope that my film could turn into something great. It’s just sort of hard to visualize when all you see are these lifeless-looking poorly-lit dolls whenever I’m animating… So yea. There’s hope. Anyway, back to work I guess.

– More to come

EDIT: Oh shit P.S.! I did some math, and figured that since this render took 30 seconds to do, and the film will be ~4.5 minutes at 24 fps, that comes out to just over 100 hours of render time… and that’s not counting adding the 2D elements to the film! FFFfuUUUuuuUCcCccCCKKKKkkkkkkk

 

Oh and P.P.S., this is the 50th post I’ve made on this  blog! GO MEEEE

Some Goofy Lookin’ Kids

So the Mean Girl has her posse of guys that follow her around, right?

Well, this past weekend I went ahead and made a big first step towards designing them and figuring out what they’d look like. And I realized pretty soon that they should be stylish-looking kids, because after all; if the Mean Girl is a popular kid, then she’s only gonna want popular kids to hang with her. Sooooo, here you go.

4 Stylish Middle School Boys:

ARCHER (My favorite) (Which means it only goes down from here…)

BIL

CASSIDY (My least favorite) (It gets slightly better from here) (Maybe)

EDGAR

Now you don’t need to tell me — these kids look way too fucking old. Don’t worry, this is just a rough pass on their design. The final versions of these kids is going to look a LOT different. And while I do admittedly like the clothing some of them wear, I also know that these kids are kind of ~too~ stylish to be Middle Schoolers. Like, these kids don’t make sense. Don’t worry, I know.

Also their heads all look kind of the same, but for a reason — their heads are made from the exact same mesh as the Hero Rig head mesh, but I morphed each of them around to look different. Except I need to morph them around a little bit more to get them to truly look individual.

But anyway, yea. Designing kids is hard, yo! For future films, I definitely don’t want to ever feature kids who are younger than 15 years old. This whole “middle schooler” shit is way too difficult to capture, design-wise. AND I AIN’T A DESIGNER, YO!!! It’s not what I’m cut out to do~ But if I can knock out 4 kids in a weekend then I figure I can fix them up in just as much time…

But yea! Just thought I’d throw these images out on to the internet to embarrass myself and also keep a record of the progress I’m making with these characters. And after these kids, there’ll only be one 3D character left to model — the Hero’s Mom! And she’s an adult, so I FINALLY won’t have to worry about her looking too old! Yesssss.

More to come (as always)

Animatic_v6

Uhh this is my animatic so far. It incorporates the rough animation I’ve done for 4 of the shots. Progress!

Also this animatic is kind of shit because I didn’t really put time into timing it out right and making the whole thing flow well, but eh. I’m honestly just focusing on animation right now and getting that as beautiful and immaculate as I can make it. But on the up-side, the people in class today said my animation was looking good, especially considering that it’s just the first pass! Heeeeeeeeyyyyyy

 

 

More to come~

Mean Girl Day!

I titled this post “Mean Girl Day” because today was ALL about the Mean Girl in my film! And by that, I mean, SHE IS RIGGED! And I now officially have 2 rigged characters in my film. Which is also super great because when you combine the Hero and the Mean Girl in my film, they do about 90 percent of all the 3D-Animated acting of the film. Because after all, the Mean Girls’ friends (of which I plan to have 4 or 5) collectively have 1 line of dialogue (one of them asks the mean girl a question and that’s about it), and the Mother appears in like 2 shots. So, yea.

But in my process of making the Mean Girl the wonderfully beautiful bitch that she is, I took a lot of screencaps, and I wanted to share with you, dear reader, my journey in creating her. And to be honest, my reason for devoting a post like this to her is because her character design really is the greatest I’ve ever done for any character I’ve ever designed — I’m extremely proud of her, and she continues to support my theory that VILLIANS ARE ALWAYS THE BEST CHARACTERS, design or personality-wise. I’ve always fucking loved villains, whether it be the Borg from Star Trek, or Madame Medusa from The Rescuers, or Madame Dubois from Madagascar 3 — Villains are just always amazing.

So here you go:

As all character designs must, the Mean Girl started off as a drawing.

Once I had decided that I liked her having big cat-like eyes, large eye-lashes, a small nose, pouty lips, and a heart-shaped face, I went and sculpted her out in Sculptris, a free 3D sculpting program. And as you can see, this image is NOTHING like what she ended up looking like, and she certainly had some weird fucking beginnings.

But as I worked into her more, things improved, and as I’ve already shown in older posts, I used this hi-res mesh as direct reference to make a Quadrilateral Polygonal model that would become her final face.

Thankfully, I had the sense to soften her brow ridge though, because it was way too fucking intense.

(New head on the right)

And then I had to decide what kind of hair she’d have! I knew I couldn’t have that long voluptuous hair, because it would be impossible to animate. I went with a short ‘do with a large swooping bang, but I knew it needed an accessory to make her more unique looking.

At first I wanted to give her a cute, youthful, girly hairband with fake plastic flowers in it. But then my friend said “No, give her a bow like Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl!” and I was all “Who’s Blair Waldorf?”

But I then looked her up, saw how awesome the bow was, and went with that instead.

I mean duh. The bow is way better.

It became clear at this point, though, that I was NEVER going to escape the Jimmy Neutron comparisons with this film, because not only do people see my main character and think he looks like Jimmy, but now people will look at my villain and think she looks like Cindy!

But really, I like to think of my Mean Girl as a mix between Cindy and Blair Waldorf….

So it’s sort of like a more bitchy, more mature, more stylish version of Cindy. So ha, take that!

But then I had to give her clothing. At first I was going to give her a long-sleeved shirt with a deep v-neck and some blue skinny-jeans. But then I realized that that wasn’t bitchy enough. (And I also consulted some actual females about what middle-school girls wear, and they all seemed to agree on one look:)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand yea! And then I rigged her, and now here you have it! A mean girl.

And before anyone goes ape-shit about the colors, let me say that THESE ARE NOT THE FINAL COLORS. Of anything, really. I mean the final version will probably be like this, but nothing is certain. Her clothing colors will most certainly change, and her lip-stick will become a lighter pink, and her rouge will be toned down a lot (because she still looks a little too mature with that makeup) (I won’t tone down the mascara though, because according to my lady-friends, Middle School is when women go Hard As a Motherfucker with the eyeliner and mascara, so there), but this is what her body is gonna be like.

Also, just as an extra fun image, this is a screencap I took while I was weight-painting her head:

Looks like a shitty iPod commercial, right? Hahaaaa.

OK. Anyway, yea. I figured it would be cool to compile the entire history of this character from step Zero to Finished Product, and it’s really exciting to me that I can create an awesome fucking animated character literally just from my imagination. This is definitely an extremely satisfying accomplishment for me, artistically speaking, and it also gives me confidence that in the future if I want to keep making independent animated films, I still can, with zero budget! 🙂

But yea. As usual, though, it’s 3:30AM right now as I post this, and I’m treating this blog like it’s my fucking diary, so I think it’s time for me to turn on my night music and go to sleep. G’night y’all! I can’t wait to animate this girl!

Peace. (and there’s more to come, of course!)

– Max