Last saturday at dawn (10.30am) completely hangover, I walked more then an hour in the sun to pick up the screen prints.

And man was it worth it! They are brilliant. It’s my first screen print and I love it, I love it so much I might screen print some backgrounds from the film.

I will start sending them on monday to a few lucky backers.

I printed with Atom Printing, I highly recommend them, great work, fast and affordable.

Here’s the print:

If you wanna get one, they’re £20, just chuck me an email.

And here’s how screen prints are made, it’s pretty rad!

And a video that shows the screen printing process, nothing to do whit atom printing or the film, it’s just a youtube video :)

I finally got around shooting the skeleton shots (some of them anyway.)

Now you may wonder how do i rotoscop a skeleton??

Well it’s not easy… So I built a “Skeleton Costume” and I start from there and draw all the missing bits (bones really) the old way :)

The roto is SO painful, but drawing the spine and all the other thing is pretty fun. I’m saying that probably because I’m still doing the first shot.

Here is the test animation I made, to make sure that the suit worked… It’s not part of the film. I’m including the live footage, because let’s face it, it’s pretty stupide.

Here in HD on vimeo 

So a few students from RCDC (Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication) backed the film’s kickstarter.

I met them at the Kickstarters end’s drinks, and for what ever reason when they’re not busy at school or on personal projects, they want to help on the film… Instead of partying and having fun! Crazy peops.

So they’re helping me shading some shots. To make sure everything is consistant I made this little “tutorial” on how to shade beard and hair on the film:

You can check it out in high quality on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/65075512

Anyway thanks Andreas, Amy, Ashley, Andreas and Matt

Damn, I’ve been dead busy with playing fancy dressing and drinking (for the live action of the film, obviously – well mainly) that I forgot to post last week!

Anyway there is much more black on the character now, and shading takes twice longer… If you want to start a 2d film, hand drawn, here’s an advice, make everything white! Damn that black T-Shirt is killing me.

So you can forgive me, here’s a little GIF, the walking drunk (it’s not the shot that caused me lots of pain):

Today I finished shot MO_03_00 witch means that I reached 5 minutes 30 of animation!

That’s half the film animated!

This shot was a bitch, I emptied a whole pen to finish it, here’s a little preview:

I’ve got around 150 packets to prepare for the Kistarter, so I’m starting early. (And this as nothing to do with the fact that I don’t feel like shooting more live action today, NOTHING)

The lucky 15  first fellas that pledged for the book and that sent me their address will receive their book very soon.

I’m sure the post man is gonna LOOOVE me.

And to celebrate this I made a GIF, obviously. (Might take a while to load)

Not much to say this week, I’ve been animating for the last few weeks, and I’m getting faster at it (not sure if it’s better though)

One more shot and I get to shoot live action again.

In animation we use a lot of cycles to save time on repetitive action, such as walks or runs.

A cycle is just an animation that loops i.e. the first frame and the last one are from the same motion and we don’t notice a change in rythme when the animation starts again.

Looping a video can get very tricky, but it will save a tremendous time in animation..

For exemple I’m working on a shot where the guy walks toward the camera, it’s a 10 second shot, witch would mean 120 frames to animate. Way to much.

So let’s turn this video (video is speed up):

into this cycle :

The first step is to find where the action repeats:

Now the first and last frames are kind of the same but the guy is moving forward…  Rubbish… So let’s scale and rotate him so it matches as much as possible.

It’s starting to get there, but because it’s video, nothing loops at the same frames. It needs to be fixed, element by elements:

Each individual part of the body is looped. If you don’t pay attention to the background.

Then I put the guy back together:

Et voila, if you look only at the guy,  the video is looping. You can see that I don’t loop the lower body and upper body at the same frame, same with the arm and the guitar. That’s another tricky part, as it’s important to keep a natural look, but once drawn:

This fella can walk, forever!

An I only animated 21 frames!

Don’t forget that first and last frame shouldn’t be the same one, or you would have twice the same frame. You need to match 2 frames, and then remove the last one, if that makes any sense :)

It’s the last day of my kickstarter if you wanna chip in, it’s here: http://www.deadmansreachfilm.com

I finished animating all the shots I filmed so far, so I’m back on live action.

I have a few “classic” shot to shoot, i.e. me going around in my living room pretending to be in the desert, but after that I’ll start the more complex shots, involving old fashion special effects such as building a fake head in latex. Ho boy that’s gonna be fun!

Here, a mock up layout of one of the shots I film yesterday:

And just a little reminder that the kickstarter is still going! (9 days left!)

Well the Kickstarter had an amazing start! We reached the initial goal in only 24 hours!

The initial goal was to cover the cost of finishing the film animation and the off costs, like festival inscription.

The new goal now includes the compositing of the film (putting all the animation layers together) and the sound recording!

I hope we can make it! So keep sharing the love!

Also I feel like the T-shirts don’t get as much attention as they deserve, It’s probably because I didn’t talk about them in the video, so here we go:

I’m planing to print the T-shirt with the AMAZING Dude Factory, this means that the printing quality will be beautiful.

They print on American apparel cuts, Male and Female!  You can also choose a variety of colors. Check it out, HERE, And it’s only £25!