Character Study 2

Now that I've developed a general story I need to make certain revisions, refinements of my animatic that would a) condense the film length and b) clarify the meaning of the message I am trying to convey.  Right now, the best plan of action to do that is to step away.  This refers to my last blog post about Thinking vs. Making. I am currently in making mode and if I step away from thinking about the story for the next while I can come back to my animatic with a very fresh set of eyes.

So, what I've been doing instead is animating and developing the visual look of my film.


An essential way of expressing your character's personality and testing out how they will move is through making a walk cycle.  I was excited to finally get down to animating again.

Here's the rough lines I animated in TV Paint:

It was interesting seeing how it looked with the shoulder rotation and the slight limp.  The reference I used had some and I wound up exaggerating it a little bit - which I think has to happen when translating any live action footage into animation.

So after that, I coloured it in, brought it into Adobe After Effects, then matted the textures of his clothing:

The most important part of this for me was creating animation that's coloured in with fully-refined line quality.  Something I actually haven't done before.
I do admit he seems a little more youthful than I was going for, but I am going to go with it for now - as a character this can be seen as him in one of his moods.

So after that I brought it into a scene I've been experimenting with in After Effects.  I used a few different assets from various software and brought it in to create a dark, stormy atmosphere.  This isn't necessarily the final way I will be compositing my grad film but it's a start.
In this I used:
Flash
Photoshop
After Effects
Premiere
TV Paint

I compiled a few walking shots with some music - The Only One by The Black Keys.  This song (pretty much their whole album) I think speaks to male angst which suits the tone of my film.

Character Study 2 from Jay Castro on Vimeo.

I'm currently looking into other ways to create the clouds using:
Maya Special Effects
Felt Needle (stop motion)
Torn Paper (stop motion)
Flash Animation