February 27th Update

A double helping of concepts this week, first up a set of chameleon slum dwellers:

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Not really much to talk about with this one, I based the coat off of Yukine’s from Noragami

The Colours I just experimented around to try get some neutral colours, but I might dull them down so they don’t distract from the main characters.

The Second batch is a set of fox girls:

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I based this design off of Kitty from No Evil, a great independent animation series based on old native american legends and fables, its pretty entertaining. But with this second template concept I am now not only done with Slum dwellers, but I am also exactly half way through my background character concepts! It’ll be great to finally be done with them and back to the more interesting things, like the other scripted characters.

In other news I’ve been working on a budget for the show as a whole, and even when I take on most of the process myself it still turns out insanely expensive, Voice actors is the big one, because even hiring people who treat it like a hobby  is going to cost me at the very least a grand, and that’s being very optimistic. This gives me two options: A) build up money and hire one voice actor at a time, or B) Approach hobby voice actors and beg them to do the work on faith or for free. Both this options have signification cons to them, Option A will cause the project to slow to a snail’s pace, and its already at a crawl. And Option B will leave the project at the mercy of people who will have no investment in the project’s completion, or may be unreliable.
I’m also tempted to try crowd funding, however Fade has no real fan base yet, and without a trailer or first episode, there is no proof I can actually do what I’m setting out to do, so the odds of a kickstarter or patreon succeeding are slim at best. Honestly this isn’t a urgent problem yet, but it is an important one. So I’ll probably bring it up again when I’m closer to needing voice actors, but I am curious to hear all of your idea’s because there is very likely something I may have not considered that would help me bring other people on board without breaking the bank, so please don’t be afraid to comment.

That’s all for this week, next week, Military personnel!

Till next week

Marc Out~~

December 20th Update

Second last civilian template this week, This one is based on Ikki Minami from air gear:

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I’ve greatly simplified the character down, and I like how it turned out, I also experimented on the colour schemes myself, and I really like the purple one!

One of the great things about Ikki is he does look like a pretty average guy design wise, all of his character comes from the great dynamic poses in the anime and manga, its another reason the show is a huge influence on Fade.

In other news I’ve been doing a lot of searching for music, and I’ve come to the final conclusion that I need to hire a composer, but I’m hitting a major problem, I have no idea what a reasonable budget for a composer is. If I have a target amount I can save up that’s just time. But as it stands I have no ballpark figure, so any composers I pitch the project to won’t be able to trust me, plus I don’t expect someone to work on a project of this size for free. The same problem also applies to voice acting, I know a few people that might be willing to help, but I’d like to get dedicated people for that goal.

I might ask around on Newgrounds.com , but I’d love to get some opinions on other places to look, or people to ask about this. Even if I have rough figures I might be able to get grants since its an independent venture, I’ve looking online and the basically the answer I’ve got is producing something is easier if you’ve already produced something before, hence why I’m focusing on just a preview of the show, but even a minute and a half preview is still tricky when you have to concept and build all the assets yourself and have no original music to go with it. If your reading this and have opinions that you think might help, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me!
And the moment I have four main expense areas:

• Pre-production
  • Script by me
  • concepts by me
  • storyboards done by me
• Production
  • Recording by voice actors
  • actual animation by me, and possibly others
  • music composing by a composer
• Post-production
  • Video editing by me
  • sound design (not to be confused with the music, think sound effects like punches footsteps) by me
  •  visual effects and correction by me
• Marketing by me unless I can find an online marketing specialist
  • Illustrating ads by an artist or illustrator
  • Website ads
  • Facebook/twitter/google ads
  • News sites, etc.

I’m still researching Marketing so I’m still constructing a basic strategy for it. Another factor I’m just sort of improvising how the planning is scheduled. I have no idea how long each thing on this list should take, I finished the script in about a year, which I feel is acceptable, and I know when I get around to writing season 2 in earnest I’ll complete it in less time, but the concepts and storyboards are taking much longer than I expected, in particular the story boards, although I’m chalking that up to my lack of experience coupled with my under developed art skills.
On a side note, I’m going to work on producing one story board preview each week to improve my speed since it worked well for my concept art.

That’s all for this week,apologies if this budgeting and marketing talk wasn’t very creatively stimulating, but its what I’ve been working on this week and its important to the project in the long term so I felt is was important to talk about.
I’ll have more visual content next week.

Till next time

Marc Out~~

October 16th Update

Our last cast character for a while, with Violet Lila here we have everyone I need for the first episode or two:

I wanted her appearance to reflect Ebony’s, who has a black bird theme, Violet’s is based more around bats, so part of her appearance is based on a mix of Ebony’s design and the main character from Ultraviolet, batman beyond also played a little influence in the shape of the wings

From here on out I’m going to work on some of the less important details, mainly extras for each district of the city, to speed up the process I’ve decided to use a template image as a base I’ll trace the design over, luckily I’ve found a turn around image that the original creator Yumezaka has allowed people to use as a reference, which I am super grateful for. I’ll be using these two images:

This one for Female character designs
And This one for Male Character Designs

More then anything else I’m going for speed with the extras, they aren’t very important, and shouldn’t be noticed much by the audience, so I don’t want to waste too much time on the. I want to have about six designs for both male and female for each district, with about three colour variations in each, so I have room to add a few for crowds, although I might lower that number for less populated areas.
I’ll be starting with an area called the Otherkin Business district.

Till next time,

Marc Out~~

October 9th Update

One of the most inhuman looking characters Kusanagi Tsurugi (yeah the name is a total mouthful!)

I wanted to have a character that shows the ranges of humanity Otherkin have, so I wanted one that was barely recognisable as human, he has heavy influences from the Saurians from outlaw star:

I toyed around with the idea of giving him hair, but I could tell even without colouring it it looked kinda ridiculous, so I left it at that. I’ll have to nearly make a custom model for his head, but I’m learning that its far easier to animate snouts than faces, so it shouldn’t be too much extra effort. I also decided to curl his wings out backward, but I’m not sure I like the look of that, I may change it once I’m doing the model.

As to the updates on the new template models, I am working on them, but the only one I have I’ve done in Maya, and i still don’t know how to render and export in it yet, so you’ll have to wait for that, its a little stylised for what I want (I was following a tutorial, in class) I’m working to get some notes from my lecturer so I can remake it in blender.

I have one more character that’s relevant to the story I’ll be concepting, then I plan on moving to background extras, up until now I’ve been using these concepts to practise my posing and proportions, but luckily I’ll be working on that regularly in college. So I’m going to cut a few corners to get the ideas on paper faster. I really want to bump up the speed on this pre-production so I can get to the cool looking parts, but I have to be careful not to let the quality of the production slip as a result.

Lot’s of planning this week, but with next week’s character I’ll be hitting my first Character milestone, I’m looking forward to it

Till then

Marc Out~~

Kigyo and milestones

Still experimenting with post layout on wordpress, I don’t want to repeat and image too much in my updates, but I’m going to try another approach, the featured Image will be a preview of the full image, and I’ll place a more detailed view below it, and here it is, the blindfold code’s Tank Kigyo:

He was the first blindfold code member that I ever drew, and i think it shows a bit, he doesn’t fully fit the punky hoodie look of the others, so I will probably redo him, there are aspects of his design that I do like and will be keeping, like the hex pattern on his sleeves, his hair colour, the hood made up of strips, as well as the mask made of multiple blindfolds. His original inspiration was based off of Konoha from Mekakucity Actors, in both his black and normal forms:

I think the main problem is that these two don’t match the designs of the other characters, because they were designed to be a villain rather then part of the group in the anime, so I’ll take a little time to redesign a hoodie for him, which I’m thinking I’ll base off of the segmented hoodie I came up with.

 

I don’t have much to show this week in other area’s, this week was kind of hectic for me, but there is another important subject I wanted to detail this week, my goals and milestones.

I don’t have much experience making a cartoon, even in a team, so I’ve been scouring the internet for any information, and I came across Olan Rogers, who has released a pilot episode of his show, Final space, which I highly suggest you go look up. but in one of his vlogs he mentions that it took him six years to get it made, so I’ve adopted that time frame for myself. Now over the last year I’ve been writing the script which is still in revisions at the moment, and may take some time, but is largely finished in my opinion which took about a year. After that I have started working on concept art, which I’m now about three months into, and I expect to take me another six, but may take longer, due to redesigns and college constraints. After that I move into story boarding, voice acting and animatic building which at my currents speed I expect to take between two and three years unless I can find help. After that I move to animating, which I expect one more year to get the pilot done.

So to summerise I’m ordering my time to hopefully look a little like this

Year 1 – scripting (Completed)

Year 2 – Concept art/begin Story boarding (in progress)

Year 3  – finish Story boarding/ record voice work/ combine story boards and audio into animatic

Year 4 – begin animation

Year 5 – finish pilot

Now, each of these big milestones are being broken down into smaller more manageable milestones, which in turn I’m breaking down into tasks that should take me about week to do, I’m not going to go into each one now, but I will give you an example with my current milestone, Concept art and story boarding.

I’ve broken up my workload into two main sections characters and environments. In characters I have: Main cast, Support cast, and background characters.

In Environments I’ve broken it up into another two categories: interiors and exteriors. Exteriors I’ve divided up into halves of the city: the human half, and the other half belonging to a race called otherkin, which a few scatter neutral areas. The Interior are going to be collected rooms from the script that will be themed around the different sectors from the two halves of the city.

From there I treat treat each drawing as a week’s work to design and detail, for characters this is a single person, for a exterior environment, this is a single sector, for interiors, this is a room. This probably seems like a lot of work, but this breaking down process helps keep me from getting overwhelmed by the bigger picture and focus on smaller achievable milestones, right now I’m focusing on my current milestone: Completing the art for the support cast of which I only half three characters left.

Wow this turned into a far longer post then I expected, don’t worry, next week I’ll be back with more art and 3D work

Till then

Marc Out~~