From the Beginning

Alright well I've been working on this film for quite a while, so I'm going to start off by getting this blog up to speed.

In the professional world of computer animation, when some one sets out to make a film (i.e. The Incredibles, UP) everything starts with the screenplay which provides the whole structure for the production of the film. After that, character artists and director will the sketch out all characters on paper to define how they will look like on screen. They give these sketches to a team of modelers, who create the characters, and ever other detail that we see on screen. All this is passed on the the animators, who bring it all alive. The whole process usually takes two or three years. Well I don't have a whole team of graphic artists at my disposal. I don't have the huge amount of computer power used to do this sort of stuff either. The fact is, it's just me and my mac.

When I started this project last September, I didn't want to spend weeks writing the screenplay, only to get into the actually production and realize that I had bitten off way more then I could chew. So started it casually, I created the main character over a weekend, and gradually the rest of set came into being. It's been almost a year since then, and the whole project has developed amazingly well. At this point most of the set has been completed, and the dozens of technical bugs that are constantly plaguing me have been worked out. And so I've begun writing the screenplay. It will be done in the next couple weeks. Then I'll start story boarding, which is basically drawing out the whole film, from beginning to end, with hundreds of pictures. This helps to see the action that needs to actually take place, and lets you play around with different stuff, like camera angles. Then I'll begin the actually animating the film. I expect to spend at least another year on this. Actually, I'm willing to spend as much time as I have to to achieve the quality I want with this film.

Well I hope that gives you the general idea of the project. In the next few days I'll be posting test footage and stills of the project so you'll be able to see what I'm doing, and at some point I'll post the screenplay as well.