Wednesday, February 3, 2010

11 Second Club - Feb 2010 - competition



Hi.

Prelude_ I've moved to Somerville MA from California recently and while I'm in the inbetween zone of jobs I decided to keep active creatively. Step one was to start working on Jan competition for the 11 Second Club... 5 days before the deadline. Suffice to say I didn't finish on time.  I do have something on its way and with good potential but I'm putting it aside to give this month's competition a more realistic attempt.

And here we go. This month's competition has started...

The 11sec audio clip provided for us is a musical bit from Caravan Palace called "Jolie Coquine".  Here's it is: audio file.

My take on this audio:
Instruments > violin, acoustic bass, acoustic guitar, triangle, bongo.
dance style > I'm thinking 1920s Charleston.

I'm going to try and create my characters for this one, if its a going to be a wise idea or not ... I'm sure I'll  find out soon enough.


This image is what came to mind when I heard the audio. Two beautiful beautiful women surrounded by men, represented by old style cartoon monkeys. The crowd should be all monkeys too. 


FEB 04
Started modeling the girl character. Here's a screen grab of the progress:



FEB 05
The girl model progression (working on the head now); hope to get it done by tomorrow and get her rigged by this weekend. Well see.



FEB 06
The weekend rigging thing didn't happen. : / ... but here's a little more progress:


FEB 10
Finally finished the face set up ... for most part. Yeah, yeah; I know. Still haven't started animating yet!  :o/


FEB 12
Not much progress the last few days. She has hair and high heels. That's pretty much it. : p



FEB 13
Finished the hands and a few proportional changes to the arm. Head rig and girl model are now done! Sweet. Now on to rigging the body...

FEB 15
Rigging, weighting and testing the body ... she's still kinda funky.




FEB 16
Working on weighting and final tweaks. Decided I'll start setting up my animation scene tomorrow. And going to cut the other character out of it for now. I'll just use a ready made rig and switch up my idea for the animation a little.



FEB 19
I've changed my concept for this animation to make it easier on myself and to see if I can finish this piece by the end of the month. The set is done. And I'm using Max for my second character so I don't have to model and rig anymore. Now I'm on to animating!


FEB 22
First pass for timing and camera set up. Helps out a lot to flesh out the idea.
My idea is to have a bunch of guys ogling and attempting to impress the girl as she passes by only to find out she already has a boy friend that's a tiny bearded unpretentious guy or maybe just some leprechaun which in fact is what he looks like at the moment.





FEB 25
First day of animation. A little late in the game ... I know, I know. Still fun though. No pretensions here, trust me. Here I've started animating Max's reaction to seeing Charlet for the first time.
I've also decided to scrap the idea of having a bunch of guys; I'll stick with one thankverymuch. Thats good enough for my plate at the moment. Another thing is the ending, its a puppy instead of a guy. I like it better that way.   





FEB 26
Afternoon ... just a little progress. Hope to have something more substantial later on. 
 

FEB 28
This was how far I made it before the submission deadline. Blocked out some more stuff but definitely didn't leave myself enough time for animating everything. Around 3 days for the characters. Spent the rest of the time designing, modeling and rigging the girl character, building and setting up the scene and so forth. No problem though. All part of learning how fast I can accomplish things. I've also come to realize I need a better set up for the "walking stick". Found myself doing a lot of counter animating to get it to work. I had to deal with a lot counter animating for the feet on the girl too ... need to go back to the rig and see what gives. I'll still finish this thing soon enough. 


... the sad end to this story was that my laptop was stolen with all my files in it.
And that's that to this story.... :'(