Rat Plans ft. Self Doubt

With second year ending I have all summer to ready my pitch for third year. It's something I've been thinking about since knowing I was coming to Falmouth and it feels like there is a lot of pressure to make it the best thing I can achieve.

Because of this I have never been able to convince myself any of my stories are worth developing and have this moment of panic where I feel like I'm running out of time before third year and this isn't worth following up on, and so I switch to a different idea. In reality this just wastes more time as I've learnt how much time and effort it takes to develop a story and it doesn't help constantly resetting in the hopes of a stronger starting position.

During the pre-production module last term I began working on a story which I thought would be appealing to the tutors, a piece set historically with an art style grounded in that time and a story that was attempting to comment on an issue that was important to me. But it felt like a chore, I had very little art for it and I wasn't motivated to make anymore, it wasn't something that I wanted to make. Which is why I decided to develop a story based on a sketch I did whilst procrastinating from the first one. The sketch was of a rat dressed like a pirate and I thought it was kind of funny and I like rats.

And now I sit here, weeks after term has ended, and my main character Pokey is still what I find myself drawing every day. Even now I have my doubts about this project, it maybe not being as action orientated as the things I'd like to produce or that it really isn't saying anything deep like all the short films our tutors show us in lectures but I am committed to my rat story. I think working past self doubt is all a part of the writing process and a healthy part of developing a fleshed out story.

So with that in mind I have chosen to spend this summer continuing to develop my story, 'Rat Trap' to make it as visually and narrative engaging as possible. And I hope I never get sick of drawing fat little rats.

Evaluation of 'Rat Trap'

The idea behind Rat Trap is finding comedy in the contrast between the high romance of swashbuckling piracy in the style of adventure movies from the 30's featuring Errol Flynn but with the subject of rats. Rats are seen as disgusting rodents and carriers of disease but in my story they're imitating the humans and acting like pirates.




And whilst this started as simply a dumb joke I found that there was also drama to be had in that setup, the rats believe themselves valued members of pirate crews where they aren't even noticed. Pokeys arc is about discovering his role in the world because it certainly isn't as a pirate but he is too far into the facade to acting like just a rat.

The narrative begins as a fairly conventional pirate story, he arrives at the island and encounters Scab and they wind up duelling over conflicting ideas and miscommunication really. This scene is most evocative of the previously mentioned adventure movies, I took direct inspiration from 'Captain Blood' for this part in the location for the duel to take place in.

Concept art (left) is by Eloise Gardner

However after this scene the narrative takes a turn away from a pirate story as Pokey kills Scab in the name of the humans only to find that they've left without him. He is left on the island to slowly become more rat like and eventually become like Scab, but he does not want this and the story ends with him crafting a makeshift raft and leaving the island to make a place for himself.

In retrospect I think the story in its current shape is a little clumsy, after the humans leave the pacing is broken and it is waiting for Pokey to make the decision to leave but as of right now it isn't motivated by an engaging narrative. And the ending itself feels slightly underwhelming, really the story just sort of peters out after the mid point which is frustrating.

But I do think it has some interesting aspects, I think with some more development it'd have quite a strong visual style and I think there is a lot of comedic moments in the setup. I may even decide to develop this and pitch it as my third year film.

Rat Trap

As part of my pre-production university module we have to develop a story ready for pitching as a short film in the third year. For my story I developed Rat Trap, a story about a naive rat pirate named Pokey who is abandoned on an island by the humans he thought was his crew and he has to learn a rats place in a pirates world.

This is the main character Pokey, he joined a pirate crew after wanting to escape life as a city rat surrounded by filth. He wanted to see the world but he doesn't realise he's more of a castaway than a pirate, he has deluded himself into thinking he is a valued member of the crew.

This is the antagonist, Scab. He has lived on the

 island for a while now. He was once abandoned on the island much like Pokey is now, he seems to have lost his marbles a little from being trapped so long.

Character design - Space Prince

This is a character I imagine comes from a pulpy science fiction melodrama story in the style of those from the 70's. He is an estranged Prince of a royal kingdom who has dissapeared in the wake of his father becoming fatally ill, he is the next in line for the throne other than his brother who is infamously sadistic and is only interested in starting a galactic level war with a rival kingdom.
So naturally the missing Prince is a target for many people, whether that be sympathisers of his brother who wants him permanently gone, royal soldiers, and even people who don't want his brother to be in power.
However he is hiding in a deep corner of the universe, running from his responsibility as a leader since he is not interested in leading. He is quite a selfish character, but his refusal to stand up to his role as leader also goes hand in hand with not wanting to face the fact his father will die. So he runs.

Storyboard Project - 'Extraction'

This gif is part of a larger storyboard/animatic project I've been working on about a spy who's been captured and he has to fight his way out with limited resources. This is really just a reason to practise storyboard as it's what I intend to specialise in, specifically action sequences.

It's inspired by spy thrillers like the Bourne series or the most recent series of Bond movies, as well as videogames I've played like Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid. But I also want to incorporate a sense of humour that I think those IPs lack, not explicitly comedic but it doesn't take itself so seriously. When trying to explain this I think of the climatic sequence of Blade which I love for how it finds moments of comedy in a narrative that takes its ridiculous premise so so seriously.

Some basic character design sketches, I want simple designs that are easy to draw to focus on the direction. It also has science fiction elements such as the metal visor in the first image.

I only intend to take this as far as an animatic for my portfolio, I think this takes some of the pressure off and lets me focus on the skills that I am trying to develop.

Animation evaluation - Bin kick

These are some rough keyframes I provided for a group project this term, they're a little rough but I'd like to take a look to see how I could improve.

I don't think a lot of these drawings are solid enough to be considered keyframes, even at the best of times I've left things like hands with little visual information making it more difficult for the inbetweener to know how it should look. Shifting volumes are still an issue in my animation as a whole, with body parts sometimes changing quite drastically. This becomes even more obvious when it comes to cleanup phase.

Although on a positive note I think this piece of animation has a fairly good sense of weight, I utilized anticipation and follow through to try to make this action appear more violent then kicking over a bin actually may be to better suit the narrative of the piece.

Designing for Animation (Is Hard)

Developing visual design for animation has its own very specific challenges unique to the genre, something I have discovered having recently been assigned as art director on our live brief project. My initial set of designs I thought to be most visually appealing were not suitable for animation, they only seemed to work from the few angles I had drew them from and it was difficult to imagine how they might move. My team members also voiced concerns about the amount of unnecessary detail of the characters considering the time limit we had. At the time I found this frustrating because I didn't see any issue with these designs but in retrospect they were not at all suitable and I spent too much time fighting that rather than fixing it.

So I went back to the drawing board and altered the designs to simplify the shapes and remove unnecessary details. But I think it went to far into the opposite direction and we landed on bland characterless designs. Which forced me to change how I was thinking about my design philosophy for project, although at this point it was too little too late and we had to stick with the lack luster designs.

So with that in mind I'm spending time focusing on designing characters for my third year pitch. I've been looking at the art of Andrew MacLean for inspiration, he is a comic book artist but I think his art would be perfect for animation. As you can see to the left his art style is very graphic, with geometric shapes that are easy to identify, he uses shorthand when the characters are at distant such as faces boiled down to main elements. I think his use of the lines within some characters may be excessive for animation but I've been using his designs as a point of reference when designing my own characters.







Compare his face in the image below to the own above, he doesn't depict as much detail at a distance because the necessary visual information is still conveyed just with less lines, which is a more economic approach for animation.

Naptime [Short animation]

When I made my self portrait video for school a while ago I decided I enjoyed the medium and wanted to try to push it further. So I made this video to try to see what I could do visually a bit more, I tried to utilize the medium by having a shot of a character floating across the screen made much easier to do by using pixelation. I also used after affects for two shots, a transition early on where a character runs across the foreground the next short is layered underneath coming in behind him, and a shot of the same character in some sort of drug trip looking experience. I want to keep pushing the visual effects in the videos I make because I enjoy doing it, I also want to practice practical effects in live action, like blood squibs or miniatures. I think I did a decent job with the 2d overlay animation in this video, I used it to illustrate magic spells in a slightly crude fashion but I think it animates well and works with the animation style. I think one weakness in this video is the audio editing, this is the part of the process I find most tedious and I think it shows in the quality. If I make another one of these pixelation videos, which I probably will, I want to be more ambitious with the scope of it. Longer, more creative use of pixelation and the overlay animation, etc.

'Junk Boy' - Character Development

One of the first drawings of the boy character, wasn't sure what his story was at this point so he has a very different personality here. I eventually decided I didn't want the character to be one who is actively violent or has a weapon. But I do like the energy in this drawing.

At one point the story had the boy finding some
kind of mythical sword.

This one is pretty much there in terms of
costume and hair, but far too brooding.

Early portrait of the boy trying to capture his personality as a troublemaker kid.

Another earlier drawing trying to figure out his clothes,

I ended up deciding that he wasn't 'raggedy' enough.

First digital drawing of the character, done in Flash. I think

I lost some of the energy of the character here and the drawing itself

is quite stiff but I have the costume pretty much down at this point.

These are only a select few of the development drawings of the character that seemed significant in how he changed, and are also mostly finished. I did many more trying to flesh him out and figure out details of style and features. And I still am, none of these are final designs currently.

'Junk Boy' - Film Idea Synopsis

JUNK BOY

A boy in a post apocalyptic world crashes his ship on his journey home, having neglected it's need for fuel. He ties down his ship and heads off toward the nearest town to find fuel. He finds it empty of people but luckily he finds a robot which he harvests for it's power cell. Unfortunately that was not the only robot, and a much larger gollem-like machine appears, enraged at the boy. The robot chases the boy back to his ship, he loses the power cell in the process. Now hiding in his ship, without fuel and a robot pushing the ship toward the long fall, the boy seems to have lost hope. But then he formulates a plan to tether the ship to the robot just as the ship begins to slide off the cliff, immobilizing the robot and allowing the boy to harvest the power cell of the helpless robot. He then flies away, momentarily bringing the robot with him before dropping him into the deep canyon as he flies away.