Latest Update

Sorry about the long delay between posts everyone... I've just been extremely busy lately, so I'm not having as much time for animation as I'd like... :-/ But be that as it is, I do have a couple updates I'd like to share.

First of all, I'd like to thank each one of you who contributed your thoughts on the subject of backgrounds. I've been thinking about it for the past few days (as I do everything else ;-) and I think I have a plan worked out. I tried real picture backgrounds for a couple shots, but for the forest it just wasn't working. With all the intricate detail forests posses, I was having a lot of trouble mixing my foreground (the LEGO sets) with the background. But I don't want something that looks like a 2D animation world either. You know what I'm talking about: one of those worlds where everything has distinct lines separating flamboyant colors; where trees have only 3 colors and verdant fields have one shade of green except for where there are shadows. Not very realistic looking, but it's what they had to do to keep drawing time to a minimum. On the other hand, as Nathan pointed out on my last post, I don't want to have my LEGO guy walking around on my front porch so to speak! (I've actually thought about doing that though, as a bonus feature) But for my movie, I don't want that kind of realism...

So here's what I'm planning on doing right now anyway. I'm thinking of using a program like Pencil to draw pastel looking backgrounds. Someday I might be able to use something as professional as Corel, but until I get the money for that I think Pencil will work quite nicely. I want the backgrounds to kind of fade into oblivion (not be outspokenly noticeable), while at the same time providing a boost for the foreground. So that's what I'm aiming at right now! It'll be a challenge, but I love challenges! (otherwise I wouldn't have even started this project!)

The more I've gotten into animation, the more I've realized just how much artistic ability is required in this field of media! Thankfully I didn't have to spend too much time making sure my characters looked good (no, actually I did...), because they've already been created! But even your characters take a lot of artsy effort, and then the backgrounds most people draw/paint themselves! And then of course, just as in real movie sets, it takes a good artistic eye to develop a coherent movie set that is visually pleasing.

The other thing I wanted to tell you was that we've started recording!!! I guess you could call it ADR, 'cause we're recording over the animated characters. Well, kind of. Anyway, that gives you an idea of how we're doing it! We got a couple extra parts recorded a few weeks ago, and have since recorded most of the audio with only a couple characters left to do. It's been a lot of fun, and it's exciting to finally have audio for the film! Oh, and the voice transformers have been incredible!

Now I just need to get back to drawing backgrounds... I probably won't be posting another update for awhile, as I'll be busy drawing, redrawing, etc. I want to mix the background colors with the foreground colors as much as possible, which means by the time I finish "painting" my backgrounds (which comes before my next blog post) I'll have a lot of my sets created and ready for animating. From there I'll just animate my character to match the audio, and we'll be on the go again!!!! I'm as excited to see the final product as you are, believe me! ;-)