copper for cake, an animation we did for the Mazed project. Here you can see the unfinished project i put together after the deadline.
As a project, we were divided into groups each of us had a particular task.
I was the director, but i ended up, as often happen in real animation studios (i suppose), helping in character design, animation and editing.
here you can see my first attempt for Character design: simple characters, not too friendly but cute, funny shapes and not too stereotypical.
Sam, the main character, in the first script was supposed to lose his instruments and become a farmer, but we decided with the blessing of the customer, to change the ending by smashing him. This is why i tried not too make the viewer relate too much with him, making him grumpy looking and kind of stupid.
The knockers are based on goblins, pixies and cave creatures: their colors are the same as the environment that surrounds them and their eyes are copper-like
Here are the final versions, after we all discussed the changes
with the characters set, i managed to finish properly the storyboard, that i had to change various time to make the animation clearer to the animators and for explaining the story better to the customer and the teacher.
Here you can see the very fist one
And here is the last one (which is the definitive version)
After helping with the storyboard, i had to fix a couple of background, because they were made with actual paint. I imported them in Photoshop to crop them and define better the edges, but some of them had to be completely redone.
original drawings by Emmett Norris, these are the ones i had to fix
One of the backgrounds i had to re do because of the wrong composition
Before animating, i managed to make a couple of still for the video, so that Midnight Sparkle could add some cool effects on After effects.
The stills
I am sorry i couldn't upload either the final version (i don't have it) or the single scenes where i worked, but i can tell that i worked along with Dan and Clara in the scenes where
_sam walks outside before flashback
_sam coughs before seeing copper
_sam taunts knockers and shrugs shoulders
_sam is hit by small rock and then huge one
_hat bouncing
_knockers at the end
The experience was definitely interesting but i definitely do not feel like we were ready to take over such a huge project in just three months: we had neither the necessary practice, skills, knowledge and resources to do a great job, but still, we managed to pull out a decent piece of animation, in my opinion.
Sad is the relationship i had with some members of the group that hardly did anything. I probably should have helped more in doing the job when they were trying instead of doing it myself, but with little time (and energies) i really couldn't do much.
It was a pain for me to try to put everything together all the time, especially when we found out in the day of the deadline, that our video was low quality and half corrupted. I spent 12 hours fixing all the files while everybody else were partying and enjoying life.
God
the pain...
