Testing Hair

Trying to make different Hair styles

I am doing an advanced course of C4D, and I’m practicing some aspects that will be very useful for my Final project. Now I’m testing different Hair proprieties in order to achieve different Hair styles. If I can, and depending on how the animaiton will look, I will do the hair of my Characters with real Hair. These are some tests I’ve made:

(Watch in HD!)

Now I’m focusing on making specific shapes for different hair styles.

Some changes in Workflow

Getting advice from my Tutor

While working on the definitive Story Board, I realized that first of all I had to determine how the animation will be in my short. My short will be like a graphic novel, so I was wondering when to use animation and how.

I was looking for some examples, because I want to make the 3D visible, and this is hard to achieve with static images. Here are two examples that I consider:

This clip of the Movie Kick Ass has a really nice style, without normal animation, based on comic style.

And in this the Opening clip of Marvel Vs Capcom 3, the 3D effect is really strong and there is not animation (only camera movements).

With this ideas in mind, I decided to create a really basic scene recreating the first seconds of my animated short. Here is the result:

But the result wasn’t the expected, so I arranged a meeting with my Tutor David Minguillón to show him my advances and talk about how is going to be the animation in my animated short.

Last Friday I meet with him and talked about all my doubts for a very long time. After showing him my examples, ideas, and tests, he told me that I was putting so much camera movements just to show the 3D technique, but without any narrative purposes. He told me that I have to really take care measuring the quantity of animation and camera movements.
As a Graphic Novel, it has to be more static. I have to select when the narrative requires animation and when not. Camera and animation movements focuses spectator’s attention, so with so many camera movements the narration loses the rhythm.

He told me that it will be helpfull to do some tests with the real final look before keep working on the preproduction. With the respective tests I will know how to continue with the entire production.

So now I will focus on modeling one full scene and do different tests. With this I will know the exact animation style and I will go further making the full Layout of the animated short.

Polishing the StoryBoard

Making some changes

I’m working on the Storyboard now, making some changes to make it look perfect and ready to the production. One of the problems I had is that the beginning of the story was too complicate to make it understandable without words (the part of the ancient race legend). I don’t want to put any spoken word in the Animated Short, to make it understandable and international. But the begining is too complicated, so I’m changing a few things.

I managed to arrange some details to get a good and understandable beginningwith no spoken words. I’m working on this and also on the rest of the StoryBoard, restructuring some Shots and optimizing the story. Maybe some small details of the original Storyline will change, but nothing that changes the main plot. Also I’mtrying to simplify the most complicated parts.

Characters Design

100+ Pages

Here I will upload the different Characters Design, including Major and Minor Characters,  there are more than 100 pages of character designs and descriptions in total.

Here is the content of every Character Design Sheet (with little variations in some of the Characters):

1. Description & Data
1.1. Personality
1.2. Relationships
2. Character Design
2.1. Final Design
2.1.1. Character Views: 3/4 view
2.1.2. Character Views: Front view
3.1.3. Character Views: Profile view
3.1.4. Character Views: Back view
2.2. All Views
2.3. Colors
2.4. Clarifications
3. Character Expressions
3.1. Neutral
3.2. Angry
3.3. Sad
3.4. Suprised
3.5. Happy
3.6. Expression Sheet
4. Rejected Designs

Minor Characters have less detailed “Character Views” than Major Characters due to they are simpler and more symmetrical, but they have all the necessary details explained for production purposes.

It has been very hard work that has led me much longer than I expected. Here are the different PDF files download links of each Character:

Major Characters Design:

Keira – Character Design
Kaylee – Character Design
The King – Character Design
Black Knight – Character Design
Ewan (Young Black Knight) – Character Design

Minor Characters Design:

Castle Guards – Character Design
Farmer – Character Design