Cornish Stories: Finished Piece

Woo-hoo!! Finished! The group completed the cornish stories film today and everyone is really pleased. I'm so happy with how everyone worked so hard and it looks brilliant now. Few things I would change if i get time; my background moves a little bit but for now I'm happy. I hope Truro Cathedral will be pleased with this! Enjoy!

Cornish Stores: animatic update

With the deadline getting closer by the day, my group and i are working like crazy to get this animation sorted! I have to say, its been really fun working with everyone and i'm going to miss it when this is over. Here is the most recently updated animatic, it includes parts of our animation with parts of our live action.

Cornish Stories: Live action animatic

After easter our group had a tutorial to see where abouts we were in the project. It was recommended that we make a live action animatic so we could finalise timing and get a better idea of what we needed to do. So myself, Rachel, Lexi and Maggie got together to film a live action version. After editing it, I was really pleased with how it looked.

We also received the first few rough background sketches from Stu! I really like his Matte painting skills and think these will work really well with our film. I like the middle picture because it suggests how different the mining world can be from the norm.

Stu's blog: http://stufx.tumblr.com/

Cornish Stories: Animatic v1

Got the first animatic sorted!!

I wasn't too sure how to designate the roles in our Cornish stories group so four of us took a quarter of the animatic to animate. I put the four parts together ready for our production meeting with the client. I had to chop some parts out in order to get everything in and afterwards we realised we should have timed the sound track and animated to the time we had. Still, having the animatic sorted was a great motivation for our group.

Over the easter holidays, we each set aside areas to improve ready for when we needed to animate when we got back!

- Maggie was asked to look into Lip Syncing as she was quite interesed in this anyway.

- Rachel was asked to look into flash skills and possibly lighting in after effects if she had time

- Lexi was asked to research flash skills

- I was asked to research my flash skills as they need improving!

- Stu was asked to roughly sketch out some backgrounds



Cornish Stories: storyboard

Next up we sketched out a few storyboard ideas and put together a storyboard ready for the animatic. We've tried to make the story line funny and entertaining for all audiences.

Cornish Stories: Charcter designs

For the next stage in the project Rachel and Lexi designed some mine characters and the spirt 'Tom Noogy'. Really happy with the drawings!

Rachel designed the spirit character 'Tom Noogy' here is her blog: http://rachelstarkey.wordpress.com/

Lexi designed the mine worker characters. Her blog:

http://lexi100percentartist.blogspot.co.uk/

Cornish stories: mine walk

I really didn't much on how mining worked or what it was like or anything before the start of this project, so I decided to organise a mining walk to get the feel for the environment and area. I wanted to go down into the mine but only selected mines hold tourist trips and they don't open until April time, and thats too long to wait!
I went with Rachel and Lexi to 'Consols (Gwennap) Copper Mine', but passed lots of mine shafts on the way there. Gwennap was thought to be the richest mining district in cornwall during late 18th and early 19th centuries. We must have walked about 7 miles altogether, along Perrenwell, the Carnon Valley and around Twelveheads. Below are some of the photos I have taken:

Cornish Stories!

For a project this term we have been asked to get into teams of 5/6 and create a short animation based on an interview for Truro Cathedral. I've been designated group director and have been working with Maggie, Rachel, Lexi and Stu. We all decided to use an interview about the spirits and superstitions mine workers had. To start the project off I created a moodboard laying out our ideas.

In the top left of the moodboard are a few examples of animated interviews which we've researched following into cut out animation techniques. We were giving a stained glass window from truro cathedral to mark as out starting point and we felt cut out animation would be a nice style to continue with. Middle left has a few photos of artists impressions of the spirits and what they could look like. Maggie researched Alphonse Mucha (bottom left) and we all loved the style and felt it could really work with our animation. The bottom right image is the window we've been asked to start on. General top left area is some images I found relating to mining.