Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Progress Work: More Coffee Guy and Robber Sketches

These are more sketches I've drawn of the coffee guy and robber with poses ^_^.







Monday, October 30, 2006

Progress Work: More Superman Sketches

These are some more Superman sketches I've drawn with poses ^_^.













Click on the image above to view a larger version.
























Click on the image above to view a larger version.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Progress Work: Another Coffee Guy

Here is another updated sketch, concept of coffee guy...this time with an apron on..

coffeeguygeneral3

How to draw manga

As we are getting closer to our final product in concept i decided to do a little searching on drawing styles and ran into this site which I think will help in getting our character from paper into digital.

It has some quick tutorials and drawing steps that would be beneficial to me in improving my drawing style. I am still searching for a specific style to the characters on paper, like how all disney characters have a specific style applied to them. Once I find that I am going to start making better drafts of our characters.

Progress Work: Update on sketches and storyboard

Ferry has sent me a quick draft of our storyboard that goes along with the story draft posted earlier. The first few images are character concept sketches after that there is a linear story board. To see it as a slideshow click here otherwise you can navigate individually by clicking the thumbnails below.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Progress Work: A concept sketch of Superman

Ok so this weekend has been pretty boring. I decided it was time to refine my drawing skills. I managed to get a concept sketch of our Michael Jackson Superman and a Tim Hortons uniform sketch done. The uniform sketch came out well as it just outlines one look we could use for our coffee guy. The superman sketch was a bit rusty, I guess I should keep practicing, its not good enough until the face just looks scary enough :) (Click to enlarge)

Draft 1: Superman

Coffee Guy Tim Hortons

Friday, October 27, 2006

Progress Work: A quick story draft

Although nothing is set in stone yet, the general story Ferry and I decided on last weekend went something like this, it's a very rough version that gives a quick rundown of start, climax, and ending. We aren't entirely satisfied with an ending yet and will need some faculty feedback...

Additional details:
Plot: Superman goes for a coffee and runs into a fan who is robbing the store
Setting: A coffee shop at a street corner
Characters: Superman, Cashier at Coffee Shop, Robber

It’s bright and cloudy. We see two arms covered in a thin blue fabric pointing straight towards our destination. At a lightning fast speed we the viewer are going zooming through every cloud in space and approaching what appears to be a small city at an incredible speed. Immediately we see ourselves pushing through high rise buildings as we are already at the heart of the city. Suddenly we can no longer follow the two arms we first saw, but now we see them revealing a full body attached to them, a body which has a red cape attached to it with long black hair and suddenly its gone. It has moved beyond our view and we are left behind, it’s just too fast and all we see is a flash of red and blue light moving away from us.

EXT. Coffee Shop
We see a coffee shop at the corner of a quiet and not-so-busy street. We hear a fast approaching object, maybe a plain or a car? No it’s something else something much faster and stronger. We still can’t make out who or what it is as we see a lighting fast object zoom around the main narrow street into the coffee shop. This object moved so incredibly fast that all we see in the end is the coffee shop door open and close, as if a ghost just walked in.

INT. Coffee Shop
The identity of this unnatural being is still unknown to us but we know that it can travel at unprecedented speeds. In a first person view of this being we see ourselves approaching a nervous cashier at the counter who seems awestruck to see us. It’s as if he saw a ghost from the past, or an alien from another dimension. He nervously asks, “Howw..Can I help you..sir..maaaam…sir?”

We are now switched to a first person perspective view of the cashier. Through his eyes we see an almost hideous creature standing in front of us and are now revealed to the true identity of the alien being we were following earlier. It has long hair, thin wide lips and the most deepest darkest eyes ever encountered. In a very shallow and sweet voice it asks us, “Can I have a super double double please?” As the cashier we try to make out the order as quickly as we can when suddenly we are interrupted.

From a wide camera view we can now see everything in the coffee shop and are introduced to a new character. The character is a masked figure who seems to resemble the alien being strikingly. He approaches the counter in an aggressive manner and asks the cashier to hand over all of the money in the cash register. The cashier and the alien being are both surprised and have their hands up in the air. The alien being looks a little confused at the robber and lowers his hands. The Cashier is so nervous that he faints after looking at the gun.

Suddenly the robber takes off his mask and reveals his true identity to our alien being. He seems very excited and starts yelling “OMG…its you? It is you! I’m like your biggest fan” The robber then asks our alien being to sign an autograph. He is just too excited to be in the presence of this being and wants to snap a picture. He pulls out his camera phone and starts snapping a few pictures, requesting the alien being to make a few poses.

Apparently that isn’t enough, the robber wants to capture a video clip of the alien being floating/levitating to show his friends. An hour passes as we find our alien friend and the robber still at the coffee shop. The alien being is tired and sipping his coffee sitting at a table while the robber is jumping around making awkward gestures as if he is telling a story. He accidentally slaps the coffee off the table and our alien friend doesn’t look too happy. We see a flash of white air come out and find that our robber has been frozen in space and time; he has turned into an icicle. Our alien being flies off into the air…

Progress Work: Brainstorming Scenes

When we ran into Dave early last week he told us to just think of as many scenes as we can to get started. So later we did exactly that and here is what we came up with. This was totally random and not linear in any way. This post is a follow up from my earlier post, [click here to view it]

Kid with a PSP (Dave Green’s idea…sort of)
A kid is crossing the road and a truck out of control is speeding towards him. A lighting fast flash of light (Superman) zooms past the truck to save the kid. In the excitement the kid drops his PSP on the street but is saved. Superman gives a speech to the kid and flies away, on his way out he ends up stepping on the PSP

Heat Vision
Superman uses heat vision to save nuclear power plant or a warhead missile. He ignores the big sign saying “flammable” and ends up blowing up the entire area.

Lois Lane
Superman saves a woman trapped in chains/shackles made of metal. He uses his heat vision directed at these shackles and ends up burning her.

Incredible’s Spoof
Superman is pissed off at the end of the day and picks up a car to throw (he’s under his secret identity alter ego). A kid sees him and is speechless.

Flying with Ipod
Superman is flying in the air listening to a Michael Jackson sound track on his iPod, yes even he has one.

Elevator
Superman needs to change from his work outfit into his suit in an elevator but is struggling to take off his cloths, he eventually takes them off and leaves them in the elevator. Someone else walks in and wonders why there are cloths left on the floor of the elevator.

Machine gun
Machine gun shots are fired at Superman’s chest, the bullets end up flying and killing everyone around him.

Buying Coffee (The one we ended up with, sort of)
Superman doesn’t have a wallet or pockets in his spandex suit but goes in line to buy coffee and runs into trouble; he wants free coffee.

Kid walks across
A kid walks across the street playing his PSP a truck is about to hit him. Superman swoops in to save the kid by using his body. The truck crashes into him. The driver comes out yelling “Oh man, my truck!”. On his radio we hear a discussion about a nuclear launch in North Korea and Superman flies away.

Research: The Coffee Shop

I searched on Flickr for some coffee shop images, targeting specifically Tim Hortons and Starbucks. I found a few good reference images that would help us in making/deciding the look of our coffee shop. My production and scenography professor Valerie has found a coffee shop for me that might let us snap pictures in their shop, if the location and set-up looks good it would be ideal to start making a schematic and start modelling in Maya. Ferry and I will have to eventually check it out if it's close by.

View Coffee Shop Research Images

Progress Work: The Coffee Guy

Ok so we have so far determined we need 3 characters in our movie.

  1. Superman (Michael Jackson)
  2. Cashier at Coffee Shop
  3. Robber
When Ferry and I sketched out the story board these were the main cast we thought up. So I started sketching some versions of the Coffee Guy on the train. This is what I came up with. Afterwards me and ferry thought we should model the last two characters after ourselves so Ferry drew my face and I copied it over as me being the Coffee Guy. It seems to work. I think Ferry would make a great robber!

These characters and their involvment will make more sense once we post a screenplay draft and storyboard draft so stay tuned.



*Note: If the images above look distorted, click here.

Research: Main Character



*Note: If the images above look distorted, click here.

These are some of the images I collected from the Metro Toronto Reference Library to get started on making our main character; the combination of Michael Jackson and Superman. We have so far been able to sketch out an ideal face for the character but are still working on what the body should come out as. These are the images we looked at to get started, Ferry will eventually post some images of the face sketches we went through.

Credits (left-right)

  • Image 1: Vanity Fair 2006 pg.421, By: Ernie McCreight
  • Image 2: Gamma Liaison for Time; By: Ron Mc Millan; June-Sept 6, 1993
  • Image 3: By: Harry Benson; Dec 6, 1993
  • Image 4: Globe Television; June 24-30, 2006
  • Image 5: People; Sept 21, 1992

Research: Animation Look & Feel

After looking at several 3D short movies from Shorts Drawer 2004/2005 DVDs I felt that the look and feel described in my earlier post about our project should be something like this. For the Character look we want to go for the Buckets animation (3rd thumbnail), as for the enviroment we want to keep it simple like the rest of the images. A majority of these are student work and we do not take any ownership for these images.



*Note: If the images above look distorted, click here.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Progress

I'm still in the process of creating the character designs and storyboards. I promise I'll post some images soon. Please be patient ^_^.

Lots of ideas but we finally got it down to a coffee shop

Honestly September and October have been hell when trying to get a solid idea. For most of October we didn't really know what we wanted to do, we just had 1 thing in mind which was a character combination of Superman and Michael Jackson. From there we had no where else to go. Last week on Tuesday we sat in the New Media Lab for 6 hours with a bunch of pictures of Superman and Michael Jackson hoping to come up with something, anything. We wanted it to be funny and we wanted it to at least make some sort of point (or we felt we had to).

Thank god we ran into Dave Green in the hallway. He pretty much told us that the combination of our character was funny enough and whatever we do next doesn't matter much as it would be funny anyone. So for that day Ferry and I just wrote down as many scenes we could come up with as Dave had suggested just so we could get the foot in the door. We tried to get some more work done the following Thursday but didn't get much done. However by the end of last week we had a face of our character and had agreed on a look and feel of the movie by looking at several examples.

Knowing how hard it is to produce an animation from start to finish I suggested a detailed character but a simple environment to put him in. The look and feel we both agreed would work was something similar to the animated short Defective. I really thought it was a perfect look because the environment is simple yet descriptive of the setting and it still looks good aesthetically. The characters are also simple but too simple, we wanted something more realistic but believable so we choose to model our characters after the short Buckets.

I felt we still hadn't made enough progress, we had talked to James, Ira, and Dave from the faculty and had some direction but were missing a story. We decided to meet this past Sunday at Yorkdale mall to finalize something. I was determined to not leave till we had a story in our mind. We found a local Sub-way, grabbed a sandwich and some coffee and started brainstorming. After going through our list of scenes we choose one to play off of and it seemed to roll out the best. This was originally Ferry's idea and a funny one!

Essentially Superman (in a parallel universe is Michael Jackson) decides to drop by a coffee shop for his coffee. He runs into a robber who also tends to be a fan of the hero and gets stuck signing autographs and snapping pictures until eventually he loses his temper.
The fact that we would have to deal with just one set, a coffee shop was fantastic it meant less work overall and more concentration on 1 set alone. We had to stick with this for sure and so far are! I hope ED doesn't screw us over :) (ED is the head honcho here in our program)

We storyboarded the intro to climax at that sub-way in rough form and jotted down a quick screenplay, nothing in stone yet. Ferry is working on a neat copy of the storyboard so we can show it to the faculty to get better feedback. I feel we are finally on our way.

On a completely separate note: I know we are far from finalizing things but they must be done soon. Ferry and I both are following a Maya tutorial that helps us make a character from start to finish, this will hopefully get us ready by the time we start modeling everything I want us to start our character work early November.

First Entry; Just an Intro

This blog is a platform for Asim and Ferry's thesis project for MPM42. We will be publishing progress updates and journals throughout the developlement of our project here. Why? Because it's just faster and quicker.

For the rest of the world: This blog will showcase our work on a 3D aniamted short film from start to finish, how we started and how we got to the end. This short is fully computer animated and will be designed in Alias Maya. Both Ferry and I will be posting updates to this blog to keep our professors and our viewers (if any) updated in this project. This project is set to be completed by March 2007.