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.