A Gritty Western-Layouts stuff

Hey! So I've got a few backgrounds here for "A Gritty Western". Lighting is important in this film to create the mood. It's fun to see how it can help bring out story. In the last image, I put in the characters from the storyboard to see how they would look with the background and lighting set up.

Ninja Short Film

Hey there, doing the 30 second challenge. Its taken me a while to put up my first post but i'll be adding more and more now that I've gotten started.

My short is about a little boy Ninja and his imagination.

For the back grounds I went for a very simple graphic style. No black lines. I tried to just use colour and leading lines to draw your eyes to where I want you to look.

For an animation style I'm aiming to go for snappy and quick animation because, well he's a Ninja. He will move like a shadow on the walls.

I have all the rough timing and sound effects in my animatic here

Ninja Short Film Animatic from Katherine Ellsworth on Vimeo.

I'll be uploading scenes soon.

WELL DAMN

So now that this 30 Second Challenge thing has morphed into a completely new animal, I'm going to go ahead and post!

I am doing this to prove that I will not just sit around and do nothing with my years of schooling. Melissa has kindly agreed to lend her talented hands to my cause by helping me animate and colour this project.

My film is basically a short story about bullying and revenge.  These are familiar concepts to most people. I guess my last film was a shameful attempt at slapstick, so I'm hitting the other end of the spectrum. Maybe I'm a tear-jerker writer, not a knee-slapper. 

Let's find out!

These are rotations for my main characters. 

They may look pretty rough, but I'm not aiming to clean them up too much more.  Colour and art direction are a stronger focus this time around for me, much more important than the polished television look that I sought after the last time I made a film. (The aforementioned film will never see the echoing tubes of the Internet, not for decades at least).  I want that rough, always moving feel here. 

Whether it's a good idea or not, I'm doing this whole thing by hand. Again. ToonBoom is being kind enough to lend us licenses to their AnimatePro software for this project (you guys are the best!) and I intend to use the heck out of that program for a lot of my post production work. But pencils are still my most comfortable friend and I will stand by them in order to keep my drafting skills from spiralling. 

Which means I get to break out my MacGyver'd masterpiece.

This is my line testing set-up.
It's held together by electrical tape, masking tape, packing tape, double sided tape and DREAMS.

Tune in later this week for an animation test or two.