March 19th Update

A lot to get through this week, first up this week’s concept and the second last weapon concept for the moment, Commander Izanami‘s weapon:

I was searching for ceremonial Chinese swords and came across a number of Dao swords from the Tang Dynasty that I loved the look of

The simplicity of the designs fits the character really well, since she’s a bit of a pragmatist despite the formal clothes. It also contrasts nicely with her counterpart Commander Izanagi’s Weapon which is a bit more technology based. Overall I wanted to keep this weapon simple since it only appears once in the first season.

Secondly, comes the cool thing I was talking about at the end of last week’s blog post, the first animation for Fade’s teaser:

Its a section that comes later in the story, but its a excellent scene for generating interest, it still required some music and some redrawing in parts, but this is a really important milestone for me since its the first thing I’ve been able to show that conveys the tone of the cartoon and shows the key relationship dynamics for three of our four main characters.
That being said there is some extra work to be done, while Ebony’s design is fine for this scene, Ash, and more so Blue have some pretty drastic changes to their looks that I had to leave out. The environment will also need to be planned out, and while I have a good idea of the layout, a few parts I’ll need to find out how to texture and model.
Overall though this minute and a half video I have gotten a much better idea of how to plan out the storyboards of the show itself and over the summer I want to break my work week into finishing environment concepts and storyboards for the Official trailer which will contain scenes solely from season 1. This might seem like jumping ahead when the teaser has only really been started, but in my current situation I’m pretty limited in what I can do technology wise, so jumping into modelling and animating isn’t a good idea, plus with animatics I can actually plan out what I need far better, which will save me building assets I might not actually need, so overall the more storyboards and animatics I do now, the less I have to do later.

When it comes to adding the trailer to the progress list, I’m going to wait until I have a scene list of moments I’m going to include in the Trailer, the idea is the Teaser should raise questions, and the Trailer should answer just enough to make people care, so I want to take my time with it more so than with the Teaser, so it might be a while before I talk about it again, but know that its very much still at work in the background.

Anyway, onto this week’s progress:

• Character Concepts
  • Background extras:42/42
  • Main Characters: 13/13
  • Main character re-designs: 5/5
  • Secondary Character: 14/14
  • Secondary Character re-designs: 5/5
• Weapon Concepts
  • Main Characters: 12/12
  • Secondary Characters: 6/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 0/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

Febuary 26th Update

Onto another Weapon concept this week, Commander Izanagi‘s weapon:

Aside from a few cyberpunk ideas I found on google, the two main insperations I drew from for these swords were Nero’s sword from Devil May cry 4, the Red Queen:

And Fiora’s Project Fiora Sword From League of Legends:

Honestly I love a lot of these designs, so its going to be tough to choose, luckily the Commander doesn’t have any fights in the first season so I have plenty of time to choose, but I still thought I’d design some for the sake of completeness.

In other news my college course has given me a project that’s a perfect opportunity to start story boarding the teaser for Fade, its a scene from very late in the series, I honestly don’t have much planned other than the Scene itself, but its a great point to show people where the story will go without giving the whole plot away, so expect news of that over the next few weeks.

Anyway, here is this week’s progress:

• Character Concepts
  • Background extras:42/42
  • Main Characters: 13/13
  • Main character re-designs: 5/5
  • Secondary Character: 14/14
  • Secondary Character re-designs: 5/5
• Weapon Concepts
  • Main Characters: 12/12
  • Secondary Characters: 3/7
  • Weapon Redesigns: 0/4
• Scene Concepts
  • Interiors: 0/24
  • Exteriors: 0/20

That’s all for this week,
Until next time

Marc Out~~

May 29th Update

Missed last week’s update unfortunately, College project got in the way, but for the next few months I’m free, so I can promise it won’t happen again. So without further delay, onto the last Businessman extra:

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I decided to go for a richer looking design, so I decided to add a waistcoat, which I think adds an elegance to the design, The colours are recycled from some of the earlier designs but I decided to darken them to help them fade into the background better.

In other news I’ve been looking into project management and figuring out how to let people keep track of the project without having to decipher the massive amounts of notes and spreadsheets, and I found a project managment App Archmule, which will let you know exactly what I’m working on at a given time, you can check out the objective list here:
https://archmule.com/@marcconroy/fade-season-1/

I was also planning on starting to gather voice actors over the summer, but after listening to another episode of tip of the tongue (Which I totally suggest you check out) Made me realise that I was jumping ahead of myself again, so I’m altering my pipeline a bit to compensate, music and Voice acting will be left till a bit later, and for now I’m going to continue producing concept art, the hope is that I can build an “Art Bible” for the show, so if I can bring on other people to model and animate I can just show them the rough ideas for assets and they can build them. I’m also going to redouble my efforts for the story boards and animatic, since I can use temp music and my own voice to work out timing.
I’m reluctant to use temp music, since I wanted an original score and honestly I wanted to avoid it, but in the efforts of producing a proof of concept it’s a necessary evil. The great thing about keeping everything just to an animatic is that their far easier to edit that a rendered animation.

That’s basic plan for the next two or three months, next week we’ll be onto a new background extra template.

Till next week,

Marc Out~~

January 15th Update

Another shopkeeper this week, I’m only probably going to do one more of these since there isn’t many shopkeepers in the show as a whole:

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The Colour schemes are based off of Yoruichi Shihōin and Renji Abarai from bleach and Weiss from Rwby, respectively.

Although I am worried that the Bleach character’s colours might make them stand out too much, Once I’m done with all the character concepts I’ll do a review of what I feel does and doesn’t work and adjust accordingly, But I suspect all I’ll have to do is just lower the saturation of the more noticeable colours.

I’ve also decided to upload one of my storyboards, I’ll admit that I’ve been reluctant to do this, since I prefer to only show finished work, but that’s against the point of this blog, and so long as I don’t use spoiler heavy shots then it should be alright.

I’m going to try up load one of these every time I have 15 shots drawn up, that way I can pick the least spoilerish of the batch. If you’d like the template that I’m using I got it from an animator called Jazza that posted up his onto Newgrounds Here. I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting storyboards, because they’re still taking a backseat while I decide on the look of the world and its characters, plus I’m still quite slow at gestural drawing, but I want to give myself an incentive to work at them, so hopefully there will be more soon.

Anyway that’s all for this week, Till next week

Marc Out~~