Monday 29 October 2007

story

We have decided on our gremlins' jobs within the animation.

We sat down together and created the beginning and end of the story and then the animatic, and Chérie and Mary went away and wrote down what their gremlins will be doing.

The story is now as follows:

1. student is at library late, trying to write an essay he can not complete.
2. He gets a call and leaves his table
3. The gremlins come from hiding and meet at the students computer space
4. They decide their plan of action and set off to work
5 . My gremlin will stay and write the essay
6. Chérie's gremlin will go and find books to help write the essay
7. Mary's gremlin will grab some snacks for the starving student (he has been studying for a while, he needs some energy!)
8. They all meet back at the computer, while my gremlin completes the essay
9. The student makes his way back, as the gremlins scatter
10. My gremlin falls out of a book case beside the student
11. The student is freaked out....
12. The librarian comes over, tells the student to hush up (because its a library and his cries of shock are disturbing the peace!) and kicks the gremlin under a bookshelf
13. Leaves the student looking baffled
14. The end!

The animatic will be posted on the website very soon, so feel free to watch!

www.manic-monkey.net

-Harn

Character Ideas and story Pt 2

We thought about adding a character into our story, more importantly a student, as it is the norm for a student to be in a library working. Our gremlins, seeing as we didn't want them to be reckless and evil, could help the student with work. We did however want to maintain that air of naughtiness in their behavior. By having an actor to have the gremlins work around, it meant we could introduce the gremlins, let them do their thing and then tuck them away somewhere, and our actor could fill in the gaps and make the story a story. The gremlins would then have a purpose and the story would have structure to it... perfect!

We went back to the library and took more detailed pictures of the areas within the library - the photocopier, bookshelves, study tables, computers, the help desk etc all places that we could hide gremlins or have them doing something funny or sweet.

We decided, to allow us each to do our own thing within the animation, we will have our own gremlin, each complete with its own design and personality, to have its own section within the library, or its own job or role within the story. We will each have control over our won part of the animation, but we will have the gremlins integrating with each other, like a team, much like ourselves!!!

- Harn

Character Ideas and story Pt 1


Having looked through the various research, we all decided to stay away from the fur style monster and stick with a monster to whom we could apply a decent skin texture, which would look just as real.

I found an idea of gremlins from a comic book i had read "the darkness". In this comic, the gremlins are very mischevous and like killing people ... this was NOT the kind of personality we were looking at, but the gremlins were kinda cool, so we looked further into this.

Chérie and Mary scoured the internet for more pictured of gremlins, and after a week, we had alot of reference material to chose from. We thought about what we wanted our gremlins to be like. Seeing as our style is generally cute and sweet, we thought we would stick with that. We wanted to keep them small, otherwise they might start to look a bit scary, and we started to put sketches down for design ideas. This is something we are still working on, we will be sure to post some pictures soon!!

Now we had character ideas, we thought about locations and settings for our story (which was as yet undecided). We went around campus and took alot of pictures (gym, lecture theatres, computer labs, science labs, cafe). Our favourite place and the one we had had in mind was the library. It is a huge building spanning across four floors, there was so much we could do in there, so much that our gremlins could be doing. Also, it was central to campus, and a place that all students (as they are a big part of our audience) can relate to. When we walked in, we saw signs saying the library would be open late, and thought of it being full of students cramming for exams or just struggling to write essays..... this sounding like a good idea.

-The team

Monday 22 October 2007

Research - adverts

While Chérie and Mary looked at feature length films, i thought about looking at shorter animations - in the form of adverts.

Seeing as we would be more likely to create an animation closer to long advert length, i looked into this, and how long it took to make them and also what kind of style and techniques they used.

Our intial thought was to go for something like the sprite advert, because of the sprite goblin, but i watched a few of the adverts and was unable to find any info about how the advert was actually made. I also discovered how difficult it was to navigate around the coca cola site :S

Anywho, i thought of other adverts to look at. In one of our Visual effects lectures, we had been shown an advert for the country life spreadable butter advert by framestore (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/commercials/dairycrest/index.html). In this ad, a mother, having just ushered her (very messy) children off to school was faced with the cleaning up. So you buttered a slice of toast, and all of a sudden came a bunch of animals to do the cleaning for her! All of the animals were modeled in maya, except for a few stray rabbits and a sheep. It took about 12 weeks to model and texture, and the ad spent a whole 3 months in post production, to get the scene looking completely real and believable.

I then found, on the framestore site, another amazing animated advert. The post office advert (http://www.framestore-cfc.com/commercials/postoffice_twins/index.html) is a firm favourite of mine, with the 3d ants living their own lil lives amongst us. The advert i watched was called "twins", where two of the children ants are playing with their RC cars and have an accident. They start talking about car insurance then break out into a fight, all good fun! What i likes about this ad is that the characters in it were so much more basic, and very cartoony, which i would say is much more our groups style. And the advert had been made so well, and the character personalities really made the whole thing more watch-able. The kids sounded and acted like kids, and were cute. Also, this animation took 3 weeks to model and texture and spent only 2 weeks in post production. This shows just how much difference using less texture and realism can make on time taken.

This was something that the group discovered generally though all of our research - that is was too difficult to go for a realistic, fur texture and all the other crazy stuff for our animals. Realistically, we dont have that much time. It would be better to stick with skin like textures - it worked so well with the ants.

Next - character designs. We each have our own ideas, we just need to pull them together.



-Harn

Research: CGI Films, Stuart Little

From Chérie's research, we found that making a full 3d animation would get too complicated and take more time than we have. So we have decided to maybe use some film footage, and build the charcters onto that. this will save alot of time.

To get an idea of what this would look like some research was done for CGI films such as Stuart Little. This was done to give us an idea on how professional industry immigrate their animation together with real live actions.

Here's a short interview for Stuart Little production team:

Stuart Little Production Story



- Mary

Thursday 18 October 2007

Research: CGI Films, Monsters Inc.

To get a better idea of what kind of tone and length we would like our film to be, we have been looking into various films that use CGI, to give us an idea of what kind of project we will be undertaking.

I have been looking at full 3D films - in particular, monsters inc(as we are using monsters in ours!) as well as shrek(which also uses monsters) to take a look at the characters and also the settings and how they are made.




-Chérie

Sunday 14 October 2007

Little inspiration

Tonight while watching 'the Mummy Returns', there was a scene with little mummy, which looks a little bit like the gremlins we've looked at from the comic book where the initial idea of gremlin making came from.



After further research, the film was produced 6 years ago, five animators and over hundred of visual effects artists was involved in the making. The size was the gremlin looking like mummy is quite an ideal sizes, and the sound effects of them was one of the aspects I particular liked.

Friday 12 October 2007

New Designed Website Uploaded

After a series of changes to the design and colours on our website, new website is now working and uploaded.

www.manic-monkey.net

New design now intergrades much better with the logo, in terms of colour wise, the whole website is more clear and readable then before. Fonts were kept the same as before which is the same font as the logo, but sizes were changed to present a more reasonable readable text.

Problem was encountered; main link buttons, which at first was going to be Photoshop images, imported to flash as a button, but resizing the image in flash had change the quality of the imported images, making the button look low in quality. To solve this problem, we decided to use a normal text buttons instead of imported images buttons.

More updating in the website will be done when more progress is made. Link is now set to the bottom of right hand side menu.

Mary

Thursday 11 October 2007

The story so far

The story so far is some information on what we have done so far, to get us to where we are now on the project.

At the end of our second year, we were given a choice of topics on which to do our final year project on. As me, Chérie and Mary are crazy about animation we decided to make something animated. Of the topics that were provided to us, we choice monsters on campus. The idea of strange creatures ripping up our UKC was somewhat appealing. And so, we left for the summer holidays bubbling with ideas. We stayed in contact all summer, sending ideas about what monsters we might have

We then met up on the 11th August to discuss ideas for what we wanted. I proposed the idea of gremlins, which i had seen in a comic book i was reading. Seeing as this would mean we wouldnt have to model fur, it seemed like a good idea, something that we could really play with and make our own. How many students had made gremlins for their FYP? We wrote up possible activities and things the gremlins could be doing (and generally what the film may look like) and started on our research.

This is also the day that Manic Monkey was born giving us a name to put our work under.

Harn

blog set up

We have just set up our blog, and this is our first blog post!
Mary lau, chérie Harrington and Harn Thind will be documenting the progress of our project from conception to implementation. So here we go!