Dasos: Intro Animatic Finished

 Whelp, full transparency here.... I don't like showing rough stuff like this. It goes against my artist nature of trying to impress people. BUT I said I would blog every step of the way just in case it would help others. So here it is! This is the animatic to the intro into the Dasos series. So lets' break down what I did:

The first animatic had 4 letters to Santa and it ran over 4 minutes. Way too long!

Second animatic added two animal cut away scenes to try to compensate for the length. There was a squirrel and a bunny. Still didn't really address the length.

Third animatic ditched the third letter to Santa, which was a letter read by my niece, Angela. Sorry Angie! I tried ignoring the comedy rule of three's but they wrote that rule for a reason!

Fourth animatic cut out a good half of the long letter to Santa. It was painful to cut out so much of my brilliantly written (and recorded) Dickensian era ominous letter to Santa, but it cut the final intro down nicely and made everything nice and tight. I also re-recorded all of my dialogue to get the shortened letter, but also address some low quality on all of SDS' lines.

The version you can watch above is what I call Animatic4.2. This version simply ads some more frames of character expressions and reactions. I'm still not pleased with how SDS sounds almost exactly like the reader of the long letter. I could re-record and keep screwing with it, but I'd rather move on.

Stop Motion: Animatic

   Now that the PBY is out of the way, I can concentrate on the stopmotion project. I drew out all the frames for the intro animatic and today I'll be recording the last bit of dialogue for it.  

So the order of work is: Storyboard, Script, Animatic. 

In parallel to that it's: Character design, fabrication, set design, fabrication.

     This seems to be how I've been doing things. Since the intro is parody of an existing thing, creating the 'story' to the intro is easy. I can just watch the Rankin-Bass movie intro and make my own custom changes. Mine is very different but borrows heavily. In the Rankin-Bass movie, Fred Astaire's character is named Special Delivery Kruger or 'SD for short'. My characters name is Special Delivery Stuckey. 'SDS' doesn't dance, has no Postal snow mobile and doesn't talk to animals or the mail as in the movie. He talks directly to the viewer. The whole premise is that he's the unfortunate loser who deliver's letters to Santa the day AFTER Christmas, when kids just want to complain about everything. The joke of the whole thing is that the fourth letter is an adult who has been stalking Santa for years and finally has him right where he wants him and writes a lengthy Dickensian letter saying as much. This intro intentionally has nothing to do with the story of Dasos. That's the second overall joke. I intend to have a series of Dasos animations hosted by SDS. As the series goes on, we get to see all the weird habits and problems of SDS as we learn more about Dasos.
     I haven't worked out the Dasos story yet. It's REALLY hard coming up with a good story line out of nowhere. I guess it's more accurate to say coming up with story lines is easy, it's committing to one that's hard. 

PBY Finished!!!!!!

  I'm posting this late. I actually finished the PBY before my deadline of 6/18/18. With family visiting (the reason for the deadline) I put off posting anything until now. 

I greatly enjoyed seeing this project through to completion. I'm glad I accepted the challenge to put rivets on her. They really add another level of dimension to this project. Figuring out the circuit to let the 4 lights work off one power source is great too! The first photo above shows the breadboard configuration allowing this to work. 

I'm going to take better photos. These photos are HORRIBLE. I love the lighting in my garage, but I have a spotlight right on the PBY. In person, it's great. But to an iphone camera it's difficult.