Final post

Well it's down to the letter and the race is on. Can we all do it? Will our animation be ready? Will tweens be added? Will there be enough tweens? Will I stop asking "Will..." questions? All that and more to be answered soon.

Complete with all the rough animation and more than half is fully cleaned and colored and exported for viewing pleasure. I'd put something up, but this late in the game would just ruin the surprise. Good luck to the rest of you and I look forward to seeing all your films.

Cutting down

Well I guess I'm finally listening to people. A few of you kept reminding me how ambitious my project is. And I'm seeing how right you guys were. So I've got to take off one or two scenes that are unnecessary. But I don't want to forsake all the fun action scenes. I will get those done so it will still be the action-packed animation I've been talking about this whole quarter. Good luck to the rest of ya!

Turn'n round

I had completely forgotten that I never uploaded a turn around. Here's Vixen's turn. Progress slowed to a halt for a bit due to outside projects getting in the way. But I'm back on the ball and kicking up a notch! Here are more BG's for your pleasure. Enjoy!

Production!

Production is on its way. I'll be uploading video soon. Here's a few of the backgrounds to give the feel for what the complete work will look like. The first is the opening shot, while the second is a pan used later in the work.

Schedule

Here's my schedule for how I'll be finishing up the work. You may notice how short the time maybe on each scene. I'm first getting all the background work out of the way. And secondly each scene is short so there are a lot but they're not that long. And the animation will mostly be symbol based. Only the main character is full animation.

Scene 1-12 BG draw: DONE BG color: 7 Total: 7 hrs	Scene 4 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 2 Ani Clean:1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 4 hrs	Scene 10 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: .5 Total: 2.5 hrs	Import Sound	Present
Scene 1 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1.5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani color: 1 Total: 3.5 hrs.	Scene 5 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1.5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 3.5 hrs	Scene 11 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1 Ani Clean: .5 Ani Color: .5 Total: 2 hrs	Tweaking and Reworking
Scene 2 BG: DONE Ani Rough: .5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani color: .5 Total: 2 hrs	Scene 6 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 2.5 Ani Clean: 1.5 Ani color: 1 Total: 5 hrs	Scene 12 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 2 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 4 hrs.
Scene 3 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1.5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 3.5hrs	Scene 7 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 2.5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 4.5 hrs.

Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10
	Scene 8 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 2 Ani Clean: .5 Ani Color: .5 Total: 3 hrs
	Scene 9 BG: DONE Ani Rough: 1.5 Ani Clean: 1 Ani Color: 1 Total: 3.5

Storyboards

Here are the storyboards for my project:

Production

I've moved from pre-production to the Production stage. Everything has been keyframed and now the tween part begins. I'm doing a mixture of full animation and symbol based animation. It will be interesting to experiment and see how the two work with each other. I'm quite green to the cut-out
style of animation. I'm excited and look forward to seeing how it turns out.

Droning

Here is the design for the drones that attack our Heroine. enjoy

Tutorials

ere are the tutorials that I've been working on for the past few weeks. It is a little later than others so I'm just posting all them together.

Villain part 2

Here's our main villain, Johnny Moorebucks. Rich, greedy, and evil, a potent combination! He has many rare items in his collection but our heroine is only after one: the giant diamond. It becomes apparent that Johnny and our heroine have had some history.
Johnny's your typical rich villain, always wanting more. And to top him off he's got a hook for a hand, cause all the best villains have hooks for hands!

Script

A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
By: Todd Hoppmeyer

FADE IN

EXT. Megalith Corp. Building- NIGHT

CUT TO

EXT. Roof of Megalith building- NIGHT

There is a hole cut into the glass sky-light with a grappling hook leading down into the building.

PAN THROUGH OBJECT as we follow the rope down to VIXEN who drops off onto the ground.

INT. Megalith Museum- NIGHT

The only light is that of the moonlight. VIXEN notices her target, a large diamond. Just as she’s about to nab the jewel, the room is lit up as an alarm sounds. Laser cannons pop out of the ceiling while ATTACK DRONES raise from the floor.

VIXEN notices three figures from behind.

JOHNNY
(points toward VIXEN)
It’s, YOU, VIXEN!

VIXEN
(narrowing eyes)
You got it hot stuff!

VIXEN leaps between the lasers guarding the diamond and rolls to safety on the other side. Lasers begin to fire. VIXEN uses quick acrobatics to dodge each beam. Suddenly a DRONE appears from behind. It swipes. VIXEN leaps up. She lifts her right hand revealing claws and slashes the DONE’S visor. She then kicks. More DRONES approach. She reflects lasers off the gem destroying DRONES. Out numbered VIXEN leaps across the heads of the DRONES, against a pillar, and nabs her robe.

EXT. Megalith building roof – NIGHT

VIXEN climbs out of her hole only to be grabbed by GAUNTLET. With a kick to the jaw she’s out of his grasp. A blade cuts her arm; RAZOR prepares for another strike. A climatic fight ensues in the moonlight. GUANTLET gets up and fires his energy. VIXEN sees the energy from over RAZOR’S shoulder and leaps up. RAZOR is hit by the energy from behind. GUANTLET looks around, unable to locate VIXEN. He looks up only to be greeted by a heel to the face.

FLASH FRAME

GAUNTLET is down.

JOHN MOOREBUCKS climbs to the roof.

POV He sees his goons beaten on the ground. TRUCK UP to find VIXEN standing on the edge of the roof with her mask off and diamond in hand.

VIXEN blows a kiss then leaps off the edge. Firing a grappling gun she swings and WHIPES TO BLACK.

THE END

Hired Hands

Here's our goons. Two hired hands with the right hands for the job.

Shifting Gears

Hey all. Been a while since I updated. This new update comes with changes. I've changed my premise for my animation due to lack of direction and interest in my previous idea. The previous idea was most likely going to be a little too long anyway. Here's the new story:

It's a beautiful night in the city. The moon is big and bright. Running across the roof tops of buildings is a shadow. This shadow is none other than a jewel thief. She opens up the sky light window and has her eyes set on a rare gemerald. As she lowers herself down she thinks all is good. Everything goes accorrding to plan and she is just about to snag the gemerald until the alarm suddenly rings. Suddenly security tightens. Laser guns appear out of the walls and begin to fire. Guard robots pop out of the ground. And to make matters worse are two hired goons who have unique abilities. How will she get out of this one?

With cool action and kicking kung fu moves she weaves her way through the lasers and takes out the robots. But the goons are no slouches. She takes them out and see's the owner of the gem. They exchange pleasantries showing that they've had history and then she makes her get away leaving the mess for Mr. Richy Rich to pick up.

Clearly action based. Not much story to it. But this gives me more flexability to do what I aim to achieve in this class.

A "Knight" to remember

Here is my preliminary designs for the Boy's fantasy Knight design. Just a rough design to achieve a concept and practice my skills on the cintique since I'm still quite green to the technology. Here are just the break down steps from gesture/rough to color test. I plan on going back and doing the final model in a traditional means due to the fact that I'm stronger on paper and pen than digital at the moment. Enjoy.

Idea and concept art: Part Uno

Hello all. I've come up with my premise so here goes:

It's a dark stormy night.... oops wrong one

*ahem* Take your traditional story: Knight, valiant and strong. Damsel in distress locked in the highest tower of the castle. Throw in a typical dragon, evil wizard, and a monkey with a monocle and crazy action. The Knight fights past the evil do-ers, makes his way to the tower. The Princess is over joyed and rushes to him. He rushes forward. She opens her arms to embrace him... but he runs past her! She waits a second. She stops. Turns. Low and behold he's hugging a glass of milk and plate of cookies on a table behind her. Cut back to reality. A little girl and little boy playing dress up. The boy wears a bucket on his head and cardboard armor, the girl in dress-up princess gown. She's steamed at him for ruining her fantasy dress up story. He's just happy he made it to the cookies.

That's it so far. Tell me what you guys think. Good, bad, silly, not silly, too over the top, you love cookies. Which ever. My aim is to have dynamic fun action with the knight and monster sequence then add some fun humor in when we return to reality.

Oh and below are some concept art of the boy and girl and the knight ... who doesn't look very knight-ish. Model sheets coming soon!

Animation Type/style

I intend to utilize full-animation in my final project. Not much story will be involved as my goals to go for dynamic action and strong camera angles/ shots. Cinematography will be stressed.

I also would like to play with outline-free, or at least non-black outlined, cartooning as many contemporary cartoons/ animations are playing with. Cartoons that have used this technique are Samurai Jack and Kim Possible:

Pick your Fav!

Batman Beyond is a top fav. of mine. Bruce Timm took the Batman franchise to new levels and retold the character in a fresh, unique way. It was edgy, dark, slick and action packed with some of the best writing as far as TV animation goes. The stories were mature and enjoyable to not only children but appealed to older audiences as well. Not to mention the animation, being out-sourced, was done well for TV animation.

Up for seconds?

Todd Hoppmeyer is my name and cartooning is my game. I hale from Dacula, Georgia and am majoring in Sequential Art and minor in animation. I like long walks on the beach... wait wrong blog. Chocolate is my top favorite food. Though I'm a southern boy and do love me some good 'ol Steak and potatoes. I jam to my favorite song by the Gorillaz: "Feel Good Inc." I enjoy flash fighting games of all web games. The Teen Titans one on CartoonNetwork.com is a top favorite of mine. I love speed so thus my favorite animated character is Sonic the Hedgehog. Steven Spielberg is a top favorite director of mine cause he blends action and story so well thus in find myself sitting in front of Minority Report a lot. The Office is a hoot cause I love Steve Carell and its eclectic cast. And Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker wins hands down for my favorite animated movie.

This is actually my second blog. My professional one can be found at:
http://hoppart.blogspot.com/