Friday 28 September 2012

Reference footage from The Space

Today we filmed at The Space @ Dundee College Kingsway Campus. Here's a pick of the best footage we collected, first of all: the choreography both in costume and out. Dancers: Miranda Sheehy, Jessica Catrin Engberg and a boy who's name I haven't got yet :P

 


And these are some of the cloth tests we made; both interacting with someone and simply being dropped:



Productive day i think, the plan now is to make solid character sheets/ turnarounds, recruit animators, and divide a chosen 10% chunk between us all to work on for our Christmas deadline. the camera man/ driver was Scott Sutherland and the photographer/ general tech. hand was Rob O'Hara. I'm the one throwing cloth. For hilarious out-takes visit: http://insovietrussiaartblogsyou.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/dancing-nina-filming-day-at-space.html










Thursday 27 September 2012

Slightly New Schedule

After our meeting with Andy Eracleous yesterday I've added a few things to our schedule and taken away the modelling and sculpting I had scheduled for myself, as now I'm working on Jamie Buchanan's film "Stupid kow" http://stupidkow.blogspot.co.uk/ which makes up the other half of my 3D modelling specialism. Bob and Scott have volunteered to help me film our reference footage at the Space tomorrow, I'm still to fully recruit additional inbetweeners/ clean up artists, which will be done the old fashioned way: sign up sheet in the studio.



Wednesday 26 September 2012

New Storyboard and Animatic!

Finally! The new storyboard according to the shorter choreography has been drawn up, complete with new style decisions made in a meeting yesterday with Tricia Anderson. Tricia had the wonderful idea of having our characters not only move like pieces of cloth but also have them disappear and appear by morphing from and into cloth, when necessary. Freya and I thought it was a much more elegant and artistic way of hanging Nina at the end, let us know what you think.
Obviously we haven't yet asked Finn Anderson to tweak his music to our new timing, we should be filming with the dancers at the end of this week and i also plan to get some cloth tests filmed; So hopefully by Monday-ish i'll be more sure of the timing and will feel confident sending a more accurate animatic away to him.









Comments welcome!

Friday 21 September 2012

Storyboard progress

The storyboard's progressing and i'm making a few instinctual decisions about the choreography as i go, so, really, it's quite different from the live action animatic now. Hopefully some kind souls will dance the new storyboard out for me in the next week or 2, so that i can use them as reference.












Tuesday 18 September 2012

Co-Direction (One Direction's lesser known rival band)


Ok, so, from today Freya Allan has joined my team to Co- direct Dancing Nina, the newer, shorter, 2D version. She'll be making sure I don't go crazy and make this film into something that doesn't make sense any more and generally bossing me around like dictators- i mean, directors, are meant to. I'll be doing the same back as she'll be helping with animation and such. Yay!

Here's Dancing Nina's new rough 10% by Chrimbo schedule, with role specification:




P.s. The term "level 2/3 slaves" is used lovingly.

Friday 14 September 2012

NEW (ish) designs

Nina's new(ish) look! 2D friendly, less pointy but still inkeeping with my originals I think

Bombshell!

Hold on to your hats everyone there's been a change of plans, Dancing Nina will now be a 2D production, traditionally animated, and will be roughly 1 minute long, or under. I (Slava) am now basically in charge of the project as Jo has dropped out of her role as director and production manager. There may be more people joining my team but for now it's just little old me.
All of these changes have come about due to the brief drastically changing over the summer and requiring everyone to specialize in 2 areas and demonstrate those specializations in at least to different productions. So far mines are Character animation and 3D Modelling- so this should showcase my character animation in my showreel, at least- I just couldn't bare to give it up when we'd all worked so hard on it already.
 Anyway all I can hope for now is that it doesn't kill me and it turns out simple and beautiful.Oh, and i hope to complete the models of Nina and Death to count towards my course work and use them as 3D reference or something.

 This animatic is something I quickly cut together from our old (much longer) animatic which included storyboard, I plan to re-film the dancers to have more solid reference material in the next week or so and obviously Finn's music will have to be tweaked to fit the new duration.

I'm in the process of drawing up a new storyboard based on this animatic.