45. Bones

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.

Walking skeleton

Here in HD on vimeo 

44. Deadman's little helpers

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:

Hair-Drawing

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

Anyway thanks Andreas, Amy, Ashley, Andreas and Matt

42. Same old, Same old

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):

Walking

37. Loops

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):

Original

into this cycle :

Drawing

The first step is to find where the action repeats:

Selection

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.

Scale

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:

Torso

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

Legs

Then I put the guy back together:

Loop

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:

Drawing

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: www.deadmansreachfilm.com

34. Kickstarter Update

backers 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:

T_Shirts

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!

male

 

female

33. KickStarter is READY - Trailer

Ahoy! "Animating Deadman's Reach" KickStarter is ready to go live!

I will be launching it THIS THURSDAY, valentine's day.

And it will include Awesome Rewards!

Rewards

Don't miss it, Thuersday, for 30 days only! I will be trying to raise 7000£.

The preparation was bloody intense, but at least you''ll be able to enjoy making fun of me in the KickStarter video!

27. Zoetrope Gif

  I finished shooting 3 sequences last week and I now have 12 new shots that I can animate.

Some of them are quite scary...

This one for instance, each drawing is a proper a4 drawing... shaded and all.

I made it into a kind of zoetrope gif, for fun. So that's 9 frames out of the 26 the shot needs...

 

Comment here

25. Live Action

I've now finished animating everything I shot a will back, so today and probably tomorrow will be shooting live action again. It's quite a pain in the ass, but it has to be done... the bigest trouble is that, since last time, my hair grew quite a lot, and I'm gonna have to shave my beard... What a drag!

Here's another little GIF, enjoy:

I'm a bit out of Ideas on what I should post, Do you have anything you'd like me to explain about animation, or anything you'd like to see?

Let me know HERE.

24. Shading animation

First of all, sorry for not posting yesterday. I'm sure the 2 visitors that were eager to discover more about the making of DeadMan's Reach were very disappointed, Mum... Conor... sorry.

Anyway.

I didn't post because I was going to post a video that I filmed with a GoPro stuck to my head. I thought it would be fun to see how I shade animation...

Turns out it took me more than 16 hours to shade the 33 frames of the particular shot I'm working on, and because of that:

1) I couldn't draw with a GoPro on my head for 16 hours, I had to stopped after 8 hours... Neck fixing is not included in the film budget.

2) Even speed up 3000 time, the video was extremely boring.

So, I decided to post a GIF instead. It's crazy how gifs are more popular than video, maybe its the equivalent of Disc/ CD but in the 2010: GIF / Vimeo

Anyway, here is what took me 16 hours to draw, color and shade...

And I'm still working on it... I'm now thinking "Summer 2016" is a good release date.

You can comment here.

23. Kick-Starter

I'm seriously considering putting DeadMan's Reach on KickStarter. The main reason being that I'm starting week 23 of a production that was suppose to be 24 weeks. And I can't see how I can finish 7 mins of animation in 1 week... So I need to extend the production quite dramatically...

So what's this Kick-Starter thing?? Well kick-starter is a founding platform for creative projects.

Basically you pre-sell stuffs before  making a project, and you use the money you got from the sell to actually create the project. i.e. For an album, you pre-sell your album, then make the album, then send the album to the people how pre-bought it.

It's a one month process where you need as much word of mouth as possible to reach the amount you need to do (finish) the project. It's a all or nothing. If the amount is not reached you pay nothing and the project get nothing!

It's kind of what I started doing with the sell of the DeadMan's Reach sketch book, but on a completely different scale. (I would have done a Kick-Starter straight from the start but It wasn't available in the UK at the time).

For all of you who bought the book already there will be special, cheaper stuff!

Here are the products (Rewards) I would be selling:

The book, obviously:

T-Shirts:

Original Animation Drawings, like this one:

Original BackGrounds, like that one:

And some more surprises!

As always let me know what you think.

22. Back to Black

I finished the pencil animation for the Bedroom sequence, Those of you who bought the book had a preview of what the film animation will look like, thanks for your feedbacks!

I switched  back to shading for a few days before starting a new sequence witch involves a different drawing technique...

Here is what 3 hours of shading looks like:

[vimeo 51915738 w=500 h=281]

20. LineTest

Last week I started animation, I did 200 drawings in two days, tough. I'm probably going to finish the sequence I'm working on and then change a little bit the technique I'm using.

I will try to find a way to make animation a bite more... expressive, by animating straight with a pen.

It's going to be harder, but will save tones of paper and hopefully will make the drawings look much more  "alive".

In the mean time let me introduce you to my LineTest, it's a setup that allows you to take pictures of drawings with a consistent lighting and framing.

You can check your animation much more quickly then when scanning drawing. When I say my line test I mean the one my friend Lucas lent me, thanks mate.

I'm using a D80 to take the pictures and icarus camera control to control the camera from the computer (Tethered)

Here it is in action: [vimeo 50990280 w=500 h=281]

17. 56 Backgrounds

I have now drawn 56 Backgrounds. I have a few left and my goal is to finish most of them this week and start animation next week.

I will need to make a new planning obviously...

There is a few POV in the film and I haven't decided if they will be fully animated backgrounds and characters or if it will only be a big background with pans.

Anyway, here's what it looks like when I try to review most of the BGs:

 

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15. Win a Book!

I just finished this background, and it's quite weird, so I thought it would be fun to give a book away to someone that manage to guess what it is.

Like the facebook page (Deadman on facebook) and then Send me your answer HERE (quentin.vien@gmail.com), and I'll randomly selected the winner on sunday night,

and announce it on this page on next monday.

You have until Sunday midnight!

The winner will get the book number 99, signed with it's donkey post card and access to the deadman's mailing list that gives access to special secret shit.

Spread the word, on facebook, twitter, google + (do people use that?), smoke signals, etc...

And if you can't wait until monday, because you really really need to have the book, you can buy it here: Help Finance the film.

Or simply read about it. (you should buy it though)

For those of you who already have the book, It would make a good present for your grandmas, so I'll be happy to send it to whoever you ask me to.

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