Wednesday, 24 December 2014

Chirp

Apart from A Wondering Minstrel, I also worked on another film that premiered for the fall 24 Hour Film Festival! I teamed up with two extremely talented first year animation students Bernard Malijan and Vincent Sanyoto, the same people I collaborated with earlier in the semester. 

It was an interesting experience with a few bumps along the way but we managed! The most difficult part was teaching the two of them the programs and the entire pipeline and process of creating a short film. With them having only been in the program for 2 months, they were still getting the hang of animation and the animation process altogether. Even though I'm in second year and I was teaching them these programs, animation techniques and whatnot, I too learned a lot from working with them such as cleanup.

For this film we all contributed to the story and the storyboarding. I did the majority of the animations which I had to keep as simple as it can be with the time limit we had (we originally planned 3 days but it spanned over a week of production). I also did the colouring during clean up and the compositing. Bernard did character designs, small animations and line clean up (WHICH ARE AMAZING CLEAN UP LINES) and Vince did layouts and a tiny bit of animation. And just like with every small collaborative projects, everyone helped each other out and contributed and critiqued each other's works.

The collaborative process was fun and I like how the film turned out. The two of them put in so much effort into this film it was great to see the passion they had. For their first short film, we did a spectacular job!

So here we go, enjoy Chirp!

A bird hunter hears the call of a rare bird and attempts to hunt it down.


Kingfish Studios Team:

Bernard Malijan III: http://bernardmalijan.tumblr.com/
Marco Rivera: http://artofmarcorivera.tumblr.com/
Vincent Sanyoto: http://vincentsanyoto.tumblr.com/

Art and other Doodads:

Character designs by Bernard Malijan



Dancing bird-versions of us by Bernard! 
(Yes I'm aware there isn't an earring in one of my frames, there was a fixed one but we can't find it)


Intro pan by Vincent Sanyoto


Book design by Vincent Sanyoto 


Here's the beautiful Bernard posing with our story beats. The origins of our story stemmed from an idea of some buzzing sound annoying someone and them trying to figure out where it came from. Instead of getting into the details, we worked with the basic phrase "What's that sound?" instead. Bird calls not making bird sounds came into mind and it went from there.


Our totally legit storyboards...


And our totally legit "leica". It's mostly just rough timing no sounds. Enjoy the drawings, we're the finest storyboard artists you'll have ever come across.

Sunday, 21 December 2014

A Wondering Minstrel

IT FINALLY PREMIERED

Ever since starting production on it during winter break 2013 last year, this film went through a bit of a hiatus with work being done on and off. This summer we put our all into finishing it, we even submitted to some festivals because why not? The film was pretty much complete after the summer except for one scene needing clean up and a few mistakes that needed to be fixed. Then the premiere for the summer 24 Hour Films was delayed and then it was finally shown! HURRAH!

What a long strange trip it's been.

It's weird thinking that it's almost a year since this was created, and the small animation I did at the beginning with the first musician makes me wish I could redo it since I have become way better since then.

SO HERE IT IS STUDIO MONGOOSE'S THIRD FILM:


Credits:


Studio Mongoose Team:

Concept Art

Title Design:

I decided to go overboard with this title design. I wanted it to look like those old fairy tale Disney logos with the occasional metallic-gold look, so I looked at the recent version of the Sleeping Beauty logo as my main source of inspiration.

Disney's Sleeping Beauty logo

I looked for a font that looked like it came out of old medieval pages. Unfortunately the letter "A" didn't look nice, so I cheated and it is a combination of the letter "O" and "N". And here's the process of designing the logo.



Original black and white logo.


Digital painting process.


Final title design.


Final title card.


The House Boyd Flag design by me.


Character designs by Kathleen Martin: