Catch-up-date

The following is a recap on everything that has been going on in and out of my right brain through the last few weeks. It seems I am just not "getting" this whole blog thing. The truth is I am finding it very difficult to stay focused on producing posts as often as I should and for that I apologise. As after speaking to people in the studio I have noticed that I am receiving the benefits of their updates but not the other way around. So here is a chronological post explaining the process from pre-production of the 11 second club and where things have gone with the experimental project.

Dope Sheets.

This was a process I had done digitally in photoshop. I managed to finish the Experimental Dope sheet before the 11 second club (which was also finished in the same week which started the 8th of November)

Experiment A Dope Sheets Alberto Montana

11 Second Club Dope Sheets Alberto Montana

At this point I had finalised the idea I wanted to work with for the experimental project and the medium which I had chose; 35 mm film. At this point I could not work on the experimental physically as there was no film to use, instead this led me to work on my 11 second club animation.

Character Designs

I began listening to clip over and over acting it out and thinking of characters that would suit the voices. I had a vague image of a short fat guy yelling at a skinny man. Once I had listened to the clip I began sketching in my sketch book. I then moved into working digitally. Recently I have found myself more comfortable with my tablet than my sketchbook.


Once the characters were being worked on I started working on expressions simultaneously, while listening to the clip over and over focusing on each individual words and how the characters body language could be expressed in conjunction with it. The picture of how the characters were turning out started to become more vivid in my mind and eventually through this process the characters of a "Sensei" and a "Student" were finalised.

11 Second Club Expressions and Planning Alberto Montana






With no material to work with for the Experimental project, I moved straight onto the storyboards and animatic. In the last seminar before the teachers went to Bradford with the 1st years Derek had talked about the previous animation process I had been using for the assignment prior to this, which was using footage for reference. Derek had advised me to challenge myself by animating the 11second club using as less reference footage as possible. For this reason I have decided not to film myself for the 11 second club project. This is because I felt that if I filmed myself I would have jumped into old habits of relying on it for pose's which could have left the characters movements dull and unexaggerated. I focused allot of attention this aspect of the animation as I thought it was the most important thing. Using my expression thumbnails as reference I created the storyboard and then moved onto the timing for the animatic.

11 Second Club Storyboards Alberto Montana

11 second club animatic from Anima Films on Vimeo.

I would just like to point out that the timing is a bit off on this version of the animatic however i will hand in an uncompressed version to be marked which will show that the timing is actually correct.

This animatic was shown to Derek in the last lecture and he expressed the importance of a third character and an object or situation to help the audience understand what exactly the sensei is talking about. Unfortunately I had spent all my time thinking of the poses rather than the concept. After the lecture I began to panic alittle as I could not think of something to add into the scene. I did come up with the idea of the Sensei's Sake (Japeniese alcholic drink) was stolen from the student however nothing else popped up, weapons scrolls just didn't fit.



However with less than a week to go with the hand in date, I have come to the conclusion that I am not going to change the idea I have. Also Derek understood I was too far in to throw it all away, but suggested that the Sensei's expression towards the end looks to much like hes talking to someone off screen. For this reason I have changed the last 3 poses of the sensei to having his back turned, looking upwards. Hopefully this will give more of an impression of the character speaking to himself.

11 second club line test from Anima Films on Vimeo.

I decided to work on the animation of the 11 second club as quick as possible so I worked rough at first getting the poses in and now I am currently adding facial expressions and the inbetweens to make it smoother.

At this point I was talking to Derek and asking him whether or not i would be able to use film as a medium (as I was running short of time because I needed to practice the medium as I had never used it before)I am very grateful to Derek Hayes, the other teachers for picking up the projector and film all the way from Bristol and the students who pulled through and helped bring the equipment into the studio in time for me to use this week. I have managed to have a quick play with it however at this point I can only work on black scratching into the film. I may bleach parts for colour, but I can not paint onto the black as I found out through trial and error as the light from the projector can not pass through the black even if I had painted on top of the black. This will change my overall idea of the experimental project. Instead of having a small narrative my sole aim will be to work to get the timing on the music right.

I hope that has clarified things for the people who are interested. I have also been doing 3d work as well as some personal projects, including some drawing that I will post up (hopefully) at another date.