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.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Script Breakdown and New Schedule

I had a production meeting with myself and took note of: Everything i said i would achieve by this point- completed or not and if so whether it still needs to be completed. The old schedule looked like this: 


Final 2D animatic is complete (recently updated to include 2 new scenes with one old scene that was really annoying me cut. The new scenes are important- they show the 2 main characters together in the same shot as equals seeing each other for the first time and their first cautious exchange)


Live action/ 2d animatic is not complete because final footage is not filmed and will not be by the end of this week. I also think it's far too late for me to be faffing around with animatics.

Designs are complete.

Character sheets are complete.

Final filming and editing are not complete.

Research observation is complete

tests are incomplete (i have written off "set dressing" as i would rather focus on animation not hard core compositing past what is strictly necessary to allow my flat characters to exist in the live action setting) I have not tested any compositing past having a meeting with a member of staff knowledgeable about vfx about specific requirements for my film.

2D animation is not complete.

Based on the new animatic i made up a script breakdown (as detailed as i could manage) which will hopefully help me keep track of my film requirements scene by scene and will help when it comes to filming my live action footage. I have arranged a meeting with Adam Morrow who is leading the live action footage team for this project to discuss how the script breakdown and new schedule is working for him.




 New schedule with updated hierarchy: green means high priority, yellow is medium, red is low. i plan to push for having 62 secs of complete animation by the beginning of July. This way i hope to at least have a film that makes some sense to start putting together a month before deadline.



I have acquired a live action reference actress for my wolf pup character! Her name is Kira and her and her owner Kerri have kindly agreed to accompany us on our filming days. Having footage of Kira for reference will help me scale/ place and animate my wolf pup character.


Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Wrapping up Pre-Production

Since finishing semester 2 i've been in a hurry to catch up as much as i can with pre- production for Once bitten, so that i can start production as soon as possible. 

I had a fairly good idea of what my pup should look like thanks to the work i did with Bimpe at the beginning of semester 2:


 But i still had a mother wolf character to lock down- with the wolf pup's design solid i had something to work up from, i also had my main inspiration from secret of the kells as well as Bimpe's concepts for adult wolves.

Not wanting to dally much longer in the designing stages i came up with a design i was happy with using what i already had:

I also made a turnaround for my pup:

 I produced character sheets to help me understand the characters in different moods and poses and to give me practise drawing them:



The scale of the wolves is stylized: 

I found reference of a real wolf cub with a human for scale as i wasn't sure how big to make the cub in comparison to Anna (turns out wolf pups are pretty big!). I knew i could make him slightly bigger than realistically accurate but needed him to still be cute and un-intimidating. I also want the scale of the mother when the audience and Anna see her in full for the first time, to be a surprise.




I was also inspired to make the mother wolf large and imposing, by the scale of the Dire wolves in Game of Thrones:

However compared to my original storyboard the wolves are scaled DOWN!

While making up my model sheets i played around with some possible colour combinations for my wolves. However i think it might be early to make a final decision here. I am tempted to leave it until i have final footage to comp the characters in to.