Concept Art Gallery

I've added a concept art gallery to my website. At the moment only the two images in the previous post have been put up, but at least the structure is there to easily add more images. Again, I've gone for a pure CSS approach with no JavaScript and again I have built on ideas from Stu Nicholl's site cssplay.co.uk (a great resource).

Now I need more concept art to put in the gallery. I need to learn how to draw horses soon (at least Kelpies that look like horses).

I have this idea that as the Kelpie entangles his victim that a thin tracery of green light will appear on its skin, making arcane patterns on the beast. The eyes should also begin to glow green. Hmm, that might just work if I can pull it off.

Learning To Draw Again

That's the best way I can describe it. I'm trying to use a Wacom (Graphire 4 6x8) tablet to do some concept art for my short. I'm finding at a bit of a struggle, to tell the truth. I must try to wean myself off pencils and pastels.

I decided to try and visualize the heroine of my short (we'll just call her the girl - because I haven't thought of a name for her yet). This is her when she has grown up (in scene 2 of 2). She is wearing an iron age style dress tied at the waist. I was thinking of making my figures much more stylized but she seems to have become a bit more realistic.

Both of these preliminary sketches are done using Photoshop CS2. This first one is a full body shot from the front.




I've also drawn a more detailed version of her face.

2nd Assignment In

Well I finally emailed my story to the tutor (Zak). I don't know why I hesitated, it's been finished for at least a month. I just had to go over it and think again about the motivations of all the characters.

The girl who's the central character is quite complex. We see her helping an injured man, a stranger, so she's caring and sensitive despite possible dangers. In her village she is quite privileged (the daughter of the head man) but she is hard working, intelligent and learning her mother's skill as a healer. In primitive societies healers were often regarded with suspicion, despite their useful skills.

When we see her grown up, she is engaged to a young man she despises: a local chieftain's son. The local chieftain is more powerful than the girl's father and she is obviously torn between pleasing her father who she loves and admires; this marriage will give him more prestige; contrary to this is the fact that she can't stand her fiance. She is reluctantly going along with her father's wishes, but after their betrothal he has been trying to force himself upon her. His arrogance and his urge to make her submissive completely clash with her independent spirit. In fact, I would probably call her a free spirit.

It is a good bet to think also that her encounter with the young man washed up on the loch shore has had a lasting effect on her. She frequently remembers her encounter with him and how he disappeared out of her life. Maybe she even harbours a little crush for him. She would have speculated on what happened to him and maybe made some guesses as to his true origin. She may even have returned to the spot on the water side where he had washed ashore in the hope he might turn up again. She would speculate about if they met again, would he remember her, would he be grateful, was he married, etc? When the fight with her potential husband started, maybe something inside her told her to return to that very place on the loch side where she had found the mysterious young man.

The chieftain's son is drawn as a fairly unattractive character but the audience should probably feel a little sorry for him when he meets his untimely end. He is obviously spoiled, being the chieftain's son; the nearest thing to a king in this time. He is shocked and outraged that this girl should be anything less than honoured to be his wife; he has probably been chased by many an ambitious young lady seeking status and wealth: a situation which he has been only too happy to take advantage of. Apart from the fact that his bride-to-be is rather pretty he is mainly getting married because his father wishes to extend his influence into this area. She is a bit of a challenge to him; he is determined he'll marry her and have some children and keep his father happy until he succeeds his father when the old man dies.

What about the Kelpie? He was grateful for the help he got from the girl. Although he had seen her from a distance several times, standing on the water's edge, he had not appeared to her. He did not want to alarm her or harm her in any way. However, when he sees the chieftain's son strike her and make to hit her again he intervenes in the only way he knows how.

In the end I think the viewer will be slightly chilled by the girl's reaction, as we often are by folktales. There is often a very harsh conclusion to these stories.

We'll see what Zak thinks of it soon.

2nd Assignment

Well, the next assignment deadline has been announced. By next Monday morning we have to have the final version of the story emailed to the tutor (Zak).

I've already written my story and thought it was finished, but I'm hesitating to send it in right away. People have said nice things about the story, but now I have to be sure. I'm going to do some more analysis of the story over the next couple of days and just check that it's alright before I finally post it in.

I can't hesitate too long though. I've got tons of things to do. I really need to watch the ZBrush videos again - I'm struggling to do anything useful with that software. There's also a script and storyboards to worry about.

You can read the story on my website at
http://adp.3dbuzz.com/murmeltier/preprod/story.html

Any comments at all would be appreciated. Sometimes, I get the impression that I'm only talking to myself on this blog, because no one has left any comments yet, but I live in hope.

Website Uploaded to Server

Well I've turned in my first assignment - the website. You can find it at http://adp.3dbuzz.com/murmeltier.

I'm not totally happy with it but hopefully it will evolve along with the project. The only pages that have any content at the moment are the Home page, the Story page and the About Me page. I found it really hard to think what to write for my bio/resumé.

I really need to add some kind of gallery facility into some of the pages. Hopefully, this shouldn't be too difficult.

It strikes me that developing web pages would be a whole lot easier if Microsoft didn't exist. I really hate how they have just completely ignored web standards when implementing their browsers.

Website Coming Together

We been given our first deadline for the class; 1st November 2007 - we have to have our websites uploaded onto the server. So what are my chances of making the deadline? Obviously we don't have to have the whole thing populated, but the structure has to be there.

So far, I've finished the "Home" page and the "Story" page. That's only another 19 or so pages to go :-). I've created empty placeholder pages for all the other pages. So the full site structure is there. I should be able to knock up something for the "About Me" pages (Bio, Resume and Contact Info) fairly quickly and the rest will be empty. Since we're still on the pre-production phase none of the production or post-production pages will have any content yet.

I've tried to structure the site so that you can go to any of the pages from anywhere else. The navigation bar appears on all pages. The nav bar has sub-menus which roll-out when you roll over them. I felt that it was important to make this a CSS only menu, in case anyone has JavaScript switched off in their browser. This was good in theory, but much harder in practice. My knowledge of CSS was fairly basic and I would have struggled without the help of the examples at cssplay.co.uk (thank you Stu Nicholls - I must get round to making a donation).

The Home page is working ok. Although, sometimes it loads slowly due to the newsfeed coming from my blog. I must investigate ways of speeding this up, if at all possible. If anyone has JavaScript switched off in the browser, they are met with a message which supplies a link to the blog.

I need to tackle the pages that will effectively be image galleries. I have a structure in mind for these but I need to try it out tomorrow.

Also we have some introductory videos on ZBrush which I need to get around to watching soon. Zak (the main class tutor) made an interesting comment about ZBrush being good for concept art - I had been planning on pencil and paper, but who knows - better watch them soon.

Updated Web Page Design

Here is the latest version of the website design. I've reduced the width of the page to allow for viewing on a 1024 pixel wide display.

I plan to make this into a real web page this weekend.

Other jobs to be tackled urgently:

1. Make a plan/schedule for the short
2. Turn the story into a script
3. Start working on developing the visual look of the film

My Maya 2008 activation code still hasn't arrived, despite me emailing my activation request on Monday (15th Oct) evening - the online activation just wouldn't work for me. Autodesk managed to mess it up, so I can't get going with that until they email me with my activation code. They blamed it on a "change of database", but it's ok because they've escalated it as a problem. Hmm, we'll see ...