Designs and Sketchy Google-Searches

Yesterday I spent the day coming up with a new logo for Umbrella Duck: the old one you see below was just something I slapped together, to concentrate on the actual project itself + the myriad of other projects thrown at me during the semester. I'm still nowhere near a scanner, but I'm thinking about making the following logos below in something like MS Paint, to play with colors later. I might look up a free vector program later, since vectors are always cleaner and easier to play with than ragged pixels.

The old title screen you can see in my final project last semester.

The new one I'm considering: I'll be using the pen tool to make this into a vector image. All those weird transforming feathers are going to give me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Here you can see me playing with the look of the actual title name itself. Yes, I am crazy and am going to basically make my own font. In my last pseudo-animation (which you can see below) I basically drew out half the words with the pen tool, then rushed and typed everything else in some font. All the words I painstakingly drew look infinitely better than the weird bulb-ended font I used. I have no idea why I didn't use some similar looking font instead. I'll probably use the boring last one.

The first 'animation'-y thing I made during my stay here at Georgia Tech. It was made in two weeks, when I was a naive, chipper Freshman, all excited and ready to make a name for herself. I was able to do multiple all-nighters in a row with that green Freshman energy to finish it. :sigh: If only I had the energy to do that now.

Here is a photo of all the different variations I went through to come up with the final three designs: I am showing it to you to make you feel bad about all the hard work I put in just for the name and make you feel obligated to follow this blog and comment about my heroic efforts and spread the final animation upon its completion, making it viral. Lol, no, I'm just joking... though I would appreciate a comment or two ;)

The logo of my little animation studio-thing. I mean, this isn't really a studio or anything, but it's nice to mark everything you make with an identifier and stuff. Yeah... Lol, I think it's clever. Look, the name makes the shape of a Fish and a Wishing star, har har... See the tail-fin, it looks like a star! (feels smart)

Old character design... I don't think redesigning the little boy will help eliminate his ambiguous-gender-problems. I think it all has to do with the poses. I mean, if you look at little boys and little girls (in a not-creepy way), and you pretended they all had short hair, you'll notice they all look fairly similar, structure-wise, to each other. I remember the professor demonstrating the boy's er, femininity, in the pose when he's looking behind him (lol, I don't think I'll ever forget that...). Uh, so to fix the problem I'll have to watch more little boys and look up videos of them, to make more realistic boy-like poses. Lol, the things I have to look up... 

Everyone swears I have an unhealthy obsession with ducks, because I practice quacking (for the voice-acting) all the time, and have dozens of duck-photos and videos on my harddrive. For obvious reasons, I keep my people-reference photo nestled deep within numerous folders... Soon I'll be looking up swords and spears and other weapons! In the future, I'll probably have to look up guns and stuff.

Cute Cuttlefish and Hummingbirds

I am in Korea right now, to take lessons in basic draftsmanship during the summer, and to visit my relatives from my mom's side of the family. I'm at my grandparents right now, where I'm forced to hitchhike on other people's unsecured wireless connections and in dire danger of getting overweight from amazing recipes perfected over decades by my grandmother. This isn't a travel-blog, though, so I'll spare you the details of my trip, save one.

Yesterday I followed my grandmother to the marketplace, where the tables are lined with whole skinned animals, and buckets and tanks of live seafood lay at your feet. Along one corner were cases of whole skinned dogs, in the kind of wide ice-cream case you look down into to choose a flavor. Hardened, tough vendors spoke out prices and offers in loud, quick barks. What particularly struck me was a tank near a quiet corner of the marketplace, full of dainty little red squid. The vendors wouldn't let me near the merchandise, so I couldn't snap a photo; you'll have to do with the sketch I photographed below: pretend the squid is colored or something.

The squid were very pretty, and I wouldn't mind having them in a personal fish-tank: they had little see-through flaps attached to their tops that diligently propelled them about, and they were a solid, pretty red; not the usual mottled botch of random colors. What made them especially endearing were their eyes: squid have very large eyes, and on a standard squid the eye look monstrous. But on these tiny squid the large eyes looked inquisitive and adorable. They reminded me of a hummingbird's; large, round black eyes ringed by a touch of white. These large round eyes, in my opinion, give their possessor an innocent, bright appearance, due to the touch of white on the edges of the round black center.

When I first came up with the idea of a Serious Little Boy I didn't really know what he would look like: I just knew he would look really cute, which would make his seriousness all the more amusing. I didn't want him to look like some generic moe-blob, and I didn't want him to look like a rip-off of the other characters he was inspired from. It took until we visited a family friend's house last winter that I suddenly grasped what he would look like. This family friend had modeled the outdoors porch to attract and feed hummingbirds, and I found myself wondering why hummingbirds looked so adorable; when you look at a hummingbird up close, they don't seem quite as cute. When they are seen from a distance, the patch of white ringing the outer corner appears like a part of their eyes, making them appear larger. Also, since the white is on the outer edge, the birds appear cross-eyed. If the white was on the inner edge, the birds would probably lose their appeal... though that doesn't seem to be the case for Miyazaki.

I always thought Totoro looked kind of scary...

Based on the eyes of these appealing animals, I therefore came up with the character design you saw in the last animatic-thing I made. Basically the little boy is based off of a hummingbird! Unfortunately, the Serious Little Boy's gender seems to confuse everybody, so I'll have to work on that. 

Fighting!

I'm not on campus at the moment, meaning I'm stuck without a scanner, software or the school's zippy internet. Right now I'm polishing the storyboard... and trying to make the fight sequence between the little boy, his umbrella-duck thing and the evil, rabid squirrels, which is a lot harder than I initially thought.

Choreographing a fight sequence is difficult and requires consideration of where the characters are and how they are moving relative to each other. Sharp cuts and close-ups need to be done in a way that adds energy to the sequence without sacrificing clarity. Usually a fight sequence is the most memorable part of an episode, where all the built-up tension and suspense is finally resolved. When the artists on Samurai Jack storyboarded action sequences, they would fill pages with the most minute details, to ensure the pacing was tight and good. For example, they would have pages filled purely with arrows, to get the pacing down perfectly. Below are some action sequences from some cartoons I find inspiring:

Spectacular Spiderman vs the Sinister Six (This show is spectacular, btw... har har)

Samurai Jack vs Zombies (I like the Samurai vs Ninja fight better, but there isn't much actual fighting in that one)

Sokka vs his sword master (I like the part where they briefly switch to Sokka's pov)

These are the fight sequences that stood out to me while I was watching (*cough* marathoning *cough*) these series: I know there are a lot of good fight sequences I've missed: and there are a ton of really good fight sequences in live action. Let me know if there's a particular fight sequence you really like! ^_^

the Origins of the Umbrella Duck

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.

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.

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!