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!

The Sad Reality for Ultrafoot

I'm getting back into Ultrafoot after yet another long hiatus...

The whole problem is I want to be an animator. You know, really. I want to develop my craft. Every professional project I work on is always so rushed, budgets are small, schedules are tight, and there's always an attitude of producing work that's just good enough and moving quickly on.

I've been watching too many classic Disney films and reading too much by and about the animators of that era lately. They had the opportunity to work a character and a scene through to it's full potential. I'm finding my research into that period both exhilarating and depressing. I just don't see my freelancer lifestyle ever allowing for that same exploration of the craft.

So it occurs to me the only place I'm going to find that kind of opportunity is with side projects like Ultrafoot. Without being beholden to a budget or schedule, I'm able to try new things and put a little more effort in. The terrible down side is that any paying work that comes along must push Ultrafoot aside. There are people I know, able to pass over lucrative work in order to persue the projects they want to work on. I admire that a great deal, and I really wish I could be more like that, but that's just not me. I need to live with some comfort and security and I can hardly believe I've been able to attain as much of that as I have while doing what I love to do for a living.

And so Ultrafoot has dragged on for a year and a half so far, and it's far from finished, as you can see. In fact, eachtime I return to it after a break, I'm tempted to overhaul the whole project! I'll try not to take too many steps backward this time. I'm highly motivated to make some progress, I have no other work lined up at the moment and I have some talented people interested in helping out. Watch for updates!

Scene 3 and scene 7 with finished animation

Scenes 3 and 7 have been tweened, cleaned and painted.

Colors

Scenes 1 through 8, rough

Just a little progress update. Sorry it's a bit hard to tell what's going on sometimes with the rough animation. That's going to be a problem until things get cleaned up a bit.

Meet Ultrafoot!

This guy was definitely everybody's favorite.
He's cute. I think I was looking for something a little more "out there". Something even kind of bizarre. But this kid is definitely a lot of fun to draw!
I wanted to draw a lot more poses for you to review, but this will have to do for now. Tell me if you have any thoughts before I start animating him! (I see I forgot the lapels on his coat on one drawing, and the stripes on his tie in all cases, so any thoughts besides those)

Scenes 1 through 5 rough

I got to work doing rough animation on the early scenes without Ultrafoot in them.