Another updated beach background

This is the background that comes straight after the other beach one, where we see and meet the first marshmallow. As before, it was made a long time ago, so I have updated it just how I did with the backgrounds in the post underneath.

Here's the old version:

And this is the new updated version:

I pretty much did the same as the other beach background, so once again I replaced the sea texture, changed the colours of the trees and the sand, and added lighting and shadows.

New and updated island and beach backgrounds

We've had both of these backgrounds for some time now, since well before the Christmas holiday, but they both needed quite a bit of work to update them and make them match how my new backgrounds look.

These are the two backgrounds as they were before:

The second one especially needed changes as it looked a little flat and didn't have the depth I want, with a space our characters could move in. It was also too dark, and looked different to the vibrant and colourful village backgrounds.


And these are the two backgrounds updated with my changes:

My first aim was to give the background more depth. I first decided to change the sky so it curved more, rather than being straight on as before which made it look flat. I thought it was also a good idea to change the waves to clouds, and now it looks as if they're encircling the island (along with the two close-up clouds I added). The other major change I made was lighting and shadows, as the older version had neither. It just helps to place things more in the background, such as how the clouds now look more like they're 3D and floating in the sky because of their shadows. I also made a couple of other small changes, by making the island lighter in colour, and switching the sky around so now it's darker on top rather than on the bottom. I did this because Kathy told me that colours get lighter in colour the further away they are.

 

 This background practically had a major overhaul, with just the layout itself staying the same. I immediately wanted to change the sand, as it had too much shadow and was overall too dark; I just couldn't imagine our characters walking on it. So I made it much lighter in colour to match the island in the first background. I felt something was needed though, a shadow of some sort to help create space, and in the end I just decided to have a simple one at the back which just helps in creating a foreground and background with the beach. As I did with the trees in my cake house background, I made the trees lighter in colour the further away they got from the front. This not only helps to define each tree, but also to further enhance that depth which is so crucial. The sea underwent a change too, simply by changing the texture to a different one which was lighter in colour and felt more 3D (the waves get smaller the further away it gets). Then, as with the other background, I switched the sky around so it's lighter the further away it gets, and I added shadows for the clouds.

 

Overall I'm pleased with how they look and feel they are much better suited to the new direction I'm heading in with backgrounds.

The Schedules

 The group schedule:

 These are the individual schedules I made for each of us:

Final Script

Candy Island

Screenplay by:

Perry Hall and Jayce Cowley Liminton

EXT. ISLAND FULL - DAY

A beautiful island sits in the ocean, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with a huge volcano planted in the centre. A plane flies close up into view, which is carrying two pilots. They are Ande and Mozbie. Ande, who is wrestling with the controls,  is blue green in colour and wears a purple scarf. He is the leader of the two, the one with the brains; he's calm, cool and collected... until something goes wrong that is. Mozbie, who has his face pressed up against the glass window, is red in colour, and wears an orange cape. He is dim-witted, simple minded and oblivious to any situation. He is constantly happy, and loves food. The plane, with smoke coming out of the engine, makes a turn towards the island as it descends.

CUT TO

EXT. BEACH

The plane crashes onto the beach. Mozbie comes running out of the wreckage set on fire as he wails and flaps his arms frantically, whilst Ande calmly parachutes down until he lands on the sand. Ande walks off and brings back a bucket full of water and sits it down in front of him. He then counts the time on an imaginary watch until Mozbie eventually dives headfirst into the bucket.

CUT TO

EXT. BEACH/FOREST EDGE

Someone mysterious is watching through binoculars.

CUT TO

EXT. BEACH

After dousing himself with the water, Mozbie is no longer on fire. But he has now melted down into a of slime. Ande walks off towards the forest, with Mozbie following. They suddenly stop in shock. Mozbie pops up back into his normal form.

CUT TO

EXT. BEACH/FOREST EDGE

A marshmallow, which appears to be very camp in nature, stands in front of them holding the pair of binoculars. It greets them with happiness and shakes their hands with excitement. It then gestures towards the forest in the centre of the island, so Ande and Mozbie follow it and run into the forest. The volcano in the distance farts.

TITLE

CUT TO

EXT. FOREST EDGE/MARSHMALLOW VILLAGE

After having ran through the forest, they come to a screeching halt as they see what lies in front of them - a village made entirely of candy. There are different coloured cake houses with delicious looking roofs, candy cane drain pipes and wafer biscuit doors, fudge door mats, doughnut windows, a hot tub cup in the middle - and then the denizens themselves, who are all marshmallows. The camp marshmallow who led them to the village then welcomes Ande and Mozbie inside. The pair only have one thing on their mind; to eat as much as they possibly can. So they run manically to feast upon all the candy.

CUT TO

EXT. GIMP MARSHMALLOW'S HOUSE

Mozbie rips a wafer door off a house and shoves it all in his mouth in one gulp, taking the shape of the biscuit.

CUT TO

EXT. HALF EATEN CAKE HOUSE

Ande is seen walking away from a house patting his lips with a napkin and whistling casually, having eaten half of a house; including taking a chunk out of the marshmallow inside unknowingly!

CUT TO

EXT. GIMP MARSHMALLOW'S HOUSE

Once Mozbie digests the biscuit, he picks up a cola bottle from the floor and goes to drink it, but realises it is in fact a sweet after trying to open and slurp from it. He chews it instead, and burps soon after, feeling satisfied.

CUT TO

EXT. LARGE CAKE HOUSE

Mozbie, having walked off totally oblivious to what was in the previous house, climbs up another using the candy cane drain pipe on the front and stands on the roof.

CUT TO

EXT. GIMP MARSHMALLOW'S HOUSE

With the door no longer attached due to Mozbie, Ande catches a glimpse of what's inside when he walks past, and freezes in horror.

CUT TO

INT. GIMP MARSHMALLOW'S HOUSE

Standing just inside the doorway is a marshmallow in a gimp suit, with another marshmallow hanging from the ceiling tied with rope next to it. The gimp marshmallow offers Ande some strawberries and cream, which he reluctantly accepts.

CUT TO

EXT. GIMP MARSHMALLOW'S HOUSE

After taking the strawberries and cream, Ande walks off until away from the doorway and throws away the food in disgust.

CUT TO

EXT. VILLAGE CENTRE

Ande walks through the village, and realises something strange is going on; the marshmallows appear to be paying more attention to him than before, as one of them shows it's sharp jagged teeth. He carries on walking, past a group of marshmallows wearing freaky masks, until he reaches the hot tub cup. Inside there is a marshmallow couple humping roughly, with the receiver offering Ande a small piece of sliced cake on a plate. He looks terrified at what is going on all around him. Suddenly the ground shakes.

CUT TO

EXT. VOLCANO

The volcano, now making a face as if it's in excruciating pain, suddenly erupts chocolate furiously all over the village. It's face soon changes to being very content and pleased.

CUT TO

EXT. VILLAGE CENTRE

Chocolate rains down from the skies and lands all over the village, filling up the hot tub cup in the process. The marshmallows celebrate, dancing and rolling around in the chocolate. Ande backs away slowly, wanting to run away from this nightmare, but turns around to face a hungry looking marshmallow licking it's lips. Ande looks down and realises that he has become fat due to eating so much, his belly drooping. It suddenly comes to him that this was the marshmallows plan all along, to fatten them up.

CUT TO

EXT. LARGE HOUSE ROOF

Mozbie, still standing on the roof and covered in chocolate, waves to Ande on the ground below, not knowing what is going on in the slightest.

CUT TO

EXT. VILLAGE CENTRE

Ande flails his arms about, trying to warn Mozbie about what is going on

CUT TO

EXT. LARGE HOUSE ROOF

Completely oblivious to this, Mozbie replies by just sticking up his thumb. He then turns, takes a big jump and slides down the other side of the sloping roof; mouth wide open gulping in all of the cake topping on the way down.

CUT TO

EXT. BEHIND LARGE HOUSE/OPEN GROUND

Mozbie bounces off the ground after becoming as large as a hot air balloon, his arms and legs barely visible because of how fat he has now become. He spots something very close by, and looking like an overjoyed child on their Birthday, rolls towards it.

CUT TO

EXT. ISLAND EXIT

Mozbie reaches what appears to be the island exit, which is covered in 'goodbye' and 'come again soon' signs and flashing lights all over. But this is not the reason why he rolled here. Instead he had his sights set on a slice of cake, which was sitting on the floor just in front of the exit, and gobbles it up in one bite. As always, he is unaware of what's in front of him.

CUT TO

EXT. LARGE HOUSE

Ande, having managed to get away from the marshmallows, runs after Mozbie and climbs up the drain pipe. But the marshmallows are right behind him, and they grab Ande just as he is about to jump. They force his mouth open as they slide down the roof, so he too fattens up just like Mozbie.

CUT TO

EXT. ISLAND EXIT

Mozbie, who hasn't moved from where he last was, is suddenly enveloped whole by Ande, who still had his large mouth gaped open. Ande soon spits Mozbie back out, who is now covered in saliva. With both of them now being far too large to move, they are quickly surrounded by marshmallows, who roll them through a row of candy cane archways back into the village.

CUT TO

EXT. HOT TUB CUP

A marshmallow lights a fire under the hot tub cup, which is in actual fact a cooking pot, and accidently catches fire and melts. Ande and Mozbie are both rolled into the hot tub cup to be cooked, with one of the marshmallow occupants not making it out in time and getting flattened under the pair of them. As they begin to simmer, with Ande crying and Mozbie thinking this is really fun, a marshmallow thrusts a spear towards them.

FADE TO BLACK

FADE IN FROM BLACK

INT. GIMP MARSHMALLOWS HOUSE

On the wall is a framed photo of a cooked and half eaten Ande and Mozbie. It is then shown to be among many more photos of others who have been killed and eaten by the marshmallows. The gimp marshmallow, who is on a bed with another marshmallow, turns around and winks at the camera.

FADE TO BLACK

FADE IN FROM BLACK

CREDITS START

CREDITS END.

Old shots for the first draft Animatic/Test Shots

And these are four test shots:

Scarf Test

Marshmallow Skip Test

Marshmallow Run Test

Mozbie Run Test

Candy Island Animatic 10

This is the link for the latest animatic. The password is: Candy Island

https://vimeo.com/58149381

Backgrounds

Update: These are my old backgrounds when I first started making them. Looking back at them now it's pretty shocking how bad I was! They've all been updated and improved now but they have certainly     come a long way!

New version of old background

After the really useful chat I had yesterday with Kathy, I have now begun making changes to my current backgrounds and experimenting with them. I decided to edit the lemoncake house background as I felt it needed some changes and didn't quite give the sense of space and depth which I want for my backgrounds.

So this is my old background:

As you can see, I went with quite bright colours for the main house, which Kathy stated would be too distracting once the characters are animated over the top of it. I also went with very soft shadowing, which covered most of the foreground floor. At the time I was really pleased with this, but now I understand it isn't quite ready to be a background - it doesn't quite have the depth, and instead looks rather flat. So this is why I decided to create a practically new background, but keeping the two houses.

And this is my new background:

It's still very much an experiment, but I am rather pleased with how it has come out by using some of the tips Kathy gave me. My main goal was to have three layers to the background: the foreground, the middleground, and then the background. The foreground being the candy flower (which is very close), cake house and the two closest trees, the middleground the muffin house and the other two trees, and then the background is the lighter ground and the line of trees. I think I've accomplished the layer effect to some degree, especially on the left side of the background anyway with the trees (I think the simple fact that I made the trees lighter in colour the further away they got really helped). I'm still not too sure about the positioning of the muffin house and whether it needs changing though. I'll have to see with that one. The other major changes were that I decided to go with hard shadows this time, which I think help a lot in achieving a sense of space within the environment. I also used lighting for the first time to help differentiate between light and dark, and I think it looks really effective, especially on the trees. I haven't yet decided on the exact colour for the cake jam/cream layers, but the bright pink needed to go, so for now I've gone with a soft red. I also made a few other colour tweaks such as the muffin door, as the pink before was too similar to the sky. I'm sure I will have to make a few more changes, but this is just experimentation as I said before, and I do think I'm getting there with the backgrounds.

Oh, and I forgot to post this up before:

 I'm not sure if I will be using this background, but this is just to get an idea of how the characters will look on top of the backgrounds. I think they go quite nicely! I should try them on the new background to see if they suit it better. The harder shadows will definitely be a better fit as the characters are quite bold. I will post Ande and Mozbie up on the new background when I have the chance!

EDIT

Here's the characters on the new background:

Backgrounds

After the pitch we had a really good chat with Kathy, one of my lecturers, who is very much experienced in the area of backgrounds. She explained that we needed to work on our backgrounds, and went through what we could change. She felt that we were on the right track with them, but need to work more on depth and space. She showed examples of backgrounds from Roadrunner, and the use of lighting and shadows. What we noticed were how the shadows were very hard lined, and helped to create a sense of space within the background. The lighting was minimal, other than the main part of the ground which the shadows didnt reach (and what the shadows helped to create) and the tops of the trees. And there was a great sense of depth because of the angle and the way the tree and mountain side were positioned.

Kathy went onto explain how there are 3 layers to the background, which are as following:

The Foreground: high contrast, with the most detail and strong lighting
The Middleground: somewhere in between
The Background: More blue/grey, hazy, less distinct.

She stated how if you want something to look close or near then use warm colours, and cold colours for if you want distance. And how horizontal surfaces are generally more paler.

This talk with Kathy has really put things in perspective and helped me realise not only what a background should have, but also just how important backgrounds are. This is why from now on I have dedicated myself to backgrounds and given myself the role of Main Background Artist. Before I was hoping to complete all the backgrounds within a couple of weeks so then I could concentrate on animation, but now I need to take more care and attention to each one, and treat them more importantly; as backgrounds are a key component in animation. It's one thing having great, fluid believable animated characters, but they need to be in a world which is also believable and which allows them to be in a space to do what they do.

So I'm going to go back to the drawing board with my backgrounds. The first thing I might do is create a model village out of paper mache and modelling clay/play-doh so I can work out shot angles and depth, and help me understand the village more. I also plan to use more research, both from animated films and also the outside world (as that's one thing I haven't really done thus far, all the designs have been from my head) I already have lots of new ideas on how to improve the backgrounds using what Kathy has told us, which was really helpful, and I plan to do so tomorrow and primarily next week (due to the weekend set aside for dissertation).

Pitch to Music Students

Today we pitched to a group of music students, in the hope of finding someone to compose a piece of music and create sound effects for Candy Island. The pitch went really well, it was quite similar to the one we did back in November to the judges (except less nerve-wracking!). We basically showed some character and background concepts, explained the film and the story, and then played the animatic. Afterwards we went through what we wanted sound-wise, which is that we want some ukulele/guitar string music for most of the film that's quite upbeat and chirpy, and then get quite fast and high-tempo when the marshmallows attack - a quick shift in style to get across there is danger. There are also a few sound effects and recordings which we want which we can't create or get ourselves, such as a sound of a choir (the typical 'wow' reveal) and a vinyl disc scratch.

When we showed the animatic, surprisingly (and more importantly, crucically) we received quite a few laughs, which was great! Even I kept laughing throughout, which is strange considering I've watched the thing millions of times - I guess watching it on the big screen infront of people makes a difference. What was even more great was that we seemed to garner some interest from a couple of the music students, as we were asked a few questions and they seemed to like it. So hopefully, fingers crossed, we can get someone or some people on board to create some music and the sound effects!

Backgrounds - Lemoncake House and Main Village

I managed to complete two backgrounds today, one from scratch and the other which needed to be edited.

This is the new background, a lemoncake house, which is what Mozbie runs up to when he eats the wafer biscuit door and the cola bottle sweet. It took me about a good 8 or so hours to make it from start to finish, but ideally I want to shorten that to four hours so I can complete 2 backgrounds a day. The main problem was getting accustomed to Adobe Illustrator, as I had never used it before so it was rather baffling! So this whole time has been sort of a learning process for me to try to get to grips with a new piece of software, but I am now at the point where I feel comfortable with Illustrator and I can work in it quicker. The other problem was when I had to use Photoshop for the texturing stage - the textures had to match those in the Main Village background, which took time as I had to figure out which ones to use. It was also difficult to get the textures looking right and matching each other. But now that I know what to use and how to get the textures looking good, things should be a little easier from now on, and hopefully I will meet my goal when I start on them come Monday.

So this is the lemoncake background, which I will show in two stages (NOTE: the textures are all of our own from our own taken photos):

 

This is the finished background when I made it in Illustrator, which looks rather simple with the bold colours and minimilistic shapes. Some of the textures will have opacity so the colours shown here will be seen through them.

And this is the finished background from Photoshop. Nearly every part of the background has a texture, other than the small items on the floor and the candy cane door archway. The shading (which I found to be very fun!) helps to give the background more of a 3D effect. Overall I'm really pleased with this background, I think it's aesthetically pleasing and the style we've gone for really helps make the village look like it's made out of sweets. Hopefully now that I know what I'm doing further backgrounds will be quicker to make!


This is the Main Village background, which I needed to edit so it would fit with our new changes. These changes were that there was not to be anything made out of chocolate. So this meant changing the one cake house from chocolate to lemon, replacing the chocolate doormats with ones made out of fudge, the chocolate on the roof which is now toffee, the chocolate doughnuts had to be changed to a normal one, the doors had to be changed to biscuits, and the curly wurly style biscuit (which our characters were going to climb) had to be removed, and instead I just moved the drainpipe to where it was placed for our characters to climb instead. The other thing which needed changing was the hot tub had to be emptied of chocolate, as now we've decided it will be filled up when the volcano erupts. And the removal of chocolate altogether was because the marshmallow people had to react to it, so if they had chocolate already then why would they get all excited about more chocolate?

So yeah, here is the original background:

And this is the background with my changes (I also made the small change of moving the doughnut over to the other side of the lemoncake house and changing the cola bottle to a different colour).

Back to Uni!/What I'm currently working on

Well the Christmas break went unsually quick, probably due to the fact that a deadline for my dissertation draft was looming ever closer!

I am now back at uni and continuing where I left off before Christmas working on Candy Island. We had a group meeting regarding the animatic, and felt it was nearly there but just needed some tweaking. The biggest change we've made is now the volcano erupts midway through the film, just after Ande realises something weird is going on, as we've decided the eruption kick starts the marshmallows to attack. There are a few shots we've taken out as they were unnecessary and all had to have their own unique background, so this descision will save a lot of time. But I extended one of the shots to comply with the new changes. I also made a few smaller tweaks such as holding a few shots for longer. As well as this a lot of the shots needed simple backgrounds (using my thumbnail designs) so it will be easier to see where the characters are in the village and help make the animatic easier to understand.

So with the animatic out of the way and hopefully finished for good, my current task is now to create the final backgrounds. I already have the thumbnails, so it's just a case of drawing them in illustrator (as the line work is smooth and very forgiving) and then transfer them to photoshop to texture them. My current plan is to get half of the village backgrounds finished (as we need our film to be 50% finished in terms of backgrounds and animation) but if I have more time I will do as much as I can. My deadline for the backgrounds is Tuesday/Wednesday next week, depending how many I can get done in a day and then taking that as an estimate - I think there are around 15 backgrounds for me to do (regarding getting half of the film done).

And after my set deadline next Wednesday/Thursday, I will then go on to animating.