Animatic & Project Progress

I've done quite a bit of work on the project since my last post so this is likely going to be a long entry. First off I completed and final draft of my storyboard and then further developed it to produce the animatic for my piece which you can watch below.

It's longer than I expected it to be, luckily around 40 seconds of this is made up of narration or sections which don't include animation. I intend to keep the section I have text and illustrations in, and maybe get someone to read the narration for the final version. Aside from that this pretty much shows what I want the animation to look like.

After giving it some consideration, I've also decided to produce the animation in black and white. It seems to suit the piece well in the animatic, and as its got a creepy, dark element to it I think it'll work. 

This is the moodboard I produced at the start of my research, which gathers together stills from my favourite animations, all of them with that dark edge... guess that shows my personal taste :P 

So my short is likely going to resemble Tim Burton's short Vincent, in the fact that it will be done in these tones, hopefully with some good lighting, but I'm also aiming for it to be cute and appealing too, with the style of the characters and set. Think it's well on its way!

Here's the model of my creature, which is now being rigged:

And also some more designs for Pandora:

I'm currently in the process of modelling her, which I'd like to have done asap so I can get her rigged ready to animate

Speaking of Time Burton earlier, I'm also going to look into compositing at a later stage and experiment with some techniques to give the animation a 'stop motion' feel to see how that works. I think it could potentially work quite well so we shall see. I'm also going to need to use After Effects to make the creature's morph into Pandora work. So I'll need to do some research while I'm in the production stage.

I've also set up a basic model for my Dark Arm which I've successfully rigged and tested:

Originally I had intended to have this to be a tentacle of darkness but after doing numerous tests trying to make it work as a tentacle, which proved to be rather complicated, I decided why not make it just a simple giant arm? So that's what I did! I rigged it with IK, set up the controls and Voila! It seems to work just fine for what I require of it and it's a lot easier to control than a tentacle so it was definately a good call!

So this is where I am at the moment. My priority at the moment is to get Pandora modelled and rigged and finish the creature rig then test them both and go from there!