Mol Aram Expressions

This time last week I was frantically trying to complete the last two shots of "Thuggee Life" - the animated cartoon I'd challenged myself to create in 7 days.

In case you missed it, I did indeed manage to complete the cartoon, which you can watch here. I blogged my progress as I made it, you can read those posts here.

Earlier tonight a friend of mine asked me how I felt about the challenge and whether I was pleased with the way Thuggee Life turned out. I'll gather my thoughts on this and blog about it in the next day or so. In the meantime, here's a quick look at Mol Aram's expressions from the cartoon:

Thuggee Life

So here it is, Thugee Life, a short animated cartoon I made in the last 7 days. I'm so glad I set myself this challenge of creating it from scratch (read more about this in the related blog posts) - the process has been so much fun from start to finish, and I learned an enormous amount of stuff. I'll blog about those things at a later date. For now, I hope you enjoy watching Thuggee Life:

Thuggee Life from Rafianimates on Vimeo.

I challenged myself to create an animated cartoon, from scratch, in 7 days. Thuggee Life is is what I came up with - a one note gag inspired by characters from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Sound fx and voices by Rafi Nizam

Music sourced from this royalty free site

Written, designed, directed and animated (in 7 days) by Rafi Nizam

9 hours to go!!!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 9 - Slightly worrying situation? Nah!

With pretty much 24 hours left now, this is where I am with all the shots:

Green = animated, inked and painted. Effectively done.
Yellow = currently being worked on.
Red = work has yet to begin.



The red ones amount to about 10 seconds of the animation....SHIT! The good news is the rest of it is done and dusted.

I've been at it since 7 am, it is now almost midnight. I've actually thoroughly enjoyed the whole process so far! The last stretch awaits me tomorrow - by midnight (GMT) you, and I, will finally get to see what I can knock out from concept to completion in 7 days.

Until then, have a bit of this:

Body parts!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 8 - Project status

Just three days left until deadline, so here's a brief update on where things stand right now:



Green = animated, inked and painted. Effectively done.
Yellow = currently being worked on.
Red = work has yet to begin.

I'll try and upload more of the fun stuff tomorrow, must admit it does feel like blogging this production is eating into my time. Worth it though right?

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 7 - First shot is complete!!

All the shots I'm animating are still in line test stage - meaning none of the character animation is ready for colour just yet. I have no idea if I'll even make it to final colour stage by the deadline. However I couldn't resist adding colour to the characters in the opening shot, in the name of a "colour test" :)

I guess this shot is the first one to get completed! As for the other 14....

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 6 - More Animation Tests!

Here's some more animation line tests:

CLOSEUP ON THUGGEE#13




CLOSE-UP ON MOLA RAM WITH BEATING HEART
(warning: the volume is oddly very loud on this one)



I'm trying to get the easier (well, less complicated is probably more accurate) shots blocked in as early in the week as possible, before getting stuck into the longer more demanding shots. Four and a half days to go...

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 5 - Animation Tests!

MOLA RAM CHARACTER ANIMATION LINE TEST
Here's a line test of Mola Ram, one of the two characters in Thuggee Life. It's around 9 seconds of animation (technically 20% of the running length of the full short!):

CARTOON FIRE EFFECTS ANIMATION TEST
The role of fire is integral to the plot, it's almost a third character! So here's some fire effects animation I've been working on:



I'm having a lot of fun with the various aspects of production on this project - a lot of new stuff I've never done before - so far this is proving to be a rather stimulating challenge! :)
Still got tonnes left to do, and only 5 days left to make all the bits work together - EEK!!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 4 - Layouts & Backgrounds

I'm pretty much there with all the layouts and backgrounds now. Have a look:































Time to make a start on animating some shots - woohoo!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 3 - Background design

I've been beavering away on layouts for the cartoon all evening and have worked out that my storyboard requires a total of 12 layouts. That sounds like a lot but in actual fact there are only about 5 different backgrounds for me to create because most of the action happens in one place and my storyboard makes use of that place for several close-up shots and all of the two-shots (so I have been relatively economical :) )

Because of its importance, I chose to develop that background into its final form:



This is by far the the most detailed background of the lot, it has to be, because virtually all the essential story beats happen here. So I'm glad to have it illustrtated at this stage. Doing this has also helped me set the tone for everything else in terms of colour. I would normally create a colour script from the storyboard but there's no time for that here.

Here's an idea of how most of the two-shots will be composed:



I plan on turning the rest of my layouts into final backgrounds by midday tomorrow. If I get there, I'll be sure to blog the results. After which, I can hopefully move onto animation!!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 2 - Story Reel / Animatic

So, I'm now back home after a long but thoroughly enjoyable day out and have just taken a look at the animatic I threw together this morning. Such a gap in time is usually a good thing because it enables you to review things with a fresh eye. I said in my previous post that this animatic was a real rush job - sure enough on second viewing it's pretty clear just how rough around the edges it is! To be fair, it would be in much worse condition had I not taken it through the (brief) development stage.

As it stands, I think it's still a fun piece. Judge for yourself:

Either way, it'll just have to do. If I want to meet my deadline, it is imperative I move on to the next stage - drawing layouts.

Thuggee Life: I have an animatic! But...

This morning I very quickly threw together a story reel/animatic for Thuggee Life - but as it's Easter weekend I'm visiting family and friends today, so I didn't get a chance to upload it before leaving the house. I'll upload it when I get back later. But the point is - I have an animatic!! At the moment it's about 40 seconds long and features a pretty patchy scratch track LOL!

Thuggee Life micro animation production blog pt. 1 - The Idea

Earlier this evening I decided to challenge myself to create an animated cartoon - from concept to completion - in one week. Starting today (well, 6pm Saturday evening to be precise) I have 7 days to:

1. create an idea from scratch
2. develop that idea into some form of narrative
3. take it through pre-production (storyboard, animatic, layout, design)
4. break down all the shots for animation
5. plan that animation
6. animate it
7. clean up and finalise the animation
8. add colour
9. put some music/sfx or voice work in
10. deliver it on deadline! (in this case upload it to vimeo)

A tall order, no doubt about it. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

THE IDEA

After a bit of pondering and chatting to my other half I came up with several ideas, the one I've chosen is a scene inspired by characters from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - one of my favourite films. I love that film coz it's so ridiculously ott. Anyway, the scene I came up with is essentially a one note gag involving two members of the Thuggee cult. The first thing I did was scamp out the idea in my pocket notebook:

(note: the frames read in columns top to bottom)



Drawn in a couple of minutes, scamping an idea out like this helps me see whether it is likely to work. If it doesn't work, at least I won't wasted too much time. Fortunately I felt this had potential but looking at the frames I realised a lot needed reworking (screen direction, choice of shots and framing are some glaring examples).

STORY THUMBNAILS

So I made another pass, this time thumbnailing with more thought to how things would work on screen:

(note: these frames read in rows left to right)

In this second attempt I was starting to flesh things out - especially with the characters themselves. Once I'd drawn these thumbnails and looked at how the action played out, I knew I needed to explore the characters a little more - particularly how their design could add to the story and help show their personalities on screen. So I made some very loose sketches exploring exactly that:

CHARACTER SKETCHES



Although I only spent half an hour on them, these character sketches really helped me develop the personalities, which in turn helped me find the story beats I was looking for. It's a chicken and egg thing with story thumbnails and character sketches. It's always more effective to design characters that are doing something, or saying something or responding to something. As you can see from the ones I've marked with a red asterisk, drawing poses for a specific story purpose yields the best results.

STORYBOARD

Now armed with the character sketches and thumbnails as reference, I took a crack the storyboard - this time trying to nail all the staging, shots, story beats and key performance elements:

(note: these frames read in rows left to right)

Some of these storyboard frames could potentially serve as my thumbnails for character animation. We'll see if that's the case once I get to animating stuff.

I've decided to accept this as my final storyboard. I think the staging is pretty clear and story is engaging enough, besides, I'm out of time, got to move on to the next stage: the animatic!

I'm going to blog my progress for the next 7 days.....wish me luck!

Ascent - Drawings From Life

Ascent - Drawings From Life from Rafianimates on Vimeo.

A short film reflecting on my experience at life drawing class.

All drawings were created by me during one session in March 2011, in the life drawing studio at The Prince's Drawing School, Shoreditch, London.

Images - Rafianimates
http://www.rafianimates.co.uk

Music - osymyso
http://www.osymyso.com

Hyacinth Macaws (at ZSL London Zoo)

Hyacinth Macaws (at ZSL London Zoo) from Rafianimates on Vimeo.

Something I threw together for fun using photos I took of Hyacinth Macaws at ZSL London Zoo.

I purposely shot these parrots with my stills camera on a high-speed burst setting so I could avoid the motion blur I tend to get through the 30fps video setting. Each captured image has the birds in focus and any "dropped" frames across the movement add a much welcomed level of randomness to the whole thing :)

Working with a sequence of still photos also makes a more interesting effect when animating them on 2's, 3's or 4's - as I've done here - within the kaleidoscopic effect which I achieved using a combination of Adobe After Effects and key framing by hand.

Music by OSYMYSO.

IT Man and Eagle: True Teamwork

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed a sudden drop in posts recently. What's kept me busy this past fortnight? Click play ont he video above.

(tip: click the "HD" button in the player for improved quality)

Bitfilm links roundup

Fellow Bitfilm Award Winner Alexander Lehmann has a post on his blog about his trip to Tel Aviv. We hung out quite a bit out there - he's a top bloke and really talented animator. Alex's film "You Are A Terrorist" won first prize in the Politicool category at the Bitfilm Festival.

Weekly German magazine SPIEGEL ONLINE (www.spiegel.de) have written a piece about my winning film "Follow the Legs" and also have it embedded on their site. Check it out.

For those interested, Bitfilm have now ranked the films in each category according to the online votes. Dig.

I've won a Bitfilm Award!

If you've followed my tweets lately you'll know I was in Tel Aviv last week for the Bitfilm Festival where my music video for OSYMYSO's "Follow the Legs" was up for an award.

Nominated in the FX MIX category, "Follow the Legs" was very well received by the audience attending the screening at the Cinemateque, Tel Aviv on October 1st. I'm proud to say I was awarded the prestiguous Bitfilm Robot at the festival closing ceremony that night.



I am also incredibly humbled by the whole occasion especially as my video was up against some amazing films from all over the world. Like the whole trip to Tel Aviv, seeing my film projected on a proper cinema screen was an experience I'll never forget.

A big thank you to all who voted for "Follow the Legs".
Watch the winning film on my site: www.rafianimates.co.uk

Follow The Legs (music video)

I just completed a music video for the song Follow The Legs by osymyso. Designed, directed and animated by yours truly, the video explores the concept of collage in the medium of animation. Follow The Legs is an extract from osymyso's forthcoming album Bunkerbusterwaldernuts.

You can watch it right now here:


For a larger version and more animation check out my site: www.rafianimates.co.uk



Speaking of which, the site has had a bit of a facelift (well, a minor nip & tuck anyway). New additions include a teaser I animated for comedy radio series Danny Robins Music Therapy on Radio 4, assorted sketches, artwork and wallpapers relating to Follow The Legs.

Have a fun week.