LAUAN603 - Ben is here!

In a surprising turn of events, Ben's voice actor delivered his lines a couple days early!
I was very pleased with what he gave me, so after compiling all the voice lines I'm gonna use into one soundtrack and splitting all of it up by shot, I am finally 100% ready to animate the whole thing. Took long enough, but I'm glad we got here earlier than I expected to.

LAUAN603 - Where in the world is Ben?

Current update on the Ben's Voice Actor situation...

I have two actors in consideration: one seemed at one point to be asking for money after giving me an audition reel, but I think he was just doing the whole "you don't know if you don't ask" sort of thing. He's currently "in consideration". His audition was fine but...

....the other guy I found was better.
He showed interest in the project after I reuploaded the job ad to Mandy, and he was pretty close to what I had originally had in mind for Ben's voice, so after getting in touch with him, he will be sending an audition file this week. Hopefully I can convince him to send a reading of the full script as early as possible, after we've talked about the approach to the character via email.

LAUAN603 - 11 Second Club

For the past three weeks, I have been working on my third live brief for the 11 Second Club competition. The source of the audio was from a movie called "The Velocipastor", which had a synopsis so bizarre on IMDb that my friends and I just had to watch it for ourselves. I had wanted to do an 11 Second Club challenge for quite a while now, because animating dialogue is something I want to specialise in.

I wanted to animate this sequence in the shortest amount of time possible, so I bit the bullet and decided to mainly use keyframes with tweening in-between to give it bounce and energy. While I would have loved to go frame by frame the old fashion way, I really wanted to get this out of the way so that I could return to animating "Stupid Question" and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

For my next live brief, I may do another 11 Second Club entry, since its the kind of thing I really enjoy animating, but for the sake of keeping things interesting I might do a different animation competition or even a character design challenge instead.

LAUAN603 - LoopdeLoops

Here are my entries for the "Instrument" and "Whoops!" LoopdeLoop themes.
Pleased with how these turned out. The next two live briefs will be for different competitions.

The loop I dd was based on old 40's era cartoons. The design of the pied piper specifically was heavily influenced from adaptations of that particular era. I was originally gonna leave it at that, but I was encouraged to add some filters via After Effects, and I think they turned out quite nicely - I'm very proud of this one.

This loop is actually not the first time I animated a baby in pain. I had animated something for their "Stairs" theme from a while back but never got around to sending it. This one is okay, I think the frames are a little inconsistent and the loop back around isn't that smooth... but I guess it's funny so whatever. Another masterpiece to add to the collection!

LAUAN603 - Close-up Background and Ben finds a voice

With 250 out of commission and the cintique room full, I wasn't able to do any animating today.
However, I still got stuff done. Firstly, I redrew the background that you'll see in the close-up shots of Rover. This will hopefully make it look cleaner.

Secondly, I believe that I now have my 2nd voice actor!
After listening to his audition tape (or audio file to be more accurate), I sent some feedback and he should be giving me the full script by this weekend. I'm very excited to have both Ben and Rover fully voiced, because then I can compose a full soundtrack for the film and there won't be any obstacles in the way of me animating.

LAUAN603 - First Sequence Completed(?)

Today I finished my first sequence of animation.

It took me just little under a week to complete (Tuesday - Friday)
I love how it looks and I am pleased with how it turned out for the most part. However, I am a little frustrated with how jittery it is, but I hope I'll produce smoother stuff as time goes on. Also, I am currently not including any details on the book as not only was it a pain to draw but keeping them consistent was next to impossible and it looked pretty bad in motion. This is something I will look into.

I will also consider redrawing the backgrounds for close-up shots like this. I think zooming in on the pre-existing one looks fine but you can tell that its been blown up when you analyse the line work, so redrawing them to make them look cleaner would probably be a good investment of my time.

LAUAN603 - Rover Has a Voice

This afternoon I received Rover's lines for the film.
To be more precise, I got three takes of the script, which was incredibly useful, as I can now select the line deliveries I like the most and splice them all together (which I will do later today).

I also organised my Google Drive in preparation and divided the film into 13 shots; this will make things easy to keep track of when I'm animating sequences out of order. Since I only have Rover's lines for now, I'm going to focus on his close-ups.

I'm very excited to finally start animating - this has been long overdue.