Coffe film

When I work non stop for days I get so ratty no friend can even approach me with a cup of tea. Concentration mixes with unhealthy kind of determination and turns into something dangerous. Wild and crazy (and untamed...). Just on a special once-in a-blue moon occasion. [I remember chemistry classes back at school, no one can do the test. I got flooded with papers flying from all directions right onto my table with messages like "bla-bla-bla, here's the equation, HELP!!!! URGENT!", five at a time. I was so angry but the anger helped to do the work, strangely enough, I'd bark at the class mates "let me finish my own test first, i'm almost there!" and then ( Flash Gordon speed) I would do all the other peoples' work...]

Anger. Right now I'm angry at microsoft. Stupid Bing search engine, god-awful media player, enternet explorer seems undeletable from the machine no matter what i do. Like one big disaster. I'm switching to bloody linux next. had enough.

So yeah... Coffe film. Done pretty much in two days believe it or not. Non stop working, well, ok, a little sleep, back to the lightbox right from the bed and animating. I was properly running out of time.

Its was one thing to set the whole working space up. Really enjoyed making a "nest" in mom's apartment in London. Here's a picture.
The lightbox rests on psychology magazines, toothpicks to the left are used to poke around the frames, the brown stuff is leftover coffee and an uber-big mug of green tea to help me be. Note, Karl Marks saves the bum.
But the really interesting bit is the camera off course, on the next picture I've circled it with a very manly-coloured arrow ->
There you go, Its a web-cam, saletaped onto a lamp. Only cost me something like ten pounds, truly wonderful when you dont have a proper camera all set-up on a tripod. Genius suggested this, so I can't take any credit. He also suggested I use MonkeyJam free stop motion software. The only thing missing in that program is onion-skin, but we could live with that.

So the next stage we proceed with the film-making. ..

Here goes the first step. And a yummy one indeed. You start from a scratch. Not CG, where it's calculated, not even a well-storyboarded traditional medium, here you have a canvas and you make the first step. Like chess. It gave me butterflies in the stomach for a moment.

However characters have existed long before the start (as always). (But as the sketches can't be scanned in at home, will have to show you some other time).

The little fox, also known as Dee or just Black Fox is really like a little innocent picture you see before you go to sleep. (Actually the whole Coffe Film is like that). Some children grew up watching winnie the poo, or the muppets, or the clangers... or what-have-you.... the truth is that you never forget about them. I suspect all my characters in this film came from exactly that dreamy innocent nostalgia.

...And true love for coffee.

★IDENT★

The project is now officially finished.



Happy? Hm. 1/2 happy, a bit annoyed, quite satisfied with the fact that it's now over. (BEACH!!!! SUNTAN!!! SUNGLASSES!!!)
I used Flash for the whole piece so now the wacom is practically an extension of my hand. On the plus side it was quite simple to get the look I want.
Before I go into details, let me tell you all how ★ PROUD ★ i am for all of us...

I am proud for Simon Carter who almost lost his head rendering stuff out, for Sarah Crombie who reckoned she isn't computer literate yet managed to achieve something wonderful, for Tom Dowler who helped every confused soul put things right and composed some very nice music, for Emma who managed to keep both food supplies and work going (and some nice work it was!), for Matt Luxton who sat there modeling from the first day right to the last, for our angry German who managed to do some fecking awesome after effects work in 3 days, for Orla who despite all the doubts about her work has managed to impress the people from Chew TV, for each and every soul that spent days dwelling in the studio like some group of crazy hawaiian hoary bats..Last but never-ever least I am proud for Andy and Georg who strongly resisted temptations of the outside world to help their "kiddies". ★ i am proud, folks :)

As for myself...
Almost everything went according to plan. A few silly problems with "pencil tool" in flash were very easily sorted.
More time would have been helpful for adding shadows to the characters, but it's not necessary.
I was lucky to pick the right soundtrack from the beginning of my animation so that went well too.
The only real thing to complain about is actually the lack of challenge. The project was time-consuming all right, but it somehow lacked technical difficulties. so i promise myself to use Maya for my next project.

★Whats been used?

Literally CS Flash for the whole animation, not even tester's been done on paper (as I thought I would do to start with) . It started off as testers of the head movement mainly (in Flash). As you can guess the head was the most complex/interesting part of my animation. This is when I first applied the personality I imagined the Lizard will have (duft yet playful, not concerned about the outside world too much, finding it hard to concentrate on thinking processes) .
I found the invironment part less important as firstly-> all the attention of the audiences should be on the mein character, second-> "sketchy" style of the whole thing doesn't require detailed artwork for the background (plus it saves time) . However there was a 'boil' on the BG, which basically means that it has been redrawn (and repainted) a couple of times.

★The "logic" behind this...

Is very strange indeed. It "growed" from obscure thoughts that I had when we were given the brief. General human logic was not involved I'm afraid. Going with one of the first ideas was risky. Im having to confess that there was almost no research, no diagrams to help me think, to organise possible galore of concepts.
Now ideally I will not pick the first random idea that comes across simply for the sake of being a nerd person who knows better.
(Besides all this experience tells me its not the most artistic idea, its the one closest to what the employer is looking for.)

★Pallets
Suspecting my animation of being a bit too "obscure" and "weird" for the general audiences (from Chew TV's point of view). Intuition tells me that the pink pallet is confusing for the eye and not exactly the right choise. Off course you dont expect your tutors to tell you this...

General Pluses +

- Flows well. Has a good "beat" to it.

- Has an element of surprise/obscurity

- Nice general design of characters ("style"?)

General Minuses -

- Some more work should have been done on the bit where camera zooms in on the opened mouth. Certainly another "boil", not "hold". It makes the animation look like a picture, something best to be avoided (unless you are making anime.)
- Apparently pixilated logo