So, of course, I want to document the making of this movie, using this here blog.
Sooo... first thing, I have a sketched version of the story, drawn on paper (like always, on the train, my favorite place to draw). I'll scan it some time next week and post that too. It's flat, very 2-dimensional, one camera, one long shot, very much like a comic strip, with 2 characters staged very defaultish on some sort of a... stage. They just go in and out of the stage. For a long while I actually was in doubt about turning this story into a movie, despite the fact that I really want/ed to, precisely because the story was working so well as a flat comic strip, while I wanted to do something more dynamic, more cinematic... more of a film and less of a comic strip.
So recently I set myself to turning the flat story into a 3-dimensional thing, which was a really interesting experience. I first built a quick mock up scene in Maya, similar to the actual set I will build later on, and I used it to experiment with cameras inside this space. I also sectioned the story into shots based on a dialogue-between characters type of logic (although the characters don't actually speak). I have a lot of cameras just going back and forth between the 2 characters. So I managed to fragment the story and discovered that it actually helps the flow of things, because I get to throw out the unimportant fluff and focus more on the timing and pacing of what's really important.
This first rough animatic is drawn on top of rough 3D Maya renders. It has, well... rough and pretty even timing. Next step, I guess, is to further work with it, and start doing some character design (although I already know that the 2 guys will be very much like my other puppetzoids, so simple design, but I still have to work out the details, and especially think about the facial rig). Also, the scene needs some more thinking, this first pass is pretty messy. I don't know yet if I'll keep the tall grass, which is a technological problem if I have to constantly interact with it. But I also happen to love it :) The trees around the set will probably be removed and the landscape remodeled.
Anyway, click here to download the full rez (30MB), or click below and watch the half rez animatic (9MB).