Update

It's been a while since I've updated, but here goes!
I graduated with a short version of my film on the 23rd of august. Near the end of september I had a graduation exposition where the short version of my film could be seen, and the set and puppet.

Lately I've been updating my film's facebook page more, because it's quick and easy to do. Check it out if you want to!

https://www.facebook.com/dotherobotfilm

Led lights

Busy animating and setting up shots, working with small led lights, it's a lot of fun to do!
Sometimes I play around with the shot after I'm done animating.
Here's a photo of one of my shots, but completely in the dark. It will be fully lit in my film, but I thought it made an interesting picture.

Progress

My last shot took me 6 days to animate, most shots are animated in one or two days (disregarding the time it takes setting up the set).
Right now I'm preparing the last 3 scenes of the movie (about 14 shots). These shots are some of the most important ones for my film.

 A still from my last shot:

So there's alot of pressure to get them right!
Besides preparing the shots I also have alot of post-production work to do. 95% of the shots are shot with a greenscreen, and not all shots key out that well. Sometimes I get holes in my robot, which I have to patch up.
Otherwise some shots may look like this:

Notice the small orange dots (click to see it better), sometimes there's alot, sometimes there's none. Kinda looks like acne.

Some behind the scenes pics:

 My animating table is a huge mess as you can see. Lot's of mouth/neck replacements in this shot.

This is him after finishing the shot, I don't think he's that exited about animation anymore than I am!

Sneak Peek

I'm still very very busy with animating, at the moment I have 4 scenes left, about 14 shots to animate.

I've had some camera troubles a few weeks ago, almost had to send my 60D for repairs, but luckily I found out that there was something wrong with my usb cables. Apparently when you use a usb extension cord it can frak up your camera connection on the newest imacs. The stupid part is that it cost me about a week to fix the problem, so hurray for wasting precious animation time!

Anyway, I have a small making of/teaser video for you guys. It's basically a timelapse of how I animated the robot's walkcycle, and the rough end result. It's the uncomposited version of the cycle since I really wanted to show off some animation, but I don't want to spoil anything of the film.



The cycle looks a bit jittery now, but it looks better when it actually moves forward :)

Pics

Some pics of animating the 2nd walkcycle:

And one of a shot I recently completed, I'm not going to show the real shot, so here's a shot from a different angle:

Walkcycle

At the moment I'm really busy with the robot walkcycle. I took some key positions off of frames I shot with the robot. Now I'm making a test animation in tvpaint to figure out the timing and the spacing.
If all goes well I can animate the robot using the pencil test as a guide, it's pretty tricky though since the robot is a bit clunky and large, so there's a possibility that he can't hold all the positions like in the pencil test.

In a day or two I'll find out!

Robot pictures

It's been ages since I've updated, alot of stuff has been going on in the meantime, which distracted me from posting any new stuff.
Currenty I don't have my own workspace, haven't worked on my film for over a month now due to the Christmas vacation, and the fact that my school has not assigned me a new workspace yet (apparently they don't want me to graduate?).
I have been enjoying the time off (which I really needed) and been working on some freelance stuff. It's gonna be a little tough to start up again, but I still need to set up and animate more than half of the shots for my film.

Anyway, some more robot pictures in this post.

Replacement mouths for the robot.

Robot on rigging block for torso shots.

Robot ready to be animated.