Sealy Animatic

Sealy movie poster

Here's my little movie poster, based on the sketch I posted earlier. I drew the objects in pencil, vectorized and did basic coloring and gradient fills in illustrator, then composted in Photoshop.

The SEALY logo is the scanned design is from my mother's book cover, the entire poster design was also inspired by my mother's illustrations in her book. Thanks mom! =)

And just wait till you hear the Sealy theme song, my dad wrote it for me to complement the book in 1985. I wanted to be an animator since I was a kid, so we always talked about how cool it would be to animate Sealy. My dad would play the song all the time for me, that was my favorite thing. So this has been 25 years in the making... and a family project!

more 'Sealy' model sheets

Since I have my Michy and Sealy characters pretty much figured out, I decided to concentrate on developing these characters from my script. They aren't set in stone yet I may need to revise them again.

Kumu Tutu:

Mrs. Ishy:

Concept drawings:

316 Final animation – well almost final

Click here for swimming animation

This needs some more work of course… there are some problems with it still, like it would be better if I put in a few moving holds in a few places to give more thought processing time, I also need to take longer on the head turn.

More Swim progress

Click here

Worked on the surfacing shot… the underwater stuff isn’t different yet. Working on that…

Story idea for next semester

Sealy: A short film about a little girl named Michy who doesn't fit into the usual classroom mold, and finds her own way of learning through her "imaginary" friend Sealy.

I will be using the swim sequence I'm working on now in it, as well as attempting many other fun things like surfing... this is adapted from a children's book my mom wrote and illustrated me in 1985.

More blocking ideas

I'm working on getting a connection down with Michy and Sealy... I think I may cut to a close up or different camera angle to show emotion in their faces... and/or have a shot of them surfacing above the water. I'm still undecided....

 

Maqette - Michy

Well I had to tilt her up for balancing purposes, I may need to drill a new hole so and move her to get closer to the position in the drawing. I also have smooth it out more and finish hands & feet.

 

Studies or final animation

Here are some studies I've been doing, the character turn around sheets and stuff lower I've been drawing through the semester so far. I do need to do new turn around for the girl character, she needs to be simplified. The movement studies are recent, I've been swimming a lot trying to get a better feel for the movement. I have my keyframes drawn and will be posting them shortly =)

Remote Power

11 sec - Remote Power v3 (not finished!!!)

Well I had not enough time to accomplish the last 15 drawings I gotta do. And I’m seeing things I need to fix. Like his shoulders when he says Jelly, I think what I was trying to do goes by to fast and i should ditch the movement. And perfecting the lip sync… been looking at it to long that will require fresh eyeballs!

Run Away!

Run away, run away!

Hehe.  This chase scene was created running around the art building at UHM. When I was working on this I ran into Hapi drawing the stairs, she was wearing a striped sweater that when I drew her it was reminiscent of Freddy Cruger. So I imagined she got a knife and chased me to the elevator... as I glanced back in horror... ah but I wasn't fast enough! Damn slow art building elevator!

Remote Power Appearance Test

So I was racking my brain to come up with a cool but efficient way of getting the dark film nor look I wanted. So I did a test on one of my screen shots, it’s grainy but I may get away with it because it makes the image look old.

Here’s what I did:

I used the smart sharpen filter in photoshop to make the lines pop more. Then I used a curves layer to darken up the image, I used a mask on the curves layer so his hand, face and shirt would be light. I’m going to tweak this some more, maybe make his face lighter. But it should work, I can drag the curves layer onto each frame and do a quick mask on each frame. I also saved the sharpen settings so I think i can automate that in a batch process on each frame.

This is plan B. Plan A was to scan in each image and to an alpha channel in photoshop & premire. So this is the plan if I don’t have time for plan A. Gotta have a backup plan to meet that deadline!

Change of Expression

I re-did my story board biased on these drawings:

 

So I'm going for 3 diff shots in this story:

Shot 1:
Sindi walks in (Grumpy because she's at work); the toolbox handle flips up on it's own
Sindi walks up to toolbox; toolbox snaps open up on their own
Sindi is shocked! Did she really just see that?

Shot 2:
Sindi contemplates the box, disbelieving what just happened 
Sindi is curious, gently pokes the lid of the box
The box opens up and REALLY loud screaming noise comes out
startling Sindi.
The sound dies down.

Shot 3:

Sindi is dazed, then she looks inside the tool box
She sees the tool box is full of make up instead of tools
Sindi is stoaked!

 

Anyway these are 3 different emotion changes to portray

So I finished a rough of the second shot - change from curious to shocked. I figure I'd upload this for now to show progress.

I have keyframed the other two, and have the box movement for shot 01. I'm working on those tonight.

Shot 2 ROUGH - quicktime move 

And since I'm not sure if I handled that UH SFTP thing correctly - I had to get my husband to help me with it because I'm a retard with technical crap like that. So here's a youtube backup: