Wallpaper and pro. cont. PRO C*NT?

HEY. HI. So production is going along and all. I'm about to go away for a week to visit parents and ol friends. Tomorrow I will be working with like 30 other animators on a Tropfest entry!
We have almost finished all our backgrounds, which has been tedious and taking heaps longer than we thought. I've also picked up a few freelance little things.
HERE IS A TREAT FOR YOU. A wallpaper by Tom. It is so good. Click for full screen PLZ!

Production AGAIN

We are churning through making our backgrounds. Pretty tedious work. But we should hopefully be able to then have plenty of fun doing ambient animation passes and character stuff.
Here is some recent STUFF. Click for BIG:
Crude character designs

An awesome background by Tom

And a wallpaper for a dude on the Dwarf Fortress Forums


I have also been thinking about what to do next. I might just start my life goal project, which I would be working on at random over the rest of my lifetime. MORE NEWS ON THAT

First concept

Real basic animatic is done. We have planned the thing out further, considering shots and whatnot. Our biggest hurdle will be to create a readable silent story with an unusual plot.

Here is our first batch of concept art! I only drew the guy sitting down, Tom did the rest.

Tom from now on is in charge of elephants... for obvious awesome reasons.
It will be interesting to see how our styles combine. Hopefully it won't be too obvious when there is a switch of artist. It's a good learning experience for collaborating though!

Boatmurdered Production GO

Balls to the wall production has started on the Boatmurdered animation! It will have Dwarfs, Elephants, Magma and Madness! D.E.M.M.!
I'm going to use the amazing theme song to the Omen, composed by Jerry Goldsmith, who also scored Alien (coincidentally I've been watching them all these last few days). I actually used this song in a previous silly video edit of BigDog. I hope that doesn't make me a hack.

I created a "music-storyboard" for it. Something I have never done before, I don't know if it's common practice, but I'm pretty proud of it!

I don't tend to do such successful organization.
The animatic is about to begin production, following that music-board guide. Tom is about to come in and begin working on concept art, backgrounds and display frames.
WOO!
WOO LET'S GO! YEAAAH! ANIMATION! YES!

PROduction

Production is fully underway now, none of this dickin' round with the software business! I've ironed out all my pipeline issues and complications (touch digital wood) and it's now as simple as creating my shots.
My first shot took a few hours to compile, I'm hoping that's due to me figuring out how to actually do it. I've also planned out all my shots carefully and think I have some nice and subtle visual story hooks. Here is shot 2: Love (there are 15 in total)

Click to see full res! Here it is in the editor

So what I am doing is making these shots using only a widescreen portion of the frame. I've changed some settings in the game so that it displays at a pretty huge resolution, so that I can crop the frame in around the image without losing any resolution.
I'm still not sure if I will attempt animation within the software. If I did it would be as simple as... say those leaves moving a little. Man I probably should shouldn't I... Dammit! If I did just do some background stuff, such as a candle, dust particles and the like it would make it much more visually engaging. FINE I'LL DO IT. GET OFF MY BACK. I started this post with the intention of informing you that I wouldn't... virtual imaginary peer pressure.

Hey! I remembered another great short film that must have really stuck with me, as this project is fairly similar. Check out Last Day Dream:



I LOVE IT!

Newspaper Animation and You (me)

I'm starting to discover some interesting hurdles with using newspaper as my medium, which could also be why when I search on youtube for newspaper animations I find only about 3. I'm guessing this is because everyone else was more sensible. What I initial thought was a production shortcut has probably turned into the kind of shortcut where you blindly drive through a corn field screaming and into a lake. Newspaper is very temperamental, almost alive. It's light and loves to float about, surprisingly hard to pick up and even harder to get to sit flat, when painted it curls like a dead flower, tears very easily and my entire work station is susceptible to be blown away with a sneeze. God bless it, no wonder it's a dying form of news media! Here is a picture of all those things happening to me at once

Experimentation is trial and error right?
I thought I was being very clever with the sticky tape building windows though. This would all be much easier if I had a multi-plane glass thing going on, but it's one dimension for meeeee!
With the feeling that this animation isn't going to be visually interesting I'm starting to think of backup plans, such as throwing the footage into an animation package and animating things over it, to give it a bit more life and be experimental with the mixed media. I've been checking out some of my fellow student's blogs about their production and I think it's put me into this little unconfident state. Man who am I trying to fool, this animation is gonna change lives.

I think I have my theme worked out though! Over saturation of useless media, information and a bit of globalisation.
Here are some other newspaper animations I found:






Haha I just gave out a big sigh at my prospects and blew over a bunch of cut outs. DAMN YOU PAAAAAPEEEEER!