Porcelain

Porcelain Screening 29/11/2009 at 12pm


It's been a long time coming but tomorrow at 12pm I'll be launching the latest film by Roseline Lau and myself  Porcelain

It will all go down here:
http://porcelainfilm.blogspot.com/

This blog will home Porcelain and Existence which you can watch at high quality. If you wonder why only these films are on this blog, well that's because Porcelain is a sequal of sorts to Existence.

The idea for Porcelain came from when I was just about to finish Existence. I thought what if these fighters were never able to fight and they had to be less than they were able to be. Existence was a film about being all that you can be, throwing everyone and anything aside living and pushing life to its limits to prove existence.

I'll let you watch Porcelain first before I tell you what this films underlining theme is. One thing I'll tell you however was I wanted this film to have another voice, another point of view and sensibility to it. Originally this film was written with another filmmaker in mind to collaborate with and at that stage it was going to be liveaction with a mix of animation. It failed a funding round and then I went back and reworked the script editted out some characters and restructured what I was going to do with it and decided to build on the style I created with Existence.

On Existence, Roseline came in on the end of production (after finsihing her own high stressed stopmotion film) and she really helped me get over the line taking on some of the hardest shots (the shot where the camera spins around the main character as he walks over and picks up his sword) and not only did she do it well you could also see a strong personality in her work. Rose's gift is in her characters. She really gets inside of them and pulls out their personalities. Over the production of this movie we bounced around working on various childrens animated tv series and that side of her has really grown and really taught me what it is to be a character animator. No other animator I've worked with has ever come close to what she can do. Anyway I digress, back to what I was trying to say and that is I saw something special in her work on Existence and that was a voice I wanted to add to Porcelain. So I gave her complete control of one character, 'The Doll'.

In the original script the story was retold twice, once from the point of view of the guy (LB) and once from the point of view of the Doll. I storyboarded LB's story and Rose storyboarded the Dolls. About this time last year we had to scrap this idea. It was really heartbreaking as a lot of Roseline's stuff never got done. There are some beautiful character sequences that got lost in this cut but Porcelain was a really long project stretching over 5 years, and the (very patient and supporting) people we received funding from needed the film done and we needed to move on with life. I dont feel that it was ever a 5 year film more a 6 month film just that 6months+life=5years. So we had to combine both stories and it became a different film and I felt a new type of story turned up.

Actually once the animation/editting was all done Adrian Tolman (who's done sound on nearly all my films) and I found another story again when we started laying done the sounds. I have always felt if I did have a really clear idea of what I wanted to do when making a movie I probably wouldnt want to do it as I already know what that movie is going to be. So I am really happy with how Porcelain turned out. So even though some shots were cut, there's still some great scenes by Roseline, I know I did some of my best stuff with the design and some standout pieces of animation that I'm suprised I even did oh and I lovvvvvve the soundmix. Working with Adrian is always awesome and we had so much fun doing the sound. There's a lot of creativity behind Porcelain and I really think that comes through, we didnt hold back on our ideas and throughout the film you can see new ideas popping up all over the place. This is the type of film I like and after all the suffering I'm really happy with what we have made.

Also hosting this film on a website rather than doing a festival screening gives me a few more options. Maybe those scenes cut will come back, be animated a completely different way. I now have a world where it can exist and grow, currently Rose and I are producing a comic that prequels the film. There's only 2 pages up at the moment (there will be 6 in total) but they give you a good idea of where we are going with the story. We did some little kid drawings for the comic. We did this by switching to our opposite drawing hands.















So thanks to everyone who helped us make this film and supported us. I hope you're able to check the film out and enjoy what we have created.

Tomorrow Porcelain will screen for the world and tomorrow I turn 30 years old. I really enjoyed my 20s. I produced some films and comics that I'm proud of, I met heaps of great people, learnt a whole bunch of things, had some great experiences and despite losing my job only a month ago (and they deciding not to pay me for the work I did and being jerks about it) I'm happy with with where I am. I go into my 30s optimististic because if I knew what my life was going to be it wouldn't be worth living, something new and awesome will definately turn up.
Tim

*update* Porcelain is viewable now!

lb shot 36




Well here's a line test for this shot. I'll update my progress as I go.

Here's the original line drawings and how I decided to animate "Porcelain". I thought if I divided up my page like this I could do my pencil animation faster as it meant I couldn't add in too much detail and with this film. You'll also see that I don't trace the previous frame. Occasionally on some shots I did trace but most of the time I just guesstimated in the box this was because I wanted the film to have a sort of hand held look.

My original drawings (which are very rough and loose) were cleaned up by Roseline to keep it reasonably on model. Not so much of an issue for the LB character but very important for the Doll character since the women I draw don't look that pretty.










Ok you'll notice between videos I controlled the line a bit better and made the hair and the collar animate secondary to the body movement. (Well that's the idea I'm not sure if I've got this working yet). I also bumped around the images and lined them up better than the first set. I wanted to show this version before I inbetweened it so you can compare the original keys to the finished keys.







FINALLY I'm uploading the inbetweened animation (blogger kept crashing on me). Ok well a little bit more about this shot is that it happens after LB is waiting at the lights and as this shot progresses the camera looks up towards the building he works at. So yet to come is the background and a few extra characters to fill out the shot.



You'll notice the last few frames aren't animated and he's just sliding that is because the camera will have left him by then. An important thing to learn when there's only you animating it is knowing when not to animate. I've been watching a great piece of animation called "Trava Fist Planet" and that guy (Takeshi Koike) can really animate but he also knows when to do holds and he even has jump cuts within the same shot. He just throws on a popping sound effect to cover the jump. I've seen this done in film before but it works just as well for animation.

When inbetweening I try to just do one inbetween between my keys first to double check my movement and the positions. That last part of LBs walk I really had to move around till I was happy with it. Also I find that if I just work to straight ahead I get fatigued by the end of the shot. So spreading out the drawings and not working too linearly I can keep a good energy throughout the shot. I also take this approach in making a film that I work on the intro then the epilogue and then pick the major scenes to do and now what I'm doing at the moment are the inbetween scenes to tie it together.

How I approach my timing for my animation is that I listen for the movements. Like what sound it would make. If you look at that opening fight in my showreel you'll hear this heavy whooshing sound (underneath all the yelling) this is that sound I listen for when doing my timing. Trusting your ears is a lot better than you eyes or trying to approach it too logically. It's like doing lip sync, If you get the character to lip every letter of the word it will look stupid you only do the mouth shapes for what sound you hear.

Ok like I said there are a few more things to throw at this shot. I'll update when they are done.

7/12/08 7:10pm

Ok here's the background in its raw form for that shot. It's broken down into 6 layers

Foreground buildings
Midground buildings
Bg buildings01
bg buildings 02
sky
ground

This means I can control the depth of field a bit and also gives me more control on where the effects are. I'm working on this at the moment so I'll post up the results tonight sometime.

8/12/08 2:28am

This is the final result.




Porcelain poster art


Here's a promo poster I cooked up for the coming movie. I wanted to make a sort of 80s scifi poster at least what I think is an 80s scifi poster.

The movie will be available online in December. Think of it as a Christmas present to everyone including myself. I'll have to work out the actual bugs of achieving this but so far my tests have been pretty good.

I'll be posting more about this over the next few weeks.

Lb shot 32 - breakdown


So here's the finished shot. Pretty good considering nothing is actually animated, it's all just moving stills. To get the cars to move across without looking crappy you jitter the up and down in their movement path. You'll notice a bit of parralax movement at the start (where some layers are moving in different directions and speeds to other layers) and there's a bit of a pull focus that also happens. These little tricks can make a 4second still image a slight bit more interesting.

Oh if you're wondering why I didnt keep the warmer city image and chose the washed out one for the final, it's more about what emotion that will give my sequence. There's not a lot of dialouge in "Porcelain" so the imagery has to be clear on the feeling. This is the stuff you can only do on your own projects and never for any clients.

(no filter)
 (blurs)
(final colour mixdown)


So all the compositing has been done. I'll upload a video in a bit. You can see here the various filter phases it's gone through. I'll write a little more when I upload the video.

So now it is all in photoshop (the other stuff was in flash). I adjusted the curves on the background to nice it up a bit.

Everything is in layers (7 layers all up) and now I am going to bring that across into after effects. I was going to do my blurs in photoshop but I want a little bit more control on how it happens over time in after effects.


Ok the background characters are now all in. Have to export them at various layers. I had to expand up a bit because I think I'll crane down to all the people waiting. You'll notice the far background characters have no outlines. They will probably have a heavy blur on them.

This other reference image is going to serve as my background. I think this should work.

Ok you'll notice I pulled the saturation down on that last image. That was just testing the colours a bit. Here's the raw image moved along a bit. 3 new characters and I just mapped out the further background characters. I need to do a background and a foreground.

Here's an hours work. I'll update this post as the shot progresses

OMG 'Porcelain' images!

Since returning from Hobart I've had a lot of time to dedicate to 'Porcelain'. Both Roseline and I have been working on this film for almost 3 years now. This is a long time to be working on a film and incredibly frustrating.


(This sequence has both Rose and I tag teaming. Rose doing the women and me doing LB)

I even stopped posting about it. Since every time I felt it was going good, it would just turn on me and deliver me some new problem.


(You may remember the Doll having stripes. Well the redraw sucked so now she wears a plain pastel jumper)

There's been so many times I've wanted to just throw it in but then I go back over some finished shots and I'm in love with it again.


(I've been adding a lot of hand drawn effects which has been fun)

Well I've decided to start showing 'Porcelain' stuff again to prove it does still exist.
These images are all raw and unfinished.


(I had no idea what the office looked like until last year)

(Still not sure what the final colour of the office will be)

I will finish 'Porcelain' this year and I will enjoy to be able to finally share this film with everyone.


(I really enjoy drawing eyes)

(No way! Dash Dashing is in Porcelain! How did that happen?)

(There's no way that eye blinks)

Hope you like the new images!

A relaxing sunday

Well I mentioned a secret short a while back. I had to put that on hold as Porcelain started to drop behind schedule (thanks to the worst flu that I've ever had) Anyway when Porcelain is back on track I'll knock this film out in a day or two.



Speaking of Porcelain. At the moment I'm working on the end sequence. There's still a some other sequences to animate and we are putting in a few extra hours to bring it back on schedule but we are still managing to keep the quality pretty high.



Roseline and I may be producing a new film in the next few weeks. It's a pretty simple idea and it will involve the use of my new digital camera. I hope we can find time to get this done but Porcelain is priority.

Off to Tasmania!

Okay this may be my last post for a few weeks as Roseline and I are moving to Tasmania to work on an animated series. Employed animators again we'll be.

I really wanted to have a Vicious and Faust comic done before I left expecially since there are only 3 issues left to do. Oh well hopefully I'll get on to it as soon as I'm settled.
Also I've been doing a bit of work with these two characters. The amazing Porcelain film is needing to be completed so they are high priority at the moment.

Well so long for now,

Tim

Some cool NEW stuff!

Well I guess I should post up some new stuff. Posting just these old animations looks like I’m not doing anything productive just living in the past (man!).

First up Roseline and I have just finished (pending client approval) a mobile phone worker recruitment animation that is intended (I believe) for the web. The storyboards and character design were done by my ex-animation lecturer and fellow ‘Dogstar’ employee Todd Millias. For a short web animation it was a little bit more complicated than we were expecting. Especially the opening shot that is a track down from the city into a dungeon where there are a whole heap of these ‘bean’ characters working. I think Todd threw that in to give me a challenge haha.


(camera moves down from city to bean worker word)

Roseline and I split the work up so that I would do the backgrounds, effects and the animation in the dungeon scenes and she would do all the character animation in the cloud 9 scenes. Working for the web it’s really important to reuse as much as possible and after spending a year working on ‘Dogstar’ it was hard to change our wasteful ways of creating millions of new symbols. Rose did some really beautiful character animation of the main ‘bean’. He looked like a character out of those old 30-40s informational cartoons with his wide happy smile. My ‘beans’ looked more like my ‘Mr Gough’ stuff with their dopy spaced out eyes.


(my dopy beans)

(Roseline's beans in Cloud 9)

Speaking of ‘Mr Gough’, Roseline and I attended another comic ‘draw-off’ with fellow comic artists that took part in that 24hr challenge that happened last year. It was supposed to also be another 24hr comic but I wanted to do something a bit more planned and executed than ‘Kinetic’ and Roseline also wanted to bail early for her own reasons. So we both did about 3-4hrs which was a little weak on our part I hope the other guys did better (sorry yo!). Anyway Rose (check here) and I are doing two separate comics that we are going to combine into one AWESOME!!! large comic. My comic will be about ‘Mr Gough’ it will loosely follow where the short animation finishes off and it will all be done in full page and double page spreads. With this comic I’m putting a lot of effort into the design aspect and trying to make a ‘Mr Gough’ world. I’m taking some of my influence from what I remember ‘Super Mario World’ being like and also a bit of ‘Dr Seuss’ surrealness. There is one spread that Roseline and I co-wrote where a couple of characters (a fisherman and a frenchman) do a little song and Roseline is going to guest draw this as she will draw the singing poses very funny.


(first page)

Another comic that I’m sure you thought I have forgotten about ‘Vicious and Faust’. Since the webcomicnation comics have now caught up to where I left it here on the blog, there will be new issue put up every Saturday over the next few weeks (I’ll probably stick to only doing 13 episodes per series). I’ve already pencilled out 2 eps and it’s now a bit more character comedy like the first season. I’ve been reading John K’s blog a lot and he did a post a little while back about how artists seem to always be doing the same expressions that they should try and look for more interesting faces. ‘Vicious and Faust’ has always been my comic to experiment and try new things so I’m giving this a go and I’m pulling funny faces in my mirror and trying to sketch them.


(issue 17)

(issue 18)

And finally ‘Porcelain’. Roseline and I are pushing to get this film out of the way. We’ve got a whole heap of stuff we’d like to move on with but we can’t touch that until this film is done. That isn’t to say we are going to rush out whatever, we’ve spent ages on this film and it has to be worth it. Hopefully by next week we’ll begin putting all our work into flash and I’ll start posting some more progress on this film.


(layout for scene on bridge)

Well there’s an update on what I’m up to. I hope you enjoyed all this new stuff. Tomorrow I’m going to put up a very old stop motion film Rob and I put together so stay tuned!


Tim

Kicking back in 98

So my cpu has a busted motherboard and I need a new one. So for the moment I'm back using my old cpu. It feels so clunky!

Anyway I found this picture on it and I kinda like it. Oh there still will be a new film on Tuesday. It's a good one!




lata
Tim

Check out:

  • The anime "Eureka 7". It has some really beautiful character design and wonderful facial expressions and animation. Done by studio Bones who produced the Cowboy Bebop movie.
  • Music "The Roots: Game Theory". A very cool album. The song that suprised me was "Atonement" where they sampled "You and whose Army" by Radiohead. very cool
  • The movie "The Fountain". It was very cool. Although I must admit I really wanted to see more of the spanish soldier story and the future story had some cheesy moments. All up though it was a great trip.

EDIT: This doesn't deserve a new post so I'll drop it in here. For "Porcelain" progress check here on Roseline's blog. She's been posting up some of the cleanups. I'll start posting images when we start putting stuff into Flash.

Porcelain progress and Comic stuff

Well I've just finished the first half of the animation (YAY!) it still needs to be cleaned up, put into flash and then composited but it is a huge milestone.

Well (as the photo illustrates) Roseline is on the job with the cleanup. We are hoping to finish all the animation by the 12th of Febuary and that's looking quite promising.



Other news. Roseline and I traveled around checking the stores stocking our comics. They have done such a great job displaying them and supporting us. Thanks heaps, also thanks to Michael for delivering the comics.

It was excellent to see that a few of our comics have sold aswell. Roseline even sold out at one of the places.

If you want to check it out, the stores you will find the comics at are:
Quality Comics
Planet Books
and Oxford books


Here's Roseline checking the display at Oxford

Also this blog will be getting 2 regular updates a week. The first is on the Saturday when I will post a new Vicious and Faust comic the second will be on the Tuesday when I will upload one of my short animations to Youtube.

So stay tuned!