At the advice of my animation professor, I've decided to create a production blog. This blog won't be devoted solely to my first major attempt at a complete animated story, which I have dubbed "Umbrella Duck," since I have many, many other ideas that have been swimming around in my head for nearly a decade. For about a year, though, most posts will involve this particular project.
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| So Serious! |
I first came up with the idea last summer when not paying attention in Calc III. I had splurged on Samurai Jack the night before and had been playing Windwaker, and I found myself thinking about how amusing it was when very large-eyed chibi little boy-characters were being all heroic and serious. Since I'm ADD, I then had this hilarious image of this booming, heavy thunderstorm, with this serious little boy tattered and drenched, worn but resolutely standing, grasping his unopened umbrella. He looks down at the handle, which is of a duck head. The duck head also looks back up at him with a serious, resolute look in its eyes, and then nods dramatically. The image of the duck-head nodding all seriously was so hilarious that I immediately drew it down and began to draw out a story surrounding the image. This is rare for me, since I usually reap brief amusement from my random ADD-spawned ideas, only to quickly toss them aside for another amusing idea. With this idea, however, I sat down long enough to pin down how the whole short would roll, marked out color schemes and even picked out the duck breed I wanted the shape-shifting-duck-umbrella-hybrid would be.
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| A Chuu Chuu facing off against Link! |
A cayuga duck was perfect, because of its green iridescence in light. One of the main things that really excited me about the video game the Legend of Zelda: Windwaker was the chuu chuus in the game. In the game many objects (such as the chuu chuus) had this kind of sheen that ran across the surface as you moved around it, and it was so cool and exciting! It was almost candylike, the way the streak of color ran across the subject playfully. I wanted to implement that exciting magical quality into my animation, have streaks of brilliant, electric green flash across the duck and the umbrella as the boy swings it about. To have those disarming, unexpected flashes of green would be really wonderful to behold if I manage to execute it right! Just picturing it excites me.
A Cayuga in the shade:
A Cayuga in the light:
Here is the current logline for the short:
A Serious Little Boy must combine his skills and the powers of his Umbrella Duck to defeat Demonic Rabid Squirrels during a daily stroll.
For the final project of the animation class I took this semester, I attempted to get started on the short. I can't say I got very far, but I have a better idea of how long everything is going to take, and I now have a fairly detailed storyboard I can use. I was also pleasantly surprised at the consistency of the boy's and duck's designs in the clip: usually I can't draw the same thing twice to save my life. The most difficult part for me was the sound design: I had a lot of trouble getting together sounds I could use, and a lot of the music I initially considered was just tacky. Sound is a different beast altogether! The most difficult visual component in my opinion would be choreographing the fight scene. I most look forward to adding in special effects, such as the rain and the sheen of green on the duck.
The final I submitted (it's more an animatic than anything else ^_^;)
- I just realized I flipped the title: it should be Umbrella Duck
Choi_J_Project_8 from
Jeanie C on
Vimeo.
I'll soon be jotting down a schedule for myself and creating a percentile trackbar on my progress (idea taken from game developer PseudoLoneWolf @
www.fighunter.com). I'll be sure to update this blog at least once a week!
