its been a while since my last update, I've been doing dissertation work amongst other things. The inner skull of Noah's head and the torso sculpt are finished and ready for molding now, here are some pictures:











































Ive also done a lot of new soundscape work, but sadly the sound card on my PC has decided to die, and its not letting me put it up here. I've looking at the budget for the film today and scaring myself, I'm still looking at over a grands worth of costs, so I'm going to have to sell my guitar and some games consoles soon I think. My mum and dad have found a couple of cool sounding props for the film set, but I'll wait till I have more info/ photos so you'll have to wait and see!

I'm back in bristol this weekend and clearing out dad's garage. It went well and should be pretty much ready for me to start building the set. I haven't rung John Wright yet, about the armature, but will do tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get good news, I could do with some about now.

Just an update on the sculpting stuf today really, heads moving along slowly, its really been a pain in the ass to make. Lots of strange unstable shapes. as you can see the proportions have got a bit crazy, this is mainly because I need to incorperate the teeth (which are a wixture of fox and wallaby teeth). Its growing on me tho, I think itll work.

heres how the torso sculpt is coming along, ive started detailing it today.

Two thing to put up today, first off a quick photo of my progress on the final head sculpt:














And a design sketch for it, showing how the armature will work:















The second thing is another lump of test animations with some more sound stuff:


I should probably go to bed........

Went to John Wrights studio again today with all my new stuffs, he was home ill sadly but I got to speak to some of his technicians who'd helped my out the first time I visited so I got it all sorted. The've taken some photos of the sculpt and a few of my design drawings and they should have an armature plan and an idea of the cost for me by next friday (nov 28th). Meanwhile on my end I have to finish off the torso sculpt and make the mold of it as a priority so they can use it to make sure the key armature praportions are accurate. I'll finish up with a recent photo of the body sculpt, its still very much work in progress.

Just a quick one as its late. I'm back in Bristol at the moment and I when to check out my dads garage where I'll be animating the film. Here's a pic:














Dads been collecting up wood and bits of tubing for me to help me build the sets with as you can see! In two weeks time I'm clearing it out ready to start building sets. While I'm in Bristol I'm also gonna go visit John Wright again armed with my sculpts and armature designs, hopefully it'll be enough for him to work out a quote to see how much it'll cost. This'll help me work out my lighting budget and weather I can get myself a copy of stopmotion pro for the computers. Then I can get it built.

In other news its also nice to see my cat Lola who's living with my folks at the moment, hopefully she can come back to Newport soon :)

sorry for the lack of postings over the last few days, Ive been trying to avoid the computer so I can get more work done. Ended up feeling a little strange and unwell though and didn't get much done anyway, so its not been a great week all told.

Ive been working on the torso sculpt, decided to make a sculpy skeleton to sculpt the plaster over, but it ended up being quite a chore as it kept exploding/ falling apart and was very time consuming and frustrating. Here it is anyway:














I also finished the skull I was making and did a plasticine face for it.

i got my camera working!! So It'll be mostly photos today, I'll start with the plasticine feet I made last night, ther not really finished but these are gonna be the final ones for molding.














This Is how the body will fit together, there will be 10 parts joined together by metal cuffs to which the support arms attach.



















Heres the full size character design from the front and the side, the heads gonna change, perhaps the hands too. These photos are all distorted because i had to photograph them at odd angles due to their size (A2)



















and finally the new skull I'm making, its not finished cuz I've run outa sculpey.

















The purpose of this model is to work out if adding molars further back on the jaw works, I hope it does but I'll have to wait till I put on the plasticine 'skin' before i find out.

peace out

finished the bulk of the armature design today, just need to do the hands and finish figuring the head. I ran out of sculpey yesterday so I cant finish the new head just yet. Ive bought 2 more packs from the same guy as last time, so they should arrive monday I hope. Cost about 14 quid for both and makes it 4 packs so far for this project. Apologies for noting this down here, but I'll loose the info when it comes to budgeting this thing later. As of now my estimate is that I've spent around 40 quid on sketchbooks, 15 on pens pencils rubbers, rulers ect, mebbe make that 20. And about another 40 on bits and bobs for making the set and props (cameras and stuff). Tenner on camera batteries, 40 quid on CDs and DVDs related to researching the projects look and sound... 15 quid on plasticine. I think thats It. around 200 quid so far and I'm bound to have forgotten something.

My guesstimate at this moment in time is that the film will cost me around 2 grand, so pretty soon I'm gonna have to cut corners or risk getting in dept.

not been able to do as much today as I'd hoped, but I've started working towards the final design for Noah's head. been sculpting a new head too, one with molars in just to see if it'd work. Managed to set the oven too hot and burn the bottom jaw though as you can see:













Today I've also been working on some props for my friend John's film. Hes a fellow animation student and also a stop motion animator/modelmaker, so we're helping each other out a little. Anyway hes asked me to make some masks for him, I've done 6 so far, these are the most recent 3 I sculpted:

Well my animatic went down okay, i needed to explain the plot a bit more which was what I expected. Still gotta work out how I'm going to put the backstory in there without it becoming to epic...

This evening I've been working on a full scale character design of Noah, which i can use to design the armature along with John Wright. He comes out around 2 foot tall, I'll give a more accurate measurement when I find my ruler. I managed to get a couple of snaps before my camera died again. Ive been doing it in layers, so theres a skeleton, a muscle man and a version with the skin on. I got a photo of the skeleton and a page of templates I used to make sure the drawing was symmetrical. Hopefully I can get some better pics tomorrow!

Yay! my animatic is finished at long last! I say finished but theres still a few tweaks ill do at a later stage, different sound being one of them, but I'm leaving it alone for now. hopefully this will give a clearer picture of the sequence. One note is that once the mechanical arm things attach to Noah at the beginning there meant to be attached to him for the whole sequence, hes meant to be so emaciated he needs the arms to lift him around. Anyway they disappear cuz it would have taken too long to keep drawing them on and been a bit visually distracting. So yeah, just imagine a few spidery arms supporting him at all times, and pulling him away at the end of the film. Ill stick some sketches of how the arms will look in practice at some point I think, its a key element of the film. Enjoy!

more of the same today, animatic stuff. was hoping to finish to day so i could free tomorrow up, but I've been a bit headachey and ill today so thats slowed things down, nearly there now though!

hello hello, this is probably gonna be briefer than it should be, a lots happened since i last posted, but I'm nackered so... ill write more on it tomorrow. The armature stuff went well and inspired me somewhat so thats good.. managed to draw up and scan what is hopefully the whole animatic, so I'm now photoshopping it all. heres a few frames I've done so far:

Good news first: I managed to get in contact with John Wright, the guy who's gonna help me make the armature (skeletons) for Noah's hands. Ive arranged to travel down to Bristol and see him on Friday. I've drawn up some designs to give him, but run into a few issues (see bad news)

Got a fair chunk of the animatic drawn out today and I'm happy with the way the dance is looking.

Lastly one of my baby stick insects just hatched, wildly unrelated but good news in any case.

Bad news: The hands are going to be too big! I've tried to make the design as small as possible based on the size joints available, but their still around 4 inches long, which is huge! I was hoping to keep the model 18 inches tall or smaller, but with these massive hands thats still not big enough. This leaves me with 3 choices, a) I make do with a model with giant goofy hands and try and redesign the proportions so its more stylized, b) I use wire armature for the hands (which would be a huge pain cuz they break and id need several pairs of hands) , or C) I make the Noah puppet massive, as in mebbe 3 and a half feet tall.

so far im most tempted by the last option cuz it'd be awesome to have a giant Noah. However this probably isn't feasible, because the sets would need to be massive, not to mention the difficulty I'd have making the support arms work. Ill explain about my crazy idea for animating noah using supporting rods in another post because ive ranted enough already...

my cameras still busted it seems, which is the other downer for today, as it means i cant put my new sketches int he animatic still...

Ive taken some photos of my work from today on the dv cam, so sorry it looks awful, best i can do for now at least.

the first pic is a bit of the dance sequence i drew out, so far its about 39 drawings long and mebbe 3/4 done.













The next one is an 18" tall plan for Noah showing various proportions as I'd like them. I used this to work out how big the hands would ideally be.



















the last pic is my animatic wall, which is now full so... im gonna need to clear some posters of another wall. Im glad ive started putting it up like this, it means i can scan through the sequence easily and work out where im up to.



















aaaand thats your lot today, time for me to go watch a movie or something

ANOTHER post for today. I ended up putting a card in my DV camera and doing some test animation, its not a good enough camera to take photos for the animatic really, but it did mean I could try the test head out a bit. It went ok... both the body and the head are extremely wobbly and hard to work with, but I was able to try out some limited movements with some success. Can't wait to start work on a proper puppet so i can stop using these crappy doll bodies and dummy heads!

Ive edited this together with some older animation tests and some sound stuff I made last week.

Thought I'd start my regular blogging and summarize my progress today.

I drew up some more of my Animatic for the film today, so I'm just over halfway through the sequence at this point. I woke this morning with a clearer view of the films ending which is a relief.
I'm beginning to think I may have Noah awaken with no memory at first, teaching himself to move and progressing through the arks interior with some curiosity. Frequent flashbacks from his artificial memories could become more and more powerful throughout the sequence, causing him increasing distress. I want Noah's dance sequence to reference both embryonic growth and traditional evolution diagrams, hopefully the Animatic will make this clearer...

My cameras decided to give up on me, which is going to cause me a lot of problems in terms of both my Animatic and the test animations i had planned for this week.. oh and also keeping this blog thing full of lovely pictures of what I'm doing each day. For now all stick a couple of older pictures up with each entry so it all looks nice : )

oh yeah I also made another Noah head for doing tests with, its a plasticine head with hard sculpey jaws for trying out jaw movements. Its the..... 6th head Ive sculpted all told. At some point when theres a dry spell I can put up photos and ranting about the ones I've made so far maybe.

For todays entry I'm putting up a photoshoped Noah skull and the sculpey skull I built a while back. (apologies for the poor quality of the latter picture)

Into to Noah

Noah is the working title to the film I'm making this year. I've been working on it since early September, so I'm gonna have to work hard to bring this blog up to date.

I'll kick this off with the video presentation I made about 3 weeks ago which (hopefully) outlines the film clearly




Theres 4 sections in the vid, the first is a few test animations i did to get back into the swing of animating and try shows out. Its very rough stuff so don't expect anything mind blowing!
The next bit is a bunch of sketches I did for the project back in September, while i was in Costa Rica traveling. The third bit is some images I got of the net that interested me when I was coming up with the idea. Among the images are photos by Joel-Peter Witkin, stills from Tetsuo:Iron man and Akira, and a section on an expressionist Japanese dance style called Butoh.
The last section is the important bit, its a rough outline of the story of the film.