The basic idea behind it is that there is a man sitting in a coffee shop looking around him. He spots a guy sitting across from him who it staring at the waitress working in the shop. He is besotted and can't take his eyes off her. But she barely notices him. Taking out a sketchpad, he draws the two, the guy first, signing the picture at the bottom. Then the girl, also signing this picture. As he does, the girl looks up, finally noticing the guy and their eyes meet.
He goes home and takes the pictures, pinning them side by side on a wall. The camera begins to zoom out, revealing many drawings of couples on a huge wall. Back at the coffee shop, the couple are holding hands. He smiles and walks off past the
shop.
It doesn't sound as great quickly written down as it does in my head but I'll upload a short narrative I wrote about it which will make a lot more sense.
Anyway, I've so far modelled, textured and added lighting to the main cafe scene which is looking pretty good now. I haven't been taught any modelling/texturing/lighting at uni so it was a bit of a struggle at first but with some pointers and some googling I managed to get the atmosphere I wanted in the room. Here is what the final (unless I decide to change it again) product looks like:
It's probably not that great in the embedded image so click to get a better look :)
Anyway, I've started working on modelling my characters too, which has been a lot more difficult. As it turns out, organic modelling is much harder than modelling the contents of a cafe.
I've almost finished the waitress character in my story and that seems to be coming along pretty well, the main problem now being the attaching of her head and I still need to model her hands.
This would be the headless (but finally clothed) waitress:
And here is her head in the scene too so far (hair still intextured and I think i'll change the eyes):
Overall, the speed I'm working at is keeping me on schedule so I don't really need to worry at the moment. I really can't wait to get to the actual animation, but first I'll have to battle my way through rigging.... but that's for another blog post.
In other not so boring news I saw Tangled today! It was a great movie (as expected) and I waited right to the end to see the animators, it's the least I could do to recognise all their hard work. A few names I recognised like animation supervisor Clay Kaytis, who does the Animation Podcast I love so much. And the other much more obvious one was the brilliant John Lasseter. Overall, the film really brought together that classic Disney love story and adventure with the modern comedy that we love from films like Shrek. It had enough so that the parents (who aren't the biggest fans of animation) wouldn't get bored and it was sort of nostalgic with a few of the clichés that have to be in a Disney movie.
Oh, and not to forget that the voice acting was brilliant. I wasn't expecting too much from the cast as they are all live action actors and many of them haven't really ventured into the voice acting field previously, but they were all great. Mandy Moore made a great Rapunzel with loads of character, Donna Murphy as her "mother" jumped back and forth from funny to dark perfectly but the star of the movie has to be Zachary Levi. The star of Chuck played the main character Flynn Rider and was also the Narrator. He was really funny and clearly has a personality made for voice acting. Plus the singing came out of nowhere, he was a surprisingly good singer!
Basically, another great film under the belt for Disney and I'm looking forward to the next one as always.
That's all for me today, I should have some more news tomorrow, but most likely it will be about the hours I'll be spending trying to make these character models look presentable.
