Montage example

If you go to minute 2:22 you can find the montage in the incredibles that we have talked about.

Storyboarding Notes

2.5

Quick attempt at boarding the sequence between 2+3.

Truck in through the door to the next shot where Old Lady is looking up at the Judge. A large hand appears, picks Old Lady up, and starts going off screen right. Cut to Ms. Ecks looking awed/terrified.







Let me know what you think.

Frankenstein-ing Designing

All of this was discussed and decided during a group meeting.

Ms. Ecks
◦ 3 heads tall (including neck as part of the head)
◦ Pear body shape
◦ Limbs go from larger to smaller
◦ Swirly-doos on elbows and knees
◦ Ankle boots and V neckline
◦ Hunchback
◦ Teensy hands and feet
◦ Small floppy boobs that fall around the middle of the character
◦ Small nose, large upper lip
◦ Has eyelids
◦ Large, thick eyebrows which extend past the edge of her face
◦ (undecided but proposed) Glasses that are the eyes
◦ (undecided but proposed) Bottom of ears poking out from under hair rather than earrings

Film Inspiration

I particularly like the lighting and colors in this film.







And also the the different characters and how their personalities are portrayed both in the Design and in their movements:
Movie Intro



And finally here is an examples from design to animation

Justin Coffee cutouts & more

Right here.

He has more on his blog. Similar to what Amber was doing a while back. I think it's a really nice way to explore the look and feel of the film, especially if we're pushing a graphic look. While we're on topic, it'd be a neat idea if everyone could make an image of what they picture the final film to look like. It's something that we pretty much need to know before we lay down our rough/final design packs - character, environments, everything. So before winter break.

I seem to be late in the news, but there's this project going on called SKETCHTRAVEL, and there's some pretty neat stuff in there already. Like the Totoro Forest project, lots of great artists and great art to get inspired by. Click on the above SKETCHTRAVEL link, then sketches, and voilà!

Pursuit of Excellence, indeed

As much as I want to link to a million useful bits of Jonathan Ive information there just is not an abundance of it out there which does not specifically relate to his work in industrial design. One great little book on my shelf, Leander Kahney's Inside Steve's Brain, does have some wonderful quotes by the king of design which I want to share.

"There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity," he said. "This looks simple, because it really is."
Ive said keeping it simple was the overall design philosophy for the machine. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential, but you don't see that effort," he said. "We kept going back to the beginning again and again. 'Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?' It became an exercise to reduce and reduce, but it makes it easier to build and easier for people to work with."

Also...

The small, intimate team is key to being creative and productive, Ive says. He denies that Apple's innovations came from one individual designer or another, but the team working together. It's a process of "collectively learning stuff and getting better at what we do. One of the hallmarks of the team is inquisitiveness, being excited about being wrong because that means you've discovered something new".

Also...

Ive has said many times that Apple's design is never forced. The designers never say to each other, "Let's make an organic, feminine-looking computer." The iMac may look friendly and approachable, but that was never part of the machine's design brief. Instead, Apple's designers say, "Let's see what we can do with plastics, maybe we can make a translucent computer." And it proceeds from there. [...] for Ive and his design team, the materials come first. The first iMac, for example, was always intended to be "an unashamedly plastic product," Ive has explained. [...] We spent time in Nothern Japan talking to a master of metal-forming to get a certain kind of detail. We love taking things to pieces, understanding how things are made. The product architecture starts to be informed by really understanding the material."

So just try and tell me now that you don't want to borrow this book!
I suppose what I'm proposing by writing this all up is to PROTOTYPE a million times based on what you encounter while storyboarding. When storyboarding consider the MEDIA you feel we should use in post.

Kat Morris

Can you tell how much I love Cartoon Brew? Anyway, here's (click it!) a short that uses a certain degree of "flatness" in the designs, in case people are still interested with that idea. Turns out she also made another short based on/inpired by Ralph Steadman's designs (one of the guys I brought stuff of for inspiration for our own film), which I thought was pretty interesting. So I decided I'd post that on here as well.

monday ecksploration

fabric + doodles

A bit of experimenting with the fun pack's design...


And then I had some fun dressing her up.

With this fabric...
Another pattern...
Middle age crisis...
Miss Frizzle-y...
Granny prints...