Breaking a script

 This guy has decent ideas

Free Screenwriting Scriptwriting software

 https://writersolo.com/#

The Bazaar

really interesting mix of 2D with some 3D hero assets
by Mana

breakdown on their behance

Unreal for Feature

Unreal Learning

The official Unreal learning site, haven't seen it in a while, so putting it here for finding later. 

 Unreal 5 Control Rig   (can animate in sequencer and bake out to animation sequence)
 

Animating in Engine  (looks like they're going after mobu)

 

 Stylized Rending in Unreal Course

 

Independent Film Making with Unreal

Getting in and out of Ragdoll

Irradiation - short made with Unreal

Irradiation - Process from Sava Zivkovic on Vimeo.

interesting. He just threw in assets into unreal and virtually walked around to discover shots.

Film Riot Talked about the same thing basically


Times are changing, no longer need anything but a computer to make a film (if you're clever)

3D storyboards

Ran across an article talking about using grease pencil in Blender to do storyboards in quick greyblock scenes. Combining layout and storyboarding so you don't have to reinvent things when you get out of 2D into 3D

Student Short Films

a team's post mortem on a short film, with links to each aspect discussed. The Character artist was talking about how the chosen concept had the strongest expression, so was easiest to relate to, so keep that in mind when designing.

Create Sci Fi KitBashing

Got sucked in and watched a ton of these last night. I love the punk rock "just get stuff done" attitude. I also love that the steps are the same from kitbashing a spaceship miniature, to making a costume, to building a set.
Choose stuff for silhouette and shape
Mash it together strong (trim back after if you need)
Unify it with dark primer (or fabric dye for costume)
Drybrush silver or gold on
Weather it

Miyazaki again

I'm not making a story yet, that's too limiting.

Starts with just images that make you question and wonder what is happening. Totorro started with just the image of the kid and totorro at the bus stop. Then builds the story around the moments he explored.

doesn't matter if it's just an illustration, it works so long as it's interesting, if people are bored it's game over.

funiko - atmosphere or mood. japanese animation emphasizes this idea of strong emotional resonance rather than gag based cartoons. the environment is a character and has a feeling mood and story about it. The particularity of place, there'a narrative anchored in the larger world. How does this particular environment push on and change the story elements.

You must animate will, not just movement, the drive behind it.

easy to understand movies are boring. Logical storyllines sacrifice creativity.

empowers his protagonists with a sense of action, the power to do what is right despite adults perhaps not doing it.

he's creating worlds for the next generation.

self satisfied people are boring. we have to push to surpass ourselves

Alex Henderson

Just ran across this guy  Sheridan Grad, 1 man animation band.


Breathing Space - Animated Short Film from Alexander Henderson on Vimeo.


His twitter is full of tons of matte background painting, which look great with the flat shaded animation.

He storyboards pretty tightly. Uses zbrush and mudbox for modeling, feel like he's able to recycle his models some to jump off to a new one. For rigging he uses Rapid Rig to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and has other auto rigger scripts that he hasn't named. (wonder what he does for faces), and then corrective blendshapes for big changes. VFX are a large part preset's he bought for aftereffects. All of those skills are a career in their own, it's impressive how well he does them all, he has commissions on his site for doing quick animate portraits and it seems fairly cheap to be making a new character all the time.

Pretty inspiring what's possible.

He's currently running a kickstarter for a short

Objective vs Subjective filming

What is Character Perspective? from Travis Lee Ratcliff on Vimeo.


This was a fascinating idea when I first learned about it, but I couldn't find any further explanation. This video does a better job of running it down.

notes:

pov shot doesn't give us any insight into the mental or emotions of the character who we're riding.

subjective gives us that story, often by looking at that character as much as what they are looking at

Blender

Another thing that I came across was how awesome blender is getting these days. They've got really amazing looking CG stuff, but their 2D is and cell shaded stuff is great too.





and I went searching for it because it was so cool, but this 2D looking scene made in Blender.

By Janina Gerards
(@luamono on twitter)

 

@antonioya_blend on twitter automated the process https://twitter.com/antonioya_blend/status/1244294087806783488
(so I think it's part of Blender by default now)






and the classic Blender one by Dedouze

Dedouze tutorial


and part 2 of Dedouze


blender cartoon renderer


flat in photoshop, shade and light in AE



and of course the patron saint of blender PepeLand has a series

1 person film stuff and the power of After Effects

Ok, so I caught that Spice Frontier short and was super into it, I like the flat shade look with 2d vfx. Partly because it feels more 2D so there's more wiggle room to having more stylized characters. Watching a making of Steamroll Studios made it over 2 years, and the main creator wrote basically a novel that he developed into a short. (with plans to go series or feature)

I also bumped into Denver Jackson's Cloudrise pictures again.  Specifically this comment he made:

A year ago, I started animation on this feature. I am now approx an hour and a half through animation! Another 30 minutes to go!

Super exciting. The idea that 1 person can make a whole world  and complete story in a conceivable amount of time. Although I have seen timelapse of Denver working at his cintique and not moving for an entire day, so I think he is putting in deadly amounts of hours.

But, he also turned out a whole feature worth of work already.




He said he painted over 200 backgrounds for it. And then just hand animated the whole damn thing.
A lot of his backgrounds I think he quick mocked up in 3d and then painted over, so as to speed up working out the perspective.

He mentioned that currently he is working with CG characters that he then stopmo puppets in quill/occulus for speed, then reexports back to render.

But a big factor in 1 person productions seems to be how much power is in after effects. Make a shot feel full and vibrant. Lighting tricks and depth of field and atmosphere for depth. Running through some of these it occurs to me that that is what makes a scene feel real, the depth and the sense of environment, weather effects (mist and clouds and rain and wind) and light effects, which makes it feel cinematic because it's easier to suspend disbelief.

And Toniko has a amp up vid about making a film in a week, then you can just blaze through it because you know it can't ever be perfect so you're not slowed down trying to make it perfect.


flat in photoshop, shade and light in AE


basic putting together assets in AE


and adding some volumetric and depth of field to AE


building a long parrallax BG in AE


another putting together a scene in AE


overpainting photos to make BG


rain fx



artist drawing BG starting from ref


lasso color line art


rim light AE


just rough to clean 2D anim


lighting effects in AE

Unreal Engine Film BattleSuit

Another example of using game engines (unreal) for film making

BattleSuit Film By Hasraf "HaZ" Dulall

"

Their notes were typically about story and dialogue, things that if we were doing this in a more conventional linear route, would entail time and expense to fix. But because we were in a realtime environment and we didn’t have pipeline steps, such as compositing or multipass rendering as you would get in conventional CG, we were able to make iterative changes really quick straight out of the engine.

“The ability to make these changes on the fly without making a difference to our budget and schedule is another huge game-changer. It could mean that many more story ideas get made because the risk to the producers and finance execs is so much smaller.”

article at no film school

In Shadow

Flooby Nooby Storyboarding Lesson

http://www.floobynooby.com/comp1.html

Andrea Gerstmann

Listened to Andrea Gerstmann on the animated journey podcast 

She had some decent tutorials, like this. 

Storyboarding

Recently read Nourigat's coming to LA book, and it has me thinking a lot of storyboarding.






Great walk through of making this scene by Joe Johnston




Somewhere I listened to a podcast with Alex Hirsch Gravity Falls showrunner where he talked about the 2 types of network cartoon shows. Script based and board based. Script based write out the whole show as a script then hand it to the board artists. Board based the writers come up with a premise and maybe beat break down, but then the board artists take that and actually hash out who does what and who says what. But "script writers" make more and get residuals while board guys don't.

Sam Spina shows the process of taking breakdowns to boards.     It's pretty easy to find adventure time boards and they look like they work this way also.

In real life, you have to pull off 10 to 20 pages per day to make your deadlines.

Comedy For Animators

Seems like a great site   Comedy for Animators
they had a great breakdown of Jackie Chan, that the next crazy set/prop thing he's going to do is always forshadowed and then he basically gets pushed into it.