It has been far too long.

Unfortunately, as is so often the way with part-time projects such as Fishin', real life obligations have to take priority. It has been many weeks since I last worked on this project and it may be many more before I can pick it up again. This is unfortunate for Myron and myself but I have told him that if someone else wishes to make their own video for his song that he should feel free to let them. It is his dream to see it realised as an animation and I would rather that other versions were made rather than having to wait until I can get back to working on it.

In the meantime I might post some more of my rough character sketches and thumbnails, just to give this blog a little more content.

I will get back to this project as soon as is humanly possible.

A small update

I have nothing much to show at the moment. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, and ideas, I jumped into testing some techniques for the long fly-through that the screenplay calls for as an introduction and establishing shot. The following is just a test of concept and I'm not sure that I will be taking this approach yet:

I'm probably going to go for a mix of 2D and 3D as I think it will allow for a much more interesting look and could even speed up the production.

Another thing that keeps demanding my attention is the idea of adding about a minute of back story to the movie to further establish the characters and add some anticipation for the song. I have done some rough thumbnails to storyboard this addition but am not completely happy with it yet.

I have worked out that there will be at least 18 characters that I will have to model, texture and rig for this, even though most of them will only be seen for a few seconds. Lots to get on with and I hope to start some of them this week.

Let's go Fishin'

Introduction:

Fishin' is a song by songwriter and country/blues guitarist, Myron LeRoy, from Oregon. Myron wrote this song over 30 years ago and always envisioned it accompanied by an animation. Many years ago he asked a friend, who was a stop-frame animator, what it would take to make his dream come true and was quickly brought down to earth when confronted by the costs, work load and time required to make a 3-4 minute animated short. He never gave up wanting to see his song brought to life on screen. So much so that he recently set out to teach himself how to animate, with the intention of making the movie himself with CGI. The trouble is he soon realised that it was going to take him a long time to learn how to model let alone all the rigging, texturing, lighting and animating . What he needed was a fool to swim by.

Sorry... I meant to say miracle.

I have been wanting to do an animation to music for quite some time so after becoming aware of Myron's music/animation collaborations on A:M Forums I asked him if he had any songs that I could animate to. He promptly emailed three tunes to me, one of which came with a screenplay. Well, I hadn't been looking for a ready made screenplay but Myron's brief was clear and concise enough to immediately visualise much of the story, and the song has such potential for some fun animating, that I just had to make a start on it.

Hooked!

This project will build on Myron's original screenplay, (I hope I can hit all the right notes, Myron), and will hopefully be completed sometime before we both pop our clogs.

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Pre-Production Begins:

The first Stage was to read the screenplay, breakdown the audio and start dreaming. I produced storyboard thumbnails for most sections of the song. These are drawn very quickly and can look like a complete mess if you don't know what the image is meant to be. Luckily, as I am working alone, no one else needs to decipher them. Here is an example of my thumbnails.

The following video clip is a rejected animatic for the first 10 seconds of the movie. I rejected it myself, so that's okay. The brief calls for more of an open vista so that will be what we go for. This was more of a warm up exercise than an attempt to nail the brief.

The animatic is being put together in Animation:Master as it is pretty easy to set up a pose driven, multi-plane camera rig which does everything that I need it to do.