Callie and the Colour Palette

I forgot to write a post for last week so I'll include what I did in this post as well as the stuff from this week. It's sort of hard to remember and all the days blend into one another because I'm so lost in what I'm doing. Maybe I'm losing track of time (whoops). I know that last week I finally made a work back schedule and coloured in my characters.

Choosing the colours for the schedule was probably the most fun because I made it rainbow and who doesn't love rainbow? Excel was tricky to get a hang of and I had to copy and paste cells to move things around (which completely defeats the purpose of excel 'cause it took forever).

The colouring of my characters was a lot more fun. I've been working in black and white up until now pretty much and this was my first chance to choose a colour palette for my short. It took surprisingly long to colour just a few drawings in Photoshop even more so because I still can't use the pen and tablet particularly well.

This week I've been trying to relearn perspective. I really really should have paid attention in art because I am having the hardest time drawing backgrounds. Whoever knew drawing a window could be so freaking hard.

According to my schedule I have one week left to finish my concept, but seeing as that's only three days and I have to paint three different backgrounds, I have lots of work to do. I'll probably practice out of co op otherwise I'm sunk. Happy weekend!

Callie Meets the Cintiq!

Drawing character rotations is super hard because everything must line up perfectly. It's understandable that things must line up to pass off to the designers, but it doesn't make it easier. I'm so glad I was warned off of animating humans for my short, because I probably would have died. A firefly is about as complicated as I'll get for now.

Aside from drawing the rotations painstakingly slow, I used Photoshop for the second time. Joel was out of the office on Wednesday so I got to use his Cintiq!! It was so freaking cool and much easier to use than the pen and tablet. Basically it helped me learn Photoshop and now I can focus on getting better with the pen and tablet which weirds me out 'cause I usually like to look where I'm drawing.

I didn't get much else done this week other than 3 different angles of Sam the firefly and a Photoshop painting of my friend. 

The painting was completely irrelevant to my animated short but it taught me about Photoshop so I think it's okay. Next week I want to finish the concept stage and go into storyboarding. That'll have to wait till Monday though. 

Adios amigos!

Callie on Concept

I have been working here at Smiley Guy for a month!! It's official! I love it so much. 

This week I went on to the second stage of animation, which is concept. I have already finished my script, and so I spent four hours each on Tuesday and Thursday drawing out my characters. They're pretty cute, if I do say so myself. 

Rich has been helping me through this stage and it is so helpful to have someone give constructive criticism. I know how to draw but I don't know how to stylize something so that it is workable in a cartoon and looks appealing. I think I've drawn about 9 pages of concept art and I'll probably draw lots more. It'll have to be done next week though, because now it's the weekend!! So long!

Callie Love Halloween and Samosas

Halloween is upon us!! I love costumes and I was very happy when I was allowed to wear mine to work on Friday, even though the high heeled boots made me late. My boots are quite irrelevant to what work I got done this week however, so I'll move on. Monday and Wednesday I worked on my script, using Jeremy's notes and I watched more animated shorts to look at what elements made a short funny or memorable. Death Buy Lemonade by Kyu-bum Lee is definitely my favourite (probably because of the pun in the title).

Friday was my most productive day, by far. I sat in on a meeting and listened to Julie talk about a top secret toy (shhhh) being released just in time for Valentine's Day. It was actually a good thing to listen to because it offered an inside look at the back and forth between the client and the studio. Julie also printed out a script of Chirp and used that to teach me how to format my own script. I didn't do much after that except eat a samosa and write this before it was time to go. People are always giving me food here and I love it. Yum. Anyways, Happy Halloween!! See you next week.

Callie = Claire Standish