Roughing out Monster for Shot 6

The monsters form seems to be developing with shoulders helping to show weight.

Giving Pip something to stand on

I thought about getting a texture and running it back in perspective to the horizon with a gradient fade to emulate something along the lines of ground, however when I was doing the DVD covers with the spotlight on Pip I liked the look of that and gave it a try.

 I think it works well and it is also adds to the theatrical theme of the animation. The two options I have is the light coming from above out of screen or the monster hand.

Light originating from out of screen

Light originating from the monster hand

Half way through Shot 5 (strings)

More string animation, I'm just off half way through shot 5. I would have been further ahead but spent about 5 hours exploring/attempting to animated 2 seconds of one of the string actions and ending up scraping it in the end. It's annoying having spent so much time on it but oh well.

I changed my mind again about how far zoomed out shot 5 will be, taking on board Jacks input I went back to the original composition.

There's one string snap in the shot that I'm not sure about but I'll leave it settle for now and come back for a fresh look to see what I think, it happens at 0.55 seconds.

Re-Sizing Shot 4 and 5

After watching my running comp and looking back over some layout images I produced in pre-production I realise that Shot 4 looked a lot better with Pip a bit smaller and the monsters eyes bigger, it makes the monster feel more imposing/formidable.

So I made Pip smaller and extended the strings so they still lead out of the screen, I'm still deciding on the exact size but it shouldn't vary too much from what I have now. I'm glad I realised this now before I got too far into the string animation.

I want to do the same for shot 5 when the monsters hands lands next to Pip as the hand would be too large to fit into the screen at its correct size. So I think I'll do a zoom out half way through the shot, I hope this will help break up the shot a little as I dn't think I have enough varation in shot sizes through out the animation.

More string animation

Almost finished animating the strings for shot 4. I didn't complete the whole dance sequence as the camera will pan up to the monsters hand and I'm yet to film the hand footage. I'm happy with how its looking so far.
Also Jack sugested I put a shadow under Pip to ground her a bit more into the composition, its just a test with no refinment in 1 shot so far but I think it looks good and I'll fix it up a bit later, just have to concentrate on gettign the animation done for now.

Backgrounds, More Strings

I'm still trying to find out what works best for the backgrounds, color wise I prefered straight black rather than the greadient of blues i had but overall it looks a bit minimal. So now I've tried a smokey blue effect which I prefer though I'm not 100% happy with it. It's a step in the right direction though.

I've completed all the string animation for the beginning of shot 5, I think it works well enough so now I just need to concentrate on getting the rest done. The only other tricky bit R.E the strings will be animating them from the monsters hand ratehr than from Pip. I'll need to shoot some test hand footage asap so I can have a crack at that.

My running comp so far

DVD Slick & Disk Prints

These are a few of my designs for the DVD slick and disk. I went through a bunch of ideas and different color designs as the monsters color changes throughout the animation. These are just a few of the better designs I came up with. The two dots are representative of the monsters eyes.

The idea below is what I finally settled on, I think it represents what the animation is about well. I haven't decided on the straight black or gradient blue, I'm printing both to see what comes out the best (thanks sean mundy). I also changed the block of text on the left to a simpler font to make it more readable after receiving some advice in class today.

I think I like this one the best