Flower Story - Character Brainstorming

Here are some of the initial character sketches I made for Flower Story.  This was the brainstorm period, where I was drawing inspiration from wherever I could find it.

ZBrush Practice

Been working with ZBrush digital sculpting. This is one of my early successful sculpts. Guess which famous hip-hop artist this is!

Sansa e200 rendering

Rendering of a Sansa e280 media player.  Modeled, textured, and lit from scratch.

Effects in Kazu Kibuishi Style

The assignment was to choose another artist and draw, paint, or render an original image in their style. I chose Kazu Kibuishi, a comic artist, particularly the style of his Copper stories.  I used several elements from his various works, and created the image digitally.

The second step involved adding in effects using Maya and a compositing program.  I used Maya to generate the spore particle's random movements, and I used Autodesk Composite to add in the spores, the balloon's movement, and distortion on the smoke.  Both are shown below.

Walk Cycles

This assignment was to learn walk cycles, and apply the knowledge of arcs and overlapping action. We selected from several pre-modeled characters, so we could come back and animate them later. I decided to do a 3/4 view to make it more challenging.

Various Speed Sketches

Various sketches from throughout the Fall 2010 semester. Each took 1-2 hrs, not necessarily including time coming up with the composition.  Click to englarge.

Matte Painting with Animated Perspective

This matte painting was generated on seven layers, using Photoshop.  The perspective animation was created in Maya.  Below are the static image, and the perspective animation generated from it.

I wish I had been able to go more into detail, but I burnt out towards the end, simply because there was so much going on in the image.  In hindsight, I should have worked a specific area, so I could start putting detail into smaller objects, rather than having the large fields of hill and sky that were relatively uninteresting.

Lipsync and Body Gesture Animation

The focus of this animation was on gesture, lipsync, and overlapping action. The sound is a clip from a sketch comedy TV show, and was drawn out of context for humor's sake.

Flour Sack Animation

The focus of this animation was on character. A flour sack, a emotionless, almost formless object, had to make a realistic jumping motions, and the animator had to visually give a reason to make the flour sack jump.

I was not the only person to 'kill' their flour sacks. For all, it proved to be an fun test of creativity to dispose of the flour sack in a humorous fashion on top of meeting the requirements of the assignment.

Storyboards for Elephantal Disaster

Check out some of the new boards for our pitch for Elephantal Disaster.  I've posted three scenes here, showing the main beats of our story: brotherly competition, argument, and friendly resolve.

DOESN'T IT LOOK LIKE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY?

From the feedback we received by our peers over the beatboard and initial pitch, we decided to drastically change the story we were working with.

Originally, the story was very focused on the fight itself, and much less on the characters and their personal interactions.  We decided the delivery of the theme would be much more effective if the audience was able to make emotional connections to the characters and their situation.  We decided on a chance discovery of a single peanut by two brothers walking with each other.  This would explain a mild rivalry that could get out of hand, and a mutual learning experience that the brothers could share, and the audience could easily read.

Our goal was to make characters with obvious intentions, and play to the audience's likely experiences and perceptions of stereotypes, as to make the audience more easily understand the situation and, thus, more deeply experience the moral.

WHAT WAS THE RESULT?

The storyboards were shown along with character sheets, color diagrams, charts for story, character, and camera, reference images, and samples of existing works. The group presented the story to our peers and superiors in the format of a narration over a short acting play. A quick Q&A explained our choices and intentions, and left us with some more ideas to work with.

From the original seven, this story was one of the four to be picked out for further development.