CG?

At this point in the project I had already decided on what type of animation style I was going to use. The style I had chosen on was CGI or 3D animation. The reason I wanted to go with this particular type of animation was mostly because I had a knack for it.  I was very much like a duck takes to water, as some would say although, not to say that I didn’t consider other types of animation as possibilities.

There was definitely hand draw animation, or as some people call it traditional animation. There was also Flash animation, which had become very popular in the last couple of years. Also, there was stop-motion that is very popular with Tim Burton animated films, and many others. The problem was that none of the other types of animation seemed right to me. Looking back on it now, it would of been a lot easier if I had drawn the whole animation out.  But I wouldn’t hear of it, this had to be CG. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and even up to this point I have not regretted it, not one bit.

I started work on the main character, the fairy. There were several things I wanted to do with this fairy. The first was to attach the wings to the body of the fairy. In most films the fairy’s wings are not really attached, it is more like someone just glued them on to her back. I wanted to give my fairy wings that looked as if they were growing out of her body. That there are really apart of her and not just something that was put on at the last moment.

The Second was to give her hair.  On a lot of CG characters, they don’t really have hair on their heads; it’s more like they’re wearing a helmet that is made to look like it. The reason why someone would make hair like that is mostly because, it uses up a lot of memory and takes longer to render. There are also all these other little problems with hair that I can go into but I’ll save that for another time and post. But knowing all this I still want to put hair on this character and I was going to.

The Third thing I want to give this character is a loincloth. I thought this would be a good idea, because it would give this character an outdoor look as well as tell the viewer that she is part of nature and, nature plays a big part in her life. Now unlike hair this was not that big of a deal as it was with the hair. It just meant I was giving an object a cloth attribute. For those of you who are lost and don’t understand what I’m talking about, is making an object in the computer behave like a peace of fabric. The only problem with “cloth” is what I would have to keep in mind when designing the character, namely the parts that I wanted to have the cloth attribute on. I will talk more on this in another post as well.

These were the three big things I want to do in this project at this time, others would come and be added but at this time this is what I was focused on. I started work on a muck fairy as you may call it. I wanted to improve on my current fairy design and make her look more realistic. This would mean that I was going to have to redesign her, but I was going to do that any way since all I really had at the time was the first fairy character design and a comic drawing I did. The CG fairy I was making at this time was not going to be the fairy I would use, she was more of a test run to solve at list one of the problems I had.  I worked on her for the rest of the semester both modeling and rigging the character. Eventually making a short 9 second animation that I called “Fairy Fly” Which you can view below.

Thanks to this I was able to work out how to build my fairy, and what I need to do to make the way I was envisioned it. As well as some new idea that made me wanted to explore this character. 

The Next Step

I decided that I could kill two birds with one stone. I was thinking I might have something with this ninja fairy.  A fairy that didn’t really use magic but used martial art skills to survive sounded like, an interesting idea that was worth doing some investigating into.  So I decided to incorporate my schoolwork with the research I was doing. That way I was getting my class work done, and looking into making this fairy more then just a typical fairy.  I know with the following semester I would begin my senior film project, and a lot of people where already starting to think up ideas of what they where going to do for it.  I figured that my fairy idea would be a good project to work on as a senior project, but I needed to see if I could get a story that was doable

I needed a story that would make the fairy look heroic. There are basically two ways to make a heroic scene. Stopping an environmental problem or dealing with a villain.  In an environmental problem, the hero must deal with their surrounding that is causing the problem, and that can be anything.  The second is a villain and that is self-explanatory, like for example (someone comes along and starts causing problems and the hero must stop them), something like that. In every heroic tale the hero must save something or someone or both, or just go on some sort of quest, you are always going to find something like that.

The decision that I would have to make would decide the problems I would have to deal with down the line. Now, I don’t like going down the easy route, and most people like to have it easy. Frankly I’m not one of them, I’m one of those people that like taking on the more difficult tasks. I’m not someone that runs from a challenge, especially for what I had in mind for this project. All my skills would be put to the test and I wanted to live up to the challenge, and taking on difficult challenges in the arts is part of the job.  With the art industry and especially in the animation business you need to take on the toughest of challenges.

The decisions I made was not as difficult as one would think, I went with a villain and I had the perfect villain in mind to go up against my fairy. This is something so despised that some men guard there front or back door picking the monsters off with there gun. This beast doesn’t care about your property or personal belongings.  It is more then willing to mess up your yard and do what ever it wants to it.  Both cats and dogs hate this creature and will kill it if they get the chance, because it aggravates them so much.  The creature I speak of that would be the perfect villain is none other then a: SQUIRREL.

Ok at this point you are laughing uncontrollably so please calm down and let me explain.

I picked a squirrel for quite a few reasons. One of those reason was from my own personal experiences with them, and yes I’m not a big fan, and it borders on the line of sheer hate for the animal. The reason I dislike this animal is because I don’t appreciate having nuts thrown at me. Now if you live in an area and there are lots of trees, that have nuts or fruit and you are walking under them. You have to expect to get hit every now and then if you walk under those kinds of trees.  But if you are in an area where the nearest nut tree is a good fifty yards away, and you are just minding your own business, and you feel something hit your head, and you see one of those little tree rats when you look up.  Well then it’s a hole other ball game. If you try climbing the tree they run over to the next one over. In the end you end up getting stuck in a tree getting advice from some 10 year olds on how to get down. You can’t throw anything at them because they’re just too small and to fast. The only other option that is left to you is shooting them, and in some states that is illegal.  But other then my own personal feeling, I have done some research into squirrels, and what I dug up just made the idea for a squirrel as a villain that much stronger.

Now when most people think of a squirrel especially if it is for a cartoon, they think cute little woodland creature that is perfectly harmless, in reality it isn’t. Now eating nuts and berries that is all true and most people know that. What isn’t as known is that if there is not enough food they will eat meat mostly insect or the left over’s from a bigger animals meal. They are also known to raid the nests of birds and destroy the eggs or even kill the baby birds. Some small animals like mice, will be bullied to leave their habitat or even be killed. Squirrels can cause a lot of property damage, everything from digging up seeds in your garden and braking into bird feeders, to braking into your own home and making a nest in the walls. All in all squirrels can be nasty little bustards and I’ve not even covered the diseases that they can carry.

I started doing drawings to make sure I got the squirrels body right. This was the next step to making the story work. The drawing below is an example of some of the research I was doing into making the squirrels shape just rite.

I started working on a comic strip to get the idea of the story down on paper. This was going to help me in taking that story to that next level. As seen in the comic the squirrel is attacking a small fairy child in a tree adjacent to the tree where the adult fairy is watching. This same fairy comes to the rescue of the smaller one removing her from danger and flying off.

This was a good start to the animation even thou it is only two pages long. In order to make this animation work I needed to build on this.  This was a good start and there was a lot to build on. I’ll continue more on the progress of this film in my next post where I’ll go into what kind of media I was going to make this film in.

The Beginning

I have been trying to think of how to start this blog, so I just thought I should start at the beginning, of where I got the idea to make this film. The idea for this film started back in February 2009, I was assigned a homework assignment to create a cartoon character and to show 5 views of the character. A front view, a quarter turn to the side view, a side view, a quarter turn to the back view, and finally a back view. Basically it made it look as if the character was turning. At this time I was brain storming, just trying to think of a character that would be interesting to draw. I wanted my character to have a humanoid appearance, whether or not it had an animal’s head or tail, didn’t matter to me I just wanted it to be interesting.

At the same time my little sister come across a bunch of youtube videos of A Tinkerbelle Movie. The movie was on youtube, about two weeks before the release date. The reason I know this, is because she was pointed this out. This made me wonder whose head’s were going to roll for this. Because it wasn’t just a few minutes it was the whole damn film itself. I thought it would be good to watch a little bit, before Disney tore it down like I know I would if things where reversed. I sat down and watch a little bit of the film. As I watched the film I noticed that this was mainly for girls, like you aren’t going to get a lot of boys to watch this kind of cartoon. It made me start to think and do a little background research into fairy pictures and animations.

As I looked and studied both the pictures and animation I noticed that no one really did anything to make the fairies that interesting.  The most that anyone would do with a fairy is make them look cute or sexy.  In a lot of the pictures that I found they seemed, posed with these huge elaborate wings, either flying around or just sitting looking pretty. The animation I looked at where even worse, most of them showed fairies dancing around like ballerinas or doing something on the girly side, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just when you have something and everyone is making it the same way, it gets kind of boring. And with fairies they have been mostly background characters. Helping a hero on a quest, and most often made to look pretty.  And if a fairy is made the main character they don’t really take her out of that girl persona and to make it that she is a force to be reckoned with they give her magical powers to compensate for her size.

This got me thinking, why do fairies have to be that way? Can’t they be a little more of a tomboy or get a little dirty? So I decided for my homework assignment that I would make my own version of a fairy and see if I could do anything with it. I would explore this idea and see where it would take me. 

This is the first concept drawing that I came up with, I tried to draw her with a little bit of an attitude and show she is a bit of a tomboy. I tried to make her less of the typical fairy but more like her own person. I didn’t want to follow the same lines that everyone else seems to follow when they think of fairies. My train of thought was also on how much people incorporate magic into fairies. Especially when the fairy is the main character – they usually have a lot of magic. Therefore my train of thought was “if she didn’t have magic, she would have to have something else to compensate for it.” With toads being the size of VW Beatles and animals being the size of skyscrapers she would need a way to defend herself other then just flying. Hence why I added in the word “ninja”.

The reason I named the fairy Dust was because it seemed like a good neutral name. It has all the aspects that a lot of people see in fairies but it also showed that she was a bit on the tough side. A lot of the typical things I kept with her were the wings and her supermodel body type. My reasoning for doing this was mostly for the people who already followed fairies and have a bit of an attraction for them. I wanted to make sure that this would also attract those people but not make them stir away from the character. I wanted this character to be more of an evolution of fairies more than anything. And with people who don’t follow fairies she would still LOOK the part of the stereotypical fairy.

I’ll continue this on my next blog entry as well as introduce more images along with some of the evolution of this project.