Life is good at throwing you unexpected things. I expected to come home for the break and get a whole lot of work done. I did not expect to get sick.
Now, I'm not dying, but it certainly throws things off enough to put me further behind even though I'm currently "catching up". It's hard to stay focused and do good work when you're feeling miserable.
But I wanted to post some new things up. It's just a few color keys for the beginning part of the film. These are mock-ups solely for color and are not the actual backgrounds. If I play my cards right, those will all end up as watercolor paintings, but if things get sticky, I can fall back on them fancy-pants compooter programz.
The sun is streaming into the sky but hasn't really broke the horizon in these ones.
Contrast is important for images to read quickly, but I really like times like this when I can push it. I looked to a piece of Wall-E color script for inspiration.
Everything you're looking at is still being tweaked here and there, and since these are just mockups, the finals will be vastly different, and ideally a little simpler.
Don't mind the photograph for the sky. I took that picture myself while at the beach. I got up at dawn and took a series of photos as the sun rose. I didn't know two years ago how much that would help me with my thesis.
But the photograph will be replaced with my painting--inspired by that photograph. (The sea is a gradient because a 3-4 drawing cycle of waves will be on top of it, each key fading into the next...effects are exciting!)
This one is still in progress but lacks a lot of contrast on purpose.
So I've been busy, but not busy enough. I am happy to say though that I'm finally into the animation part of things, which is a great relief. Until I get there I just feel like I'm spinning my wheels, working, but not really working. Still...I'm kind of dreading the start of the upcoming (and final) semester of school for me. I know that in order to finish this film, I'm going to be working at least 80 and probably closer to 95 hours per week on the film alone.
But hey, that doesn't make me special or anything--all of us thesis students are stuck in the same boat. Here's to us, here's to 2009!
