Let's Get Rolling!

If you're just stumbling across this blog, I want to explain that from this point on it will mainly be used as a communication tool between the director (me) and the other contributors (animators, animation assistants, background painters, etc., all working off site, and all selflessly volunteering their efforts!)

I can also tell you I may occasionally reference our previous project, Ruby Rocket, Private Detective, which you can learn about here: http://rubyrocketpi.blogspot.com/2008/02/about-ruby-rocket.html

And so...to my colleagues:
Many things about or collaboration on this project are going to be the same as they were on Ruby, but some things will be different too.

Same:

• I intend to use the same production pipeline; animation, clean up, and paint done directly in Flash, (Illustrator may be more appropriate for clean up if we can work it smoothly into the pipeline) backgrounds in Photoshop, compositing in After Effects. (As before, you're welcome to introduce whatever tools you'd like to use to complete your tasks, but I think everyone's pretty comfortable with that process.)
• I'll break the project into individual scenes to hand out for animation, clean up or painting.
• We'll transfer files back and forth to each other over the same FTP site.
  

Different:

• The style of Ultrafoot is different than Ruby. The style of the animation is looser, squishier, crazier, but at the same time the drawings themselves are cleaner, tighter, not so rough or sketchy. The clean up line will be a relatively thick, black brush line.
• The cartoonier style may allow for more effective use of Flash symbols to get some traditional cartoony bounciness in an efficient Flash like way. (More about this later)
• There's more time to be properly deliberate about things. With Ruby, there was supposed to be a step between storyboard and animation called layout, but it had to be skipped. As a result, the animators and background artists had to interpret my intentions with very little informatioin to go on. Mostly it worked out, but often it really did not!
  
• Retakes! We'll see if I have the nerve for it as we progress, but right now my feeling is I really want to see what we can do, not what we can do easily or quickly. For the most part because of Ruby's tight schedule, I felt I had to accept what was turned in and move on or handle any fixes myself (with some exceptions of course). Some of the scenes that look complete in the current build need to be redone, and I'll discuss why.
• I won't get to work as hard! Here I am saying how much more deliberate I want to be with Ultrafoot than I was on Ruby, but I'll only have a fraction of the hours to devote to it. I was working on Ruby 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now my wife is our primary breadwinner and I'm generally playing Mr. Mom to our 3 year old son (cool kid, bad career move!) I'll probably get to work about 20 hours a week on Ultrafoot.
  

So as I collect my thoughts and determine a plan for how to proceed (and do website maintenance, and enter receipts, and hang curtains, and a billion other things I've been neglecting...) I've asked you to dive into the animatic with the intention of adding gags, sprucing the thing up and generally giving a fresh perspective to the project.

Temris Ridge remains the Queen of the Immediate Assignment Turnaround! Two hours after my request, she turned in this...

She spruced up the segment where Ultrafoot is being adored by the cheering throng, and added a funny gag to the ending. What do you guys think of the end? I like it, but I've also been looking forward to animating Ultrafoot dancing to that weird beat-box ending of the song. Temris' suggestion is more narative whereas mine is no more than a fun bit of (possibly gratuitous) animation. You don't much of an impression from the hideous storyboard, but my intention is that it'll be really fun to watch him dance.

More soon!