3rd Year of Animation [week 1]

Holy shitbricks. What a morning. It was the first class back at uni and within 10 minutes of being in the room I felt my chest tighten, my hands sweat up, and my left eye violently twitch. The compulsive urge to sneak outside and never return was overwhelming. Assignments, deadlines, exercise tasks, major projects, and assignment percentages… all things that totally initiated anxiety attacks.

For me anyways.

Now, here’s the magical exercise task for week 1…

Skillsets:

• Character design
• background design
• researching background information for production
• storyboarding, 2D Animating – pen to paper/ hand drawn
• adobe photoshop is my preferred software program.

Area’s I need help in / would like to explore:

• Learning stuff about animator’s software. Toonboom, Macromedia, Flash etc.
• Putting together animations from paper to the stuff on the big screen.
• Post production knowledge.

Desired Direction:

• Stop motion modeling and design [much like the works of nick park [wallis and gromit]
• character design
• 2D animating
• sound design
• compositing
• storyboarding
• previz / pre-production

The Concept Design and Treatment
after smoking, eating and boozing his life away, Blanch the obese, Bunny has an epiphany and decides to follow his dream of becoming a professional runner.

intro - shows a short series of clips of Blanch the Bunny's daily life.
him driving a forklift, constantly smoking.
getting in trouble off his boss.
catching a bus home.
his house is a humpy, or to be blunt, a shitheap.
a broken, zappy light dangles from the kitchen. moldy walls with dull and outdated furniture clutter his living space.
he approaches the fridge and pauses as he looks at the black and white photo of his younger self and a lady rabbit. he grunts then proceeds to get what he needs and enters his living room.
he then eats carrot pizza and a carton of carrot beer before passing out on his couch.
the next day he visits the doctor who tells him he is susceptible to a stroke or heart attack because of his lifestyle.
Blanch sits in the park, for so long that the sun goes down, watching road runner rabbits train in the park. he then decides that the next day would be a new beginning for him.

he hands in his letter of resignation.
and begins to get fit for race day.

i really need to work on the end part because im not sure how i want it to end.

it pretty much goes like this, blanch the bunny isn't running a race with rabbits.
he's running a race with greyhounds, where he is the rabbit they are chasing strapped to the electronic reel on the track.

however im not sure if i should organise it where, blanch falls off his board, and has to run for his life before he gets chewed up by the dogs and gets snapped at the finish line to see who the winner is.

OR if he somehow sees this lady on his fridge in the crowd at the races, and falls off and has to race against the greyhounds, wins the race, and ends up in hospital, with a photo of himself on the front of the newspaper, and his lady friend in the hospital room with him.

i dunno. i need to think about how i want it to end. and really need to consider time. but yeah thats it. and ill put picatures up next blog.

genre: comedy /arthouse mini story. not much talking, but the communication between characters will be grunting, with subtitles pop up on screen. kind of like its a foreign film.
where the most powerful element about the film is the visual.

approach: real cartoony characters, that move lifelike, and have strong features and developed background / settings.

style: wallis and gromit style claymation with a bit of 2d included [for background stuff]

length: 4 - 5 minutes of film [ like the actual story] 30 - 40 seconds credit.

ill add a concept image tomorrow. promise! :D