I wish I had a time machine

If I had a time machine then my time wouldn't be so crazy full of things to do.

So the deadline is in a day and a half and i'm still drawing my frames. We have a peer review tomorrow and unfortunatley since I won't have got mine put together on screen so my peers are going to have to use their imagination.

I plan to go in early tomorrow though at around 8-8:30 so that I can get myself set up at a mac with a tablet and a scanner. Hopefully be able to get some of my scanning out of the way then when the studio is less populated and therefore the noise is irritating less people.

I was doing the frames where Pratchett looks in to space awed and a shadow goes over his face then it cuts to a giant turtle in the sky. Originally I was going to do it as a silhouette because for the next clip the screen starts black and zooms out to show a hat. But I forgot and started drawing the turtle as I normally would, I like it though because with more detail I think there's more perspective on the size of it. 

When I bought the sealable cello bags for my print I only needed one but I had to order 50. So I've been using them to organise all of my paper for this module, which is a lot. The wallet holding my animation finals is almost full to bursting.

Finished the turtle and figured for it to make sense in the scene then it would need the space background with it to show that it and Pratchett are in the same space.

My slowly growing number of seconds in my wallet. I like keeping check of it because it feels like an achievement each time I get to change it to a new number.

Same with my checklist which is slowly being all checked off.

I drew this for one of the introductory seconds where it pans up to show Pratchett stood proudly with book in hand. I thought that if I drew it I could trace the amount I needed into each frame and move it up bit by bit and then all together it would pan up his body. After the 5th frame I realised that if I just drew the whole thing out a couple times I could repeat them over and then use after effects to make it pan upwards.

Lesson of the day: Look for every shortcut. Really look. Don't waste your time.

While I was drawing the 4 frames to make this scene with I purposefully made each drawing slightly different so that when t's put together the lines jutter about and you can tell that it's drawn frame by frame. I got this idea from watching Roobarb and Custard, the lines all changing and wobbling would probably be considered sloppy and to a lesser standard of animation in todays full blown pixar love affair. But I thnk this style of animation has a certain sense of charm about it and it's not to be underestimated. The playful and almost nervous juddering lines give a reminiscent feel because its so childlike and imperfect. And with this piece I want to draw in pre-existing Pratchett fans and make them reminisce about the stories that exploded off the pages and into their imagination.

On the bright side though while I was drawing Pratchett I was leaning on the stickers I drew for print and it left a faint rainbow Pratchett.

I got onto my final clip of animation today, excluding the bit that just says Alzheimers UK, and I got 3 out of 4 seconds done. I would have got more but I had work 4:30-10 tonight and it took a big chunk out of my prime productive time. But I decided upon exactly what I wanted to do with it. The original idea was to have Pratchett sat in a chair and then deaths hand sneak out of the daarkness and unwind the wool from his head. But I did some thumbnailing because I just wasn't feeling the idea anymore and I had one instead of death and Pratchett sat together and death reaching up from behind and unravelling. I decided I wanted the view to be from behind to show exactly what death is doing, I think since its already a visual metaphor it doesn't need clouding up any more. But I wanted to have a bit more movement in there, this is my penultimate scene and it needed some 'pazazz'. Then I thought of it; you know in movies the director will have a camera that can run on little tracks like a tiny train and they film while circling the actor. It makes things look more monumental and really its just a bit of showing off when its done in hand drawn animation. But I want to be that person, problem is my animating skills aren't that good yet. Reference is always key when I get stuck illustrating so assumably the same trick will work in animation.

My erasers at the minute are little monkeys, while i'm uncomfortable with the way they smile at me while I sand their head down, they proved their use today. I took 12 pictures going around them so that the first second of my clip could be a spinning view around the pair. The only side affect of using the monkeys was that they have a very specific 'cute' shape so in hand the final clip of Pratchett with Death is a little bit adorable. They're small and squishy but I think the seriousness is still in there. It contrasts with the innocent looking characters and then death is unravelling his mind sneakily. Kind of reflects how Alzheimers works anyway.