Percy's Breakfast Adventure

I finally finished my comedy brief animation yesterday, but was too tired to update. Just as well I didn't, because I ended up tweaking some things today, and now it's properly finished. After a bit of feedback from friends, who'd said that having credits consisting of white text on a black background looked kind of out of place, I changed it so that it featured some pictures instead, and worked with the animation rather than seeming separate to it. I'm pretty happy with the results, and it seems to have gone over well with those who've seen it so far.

This has been fun to work on - gradually getting the hang of using Toon Boom Harmony's new deformation tool was an interesting experience, and it was nice seeing it all come together. The majority of my Toon Boom animations have been done linelessly so far, so doing something different with the art style made for an interesting change, too (although my works don't seem to be able to avoid containing some form of lineless image). The only thing that I didn't end up liking very much was the fact I had to draw up and put together so many separate rigs for nearly every scene.

With my work on this piece having come to a finish, I now leave you with some final amusing screenshots.

Percy temporarily became a zombie whilst preparing his "breakfast".

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Nearly There

Forgot to post this the other day, but here's a WIP of the rest of the first scene, after Ivan tips Percy off the sofa. I've finished the scene now, but I only tweaked a couple of things and added the rest of Percy's lines, so I didn't bother uploading it to Youtube.

I spent about 2 or 3 hours on Friday getting the last of the kitchen scenes all drawn up and rigged - I needed quite a lot of props and replacements. Here's how it looked when I finished drawing everything up:

And, of course, what are my work-in-progress posts without a little rig mishap or two?

I really have no idea what happened here. I'd been editing symbols to make replacements and adjusting the pivot points, and when I went back to the top view... this sight met me.

But anyway, once I've finished this scene, I just have the last scene to go, and then I'll be done. Or mostly done, at least - I might need to tweak a few things in case I don't quite meet the length requirement, and during rushes, my tutor mentioned that Percy looked more like he was glowing than on fire in one of the time-lapse scenes, so I'll be changing that too. Hopefully it'll mean the lip-syncing I did for him in that scene will be more noticeable, as I find it kind of amusing.

Progress So Far

I have rushes tomorrow, so I combined the animations I have so far with my animatic. Also got some voice clips for Ivan today, so I was able to get part of the first scene done. I ended up picking the laggiest computer in the studio today though, so progress was hindered somewhat.

The sounds and volume levels are a little bit off, but I'll fix it when I have all the scenes properly put together. I took up the remaining time with the credits part, but it's also several seconds shorter than it needs to be - I'm going to wait until I have the other scenes finished before I start tweaking things. I just have a few more scenes to do, and then I'll be finished.

And, once again, some more rig mishaps!

This is what happened to poor Percy when I converted his pieces into symbols and then moved them back into the scene. :c

Ivan also pulled a number of amusing faces during the process of animating him.

Oh dear, it kind of looks like someone's kicked him in a... very sensitive area.

"OH GOD MY EYEBROWS ARE IN MY EYES"

Combining The Ingredients

Put together all the kitchen scenes I've got done so far to see how it's all looking (I finished about 5 or 6 of them today). Just got a few more scenes to go, and I'm hopefully getting some voice clips for Ivan tomorrow, so I should be able to get this done before the end of the week. :>

I took a few screenshots of some amusing moments too, as usual.

Woah, Dude

Finally got some voices for Percy! Decided to test some of the “woah”s out with two scenes that I’d already finished, and conveniently enough they sync up just fine. Whoo.

I did this on my laptop at home, so the quality’s a bit weird. My knowledge on proper exporting with Adobe Premiere Pro is limited. But now I can do Percy’s scenes properly. :’D Still stuck on a voice for Ivan though. I’d been planning on just using my own voice and lowering the pitch or something because I honestly had no idea who to get to voice him, but… doing that just makes it sound really really weird.

So. Still need a voice for the bugger.

Hm.

Percy's Discovery

Got another of the quicker scenes done today. I still don't have any voice clips to work with just yet, so the timings on most of these will likely be edited a little when I get them. I still don't know what to do about a voice for Ivan, so I might just end up voicing him myself, since every time I try to imagine a voice for him I just hear my own voice. :B It'll be easier that way, since my lack of voice clips is making it tough to work on the animation properly.

Also, forgot to post this one yesterday, but here's the scene in which Percy prepares himself for his kitchen adventures, using my placeholder voice clips from the animatic.

Yet More Rig Mishaps

I made two new rigs today, one for Ivan and one for Percy. As always, there were a few amusing moments while I was putting them together...

Percy, what on earth have you been smoking?

Hiding Ivan's head layer made him look like a worm.

And... this beautiful face was a result of the camera going weird. My friend and I were practically crying with how much we were laughing when it happened. :'D

Slowly Getting There

Fixed up Ivan's walk cycle a little more and adjusted the camera a little so it's not one long static scene. This is about as much as I can do on the first scene for now - I'll need a voice for Ivan before I can add anything else to it.

I'm still not really sure what sort of voice Ivan would have, to be honest. With Percy it's obvious, but I've never really had much of a specific idea in mind of how his brother would talk. Some of my friends have suggested he talk with some sort of posh sounding voice, but he's not really the posh type, so. I dunno. :B I'll have to make a decision soon though, because I won't be able to finish the scene until I do.

I was also able to get one of the shorter scenes done, in which Percy discovers a blender and acts as though he's realised the meaning of life. I did a bit of test lip-syncing with my placeholder voice clip, but I'll replace it when I get an actual clip.

Yet More WIPs

An updated WIP of the first scene. I completely redid Ivan's movements and got rid of the placeholder lip-syncing, and I'm much happier with it than I was with the previous version (although it still needs a bit of tweaking). I also had him come in earlier, to help cut down on the length of the scene when I add more to it.

Fun With Rigs

Things got a bit silly as I was working on Ivan's rig, as you can see from these pictures.

This was a rather creepy screenshot I got when I was setting the pivot point on his eye.

This was during the process of putting the replacement heads together. Floating eyes and weird necks, oh my.

And I have no excuse for this one, really. GIANT IVAN ATTACK!

Testing Testing 1 2 3

‘Nother WIP using the placeholder voice to practice a bit of lip-syncing. I’m not really happy with Ivan’s walk cycle (he moves too quickly so it’s hard to actually see his mouth and facial movements, and the cycle itself is veeeery sloppy - he has no knees, for pete's sake), but I’m going to redo it when I get a proper voice clip for him. For now it’s just practice, since I haven’t done lip-syncing or walk cycles in a while.

Also, I just realised that there’s a much longer gap at the start than there is in my animatic - this video is about 7 seconds long, and in the animatic, Ivan had already tipped him out of the sofa in that time, so I'll probably have to cut it a bit.

Edit: Couple of notes to myself about fixing the walk cycle, so I don't forget them:

Leg needs to bend a little as he’s lifting it up

Might need to add another deformer to his foot, that needs to bend too

Don’t make the leg lifting too elaborate, he’s striding, not running

Move the peg with each step, don’t set a keyframe at one end and one at the other, it makes the walk look too slippery

Watch the part near the end where his legs are temporarily visible before he goes off-screen, don’t wanna make it too obvious that his lower legs and feet aren’t actually moving while they’re obscured by the sofa

arms move along with the leg opposite to them - when the right leg goes forwards, the left arm goes forwards too etc.

Don't Lose Your Head, Ivan

Working on Ivan's rig for the first scene. He seems very disgruntled by the fact that one of his arms and leg seem to be floating away from him and there are several disembodied heads before him.

Getting The Ball Rolling

Got some progress done for the first scene. Unfortunately I'm a little bit limited as to what I can do for the first scene for now, as I need their voices so I can get timings right and do the lip-syncing and whatnot. I did have someone in mind to voice Percy, but I they haven't been around in the studio for a while now and I don't have any way to contact them, so I might have to find someone else instead. Still not really sure about a voice for Ivan, as I don't really have a specific idea in my head of how he sounds.

Overall I'm not really happy with the results of this - there were a bunch of things I probably could have done to avoid needing to animate the bowl separately, but it took a lot of starting over until I got it to move with his head in a way that I was satisfied with. Getting his movements right isn't really a priority though, as Ivan will likely distract from them when I add him in anyway.

Testing The Waters

This is a rough test animation I did today whilst experimenting with the deformation tool in Toon Boom Harmony. I normally do my rigs in a lineless style, but I wanted to try outlines for a change, and figured the deformation tool would be a good way to help stop the outline from breaking and causing gaps on things like the arms.

It's a little bit confusing and tricky, but I think I've got a basic grasp on how it works now.

On an unrelated note, pink hair kind of suits Percy for some strange reason.

Background Test

A quick, rough test animation to see how my backgrounds look when they’re all together. While I’m happy with the results, I hadn’t considered the problem of everything shifting a little when the background changes, as these were all done as separate files and then put together and exported as one in iMovie. I’ll have to try to think of a way to solve that.

Hell's Kitchen

The finished kitchen backgrounds, all in various states of damage thanks to Percy's antics.

Some of the backgrounds, such as the one with the fire and sparking outlets, have a few replacement pieces so that they can move. Though the clock has hands in most of these previews, I'll be removing them before I put them into Toon Boom, so that I can draw them on instead and help add to the time-lapse effect.

Background Progress

My uni was holding an open day today, meaning the studio was open, so I decided to go in and started working on my background and going over it linelessly using the pen tool in Photoshop.

I haven't quite finished it yet, but this is what I have so far. I'll probably need to do the background for the first scene before I can complete it properly - I need to know what colour I want for the walls and carpet, since the doorway in the kitchen background leads into the living room from the first scene.

I'm not really sure about the colours at the moment, since I made this on a Mac and forgot that the colours would look different when I was back on my laptop. I might have to tweak them a little.

Updated Animatic

Just finished the second version of my animatic, which has a lot more going on than my first one did. I had to cut one or two little things out in order to fit the time constraint, but I managed to get it to a minute exactly and I'm happy with the results. As with my first animatic, the voices are just placeholders until I get some proper ones. I recorded them in my room with my phone and I was trying not to talk too loudly, so the voice-acting isn't great, but hopefully they convey the right sort of emotion anyway.

For comparison, this was my first animatic (and the voice-acting is even worse because again, I was trying not to talk too loudly so my housemates didn't think I was talking to myself :P). There aren't really very many gags in it, so I think the new version is going to be a lot more fun to animate.

Stepping Out Of My Comfort Zone

Considering I took Graphics at GCSE, I should really have a better grasp on one point perspective than I do. But backgrounds aren't really something I draw very often, so I'm very, very out of practice.

...As you can probably tell from this horrendous first attempt. My goal was to create a kitchen background for my Comedy Brief animation, as I've made quite a few changes to what's going to happen after getting some feedback from my tutors. They essentially said that I should really be trying to get as much as I can feasibly and reasonably manage into my 1 minute time limit (argh rhyming), and made a few suggestions as to what could be changed.

My updated version will focus more on Percy, with Ivan feeling a little bitter that he has to go to work while his brother just lazes about in his underwear, and on his way out makes a quip about him not even being able to make a bowl of cereal. Percy takes the challenge and, once his brother has left, heads straight into the kitchen to get started.

After a montage/time-lapse scene of sorts in which Percy messes with blenders, opens every cupboard and door in the kitchen, scratches his butt with a spatula, somehow sets himself on fire temporarily and all sorts of other things, he finally manages it.

When Ivan comes home from work, he finds his brother in the exact same position as he'd been in before he'd left, only with an upturned, half-eaten bowl of cereal on his head instead of a bowl of Cheetos, and a spatula lying next to the sofa. ...And smoke billowing out of the kitchen.

While I was initially hesitant to move the focus away from the two brothers interacting with each other, I think this new idea will be a lot more fun to work on, and there'll be a lot more opportunities for gags and slapstick and whatnot.

I really wanted to get the background to look right, so after one other failed attempt and some help from my friend, I ended up with this, which is much better than my first one. While my first background has far too much floorspace and makes the room look like it's a funny shape, this one (while currently lacking in basic things like a cooker and a microwave) actually looks like an apartment kitchen.

The background is going to be done linelessly, but here's a colour test to finish this post off.

Meet Percy and Ivan

Now that I've finished all of the Three Week Projects, I can start focusing on the main brief. We were given a choice between going with a "Myths & Legends" theme or a comedy theme, and I decided to go with comedy. I saw it as the perfect excuse to create an animation featuring some characters of mine, who are already fairly fleshed out and developed and have a lot of potential for amusing antics together.

Meet Percy and Ivan, who began life as humanoid robots based very, very loosely on Searchman, an already existing two-headed robot. They're going to be humans in my animation, though, to make the basic plot work.

The basic premise is that Percy (the hairy dude rocking the mullet) and Ivan (the short haired guy) are brothers who don't quite see eye-to-eye on most things, and unfortunately have to share a flat together. After only ever seeing his brother eat Cheetos (and wondering how he was still alive), Ivan decides to take matters into his own hands and teach him how to feed himself properly. He decides to start with something simple, something that not even Percy could mess up - cereal. Unfortunately, Percy has other plans.

Ivan is an intelligent, 26 year old man who means well, but can have a bit of a short temper and a low tolerance with certain things. He can come across as a bit uptight and snobby, but he does have a sweet side – it’s just he usually feels the need to be in-charge and responsible, and it tends to stress him out a bit.

He’s always wanted to be some sort of high-ranking military officer, but gave up on those dreams to take care of his younger brother instead after their mother died, trying to make him into a better member of society so that he doesn’t struggle so much in life.

Ivan is 6’2”, and while he isn’t as outwardly muscular as his brother is, Ivan actually has a lot more strength to him than his appearance would suggest.

Percy is a not-so-intelligent 24 year old man, who can act loud, rambunctious and overly cocky at times, but he really just wants attention and is like a large, hairy child in that respect. He can actually be pretty sensible and affectionate when he drops the false bravado.

That doesn’t mean he makes things easy for his brother, of course. With a crude and immature demeanour and sense of humour, he and his brother don’t quite get along at the best of times, but it’s clear that they do care about one another. They just don’t quite have the same outlook on things.

Despite being the younger sibling, Percy is also 6’2”, and is (somehow, despite his diet) much more muscular when it comes to his physique. It’s all for show, though – get him into an actual fight and he’s a complete pushover.