Mid-Year Exam...Eish

the demon knife cabinet from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

So this was my effort for our mid-year exam. We were given three short soundclips, and we had to choose one of them to animate to. The objective was to come up with a coherent story, using the characters we'd created over the semester, and sync the story with the soundclip...a lot like the 11 Second Club does it. I ended up picking the clip that made the most sense to me...but it definitely wasn't the easiest!

Honestly, this could have been SO much better. We had a pretty limited amount of time to do this (two and a half weeks), so naturally, there's a lot of stuff that needs work, particularly the character animation. But anyway, there it is.

Below is the progression of the clip, from animatic to blocking.


June Exam Animatic (V2) from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.


exam shot 1 pass 1 from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.


exam shot 1 breakdowns from kwabena sarfo on Vimeo.

The model sheets for the knife cabinet...

The final 3D model for the cabinet

 

Some of the planning...

Der Eichhyrnchen Führer!

For those not in the know, the title of this post means 'the squirrel leader' in German (inspired by Tarantino's awesome film 'Inglourious Barsterds') :) This is how I chose to design one of the main characters from our storyboarding class. Once we finished designing the characters, we then moved on to making macquettes of them, which was AWESOME! :) I'll admit, I was nervous at first, because I've never really trusted myself as a sculptor, but I gained a lot of confidence from doing this.

We used a special kinda putty called Super Sculpey to make them. Its a shame I ran outta the stuff; because it meant I couldn't quite finish up the tail as well as I'd have liked to. Anyway, I'm still really happy with how it turned out :).

 

These are the designs I eventually came up with. I decided to make the characters look a lot more rugged than the brief suggested. We had to choose one to sculpt, so I just went with the one that appealed to me the most. The rabbit's designed changed in the final storyboards, because this one was, um, problematic...

 

 

Nutz, man... nutz...

 So we also had a storyboarding and character design class (drawing, yay!), and these are the final boards completed for the end of the semester. We were given a fictional advert involving one group of rabbits and another of squirrels competing to make a brand of peanut butter and, as tends to happen in such situations, all hell breaks loose... well, that's the jist of it anyway. That was basically the story we had to make a storyboard for. It was refreshing to do this sort of work again, after a pretty lengthy layoff. I wonder if anyone will actually manage to figure out what's gone on in these pictures...