Animatic and layouts

 Been reworking my animatic quite hard recently, revisiting some of the shots and working out long pans. I've decided that I'm going to follow them quite closely to create my background designs so that it is less work when it comes to it and I don't have to spend to much time working out the layout.

 Here you can see that I've started working straight on top of an animatic screen shot in photoshop to paint the scene.

It seems to be working quite well and I'm  only making minor changes to the layout so that it reads better. This is probably going to be one of the largest painting of the film. The way I see it is, If I have large background paintings for the film then I won't have to animate as much and I can fill the script with some nice visuals too. I've definite got my work cut out - painting is quite a slow process but I'm hoping to get quicker at it.

New angles

New take on the designs - I've been breaking down my characters into basic shapes to see if I can make the very distinguishable from each other whilst still maintaining the fact that they are brothers.

  

This is nearly there but Ben looks like a bit of a star fish at times.  My loose line work follows the guides a bit to strictly and I think I want to meet these designs half way.  I want to be able to draw these guys intuitively and doing these break downs is helping me get there.

I'm also considering volumes more now, which will also help with consistency.  They're jaw lines are different now too and is helping them look less similar.

Spot the difference

These are some character expression sketch sheets that I've been reviewing. I thought I was getting a bit better at drawing their hair and was starting to simply the forms. I showed my class mate Mahmoud and he has suggested breaking down the hair into basic forms to give it a rule to bare in my when drawing. 

He was also surprised to hear me say that they were different characters - He said he thought they both looked too alike and that I should work on the design some more. It's true though, right now the only major difference in their appearances is their hair.

Mahmoud has been telling me about how he use to draw Aladdin from the Disney film for fun and said that his hair had a basic silhouette.

 With this in mind I'm going to try and really finalise the look of these guys now

Bad Hair Day

Been recently spending a lot of time refining and developing character designs for Ben and George. After being told that my characters look a little bit too old i've been trying to simplify their features and remove any lines that might be aging the  characters. 

I've started squashing the features by bringing the chin and mouth up more, this seems to be helping to define their ages. I'm also trying to simplify the way they're drawn so that they are easier to draw and are not too overly detailed for animation and to animate.  

I'm also having trouble drawing the hair of the characters consistently, it seems to always look different and it's becoming a problem.