About this Blog

I am an MSc Animation & Visualisation student at DJCAD in Dundee, Scotland. "Once Bitten" is the working title for my personal project and final outcome short film. The characters in my film will be 2D, animated digitally, but the environments they inhabit will be filmed in live action.

"Once Bitten" is a story about a woman who meets a wolf cub alone in the forest, the mood is light and playful and about the pair of new friends escaping their normal lives. However the mood darkens when the cub accidentally falls into a human trap and his mother catches up with him and his new companion.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Wolf pup development

 Bimpe's concept art, we met and looked at this together and made notes to go ahead with, i decided i'd like to mix mine and her styles for the pup from this point forward, and asked her to carry on concentrating on the mother wolf character.


The white wolf in "secret of the kells" has a very appealing sleek shape and is very geometrically put together- i wanted this to be a big influence on my designs


Chris Sanders' animals are so cute, i took inspiration from this- also, my hope is that basing both human and animal characters on the same artist's style will link them visually.

I love Meg Park's wolves and dogs- again very geometrically built

 My rough photoshop sketches, trying to merge the styles highlighted above with Bimpe's work

 
Wolves are easier to draw from the side.... working out some poses for the film and to use in my model sheet- and trying different shapes.

 
Trying different shapes of eyes- i felt like some of these made him look too feline/ female/ angry/ happy all the time

 working out how to make him look less like a cat front-on: lengthening his nose. It was suggested that he looked a bit squirrelly in the far left one, but i love it XD


i'm happy with the look of him here- which was me sketching out a pose for the final scene of my animatic. He has fat front legs and paws now, with a much fitter looking body compared to my animatic pup. He has wide set, huge, round eyes (this part i have kept from my original sketches) a long snout and a geometric build made up of diamonds and triangles.

New(er) animatic!

Here we go again! Another animatic, now with slightly more changed timing, a timecode and a new ending! "ooooo"

I was spurred to make some of these changes when i peer reviewed my last animatic with people who hadn't seen any of the development for it so far. This was very useful: Kaitlin who is an experienced writer and storyteller gave me some advise about my ending- that i needed to show the emotions the pup was feeling- otherwise the ending seemed detached. So in this new version we see the pup's face in the final shot, and we also see the apple (both these things tie down the story nicely as the whole thing starts with them). Also in the new version i've added some ambient scary music towards the end, to fill the silence and indicate a tone of foreboding- i'm just trying it out- originally the plan was not to bother with a score.