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:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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~~

December 4th Update

Last set of Otherkin templates, next update will be on regular humans:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This Template was a reference to the Anime Air gear which is another big influence on the show’s overall aesthetic so I’ll be mentioning it again in the future, the over all character design is based around Kazuma Mikura, who’s design I always liked, he feels like he could switch form background character to main character in a split second, which was actually part of his character in the show

The other colour schemes are based off of the Main character Ikki and Simca I think the fem fatal (her role is strange in the show) But if you want an idea for how future environments in the city should hopefully look, check out the show, because the city in Air gear is nearly a character itself (which is appropriate for a freestyle roller blade anime)

In Other news I’ve given Damson a redesign, simplifying his tattoos, adding a ponytail to give him a better silhouette and rearranged the colours in his outfit to balance him a bit better, and I’m much happier with him:

I’ve left the old version of his design up for comparison, I also tweaked his head shape, its still out of proportion with his ears, but I’m glad that I can actually identify what the problem was before, when I first sketched him out I was largely guessing, It let’s me know I am actually improving.

Finally I wanted to clear up something that was pointed out to me earlier in the week by my reader Cillian Flood (Who you should check out because he has a very uniqe view on everyday life) that it was too early to be working on the show’s official opening, which I totally agree with, but that’s sort of not what I’ve been story boarding, the “intro” I’ve been planning is more of a “Pilot”, Teaser or a preview, but I’ve been calling it an Intro all this time because that’s what I was using as a starting point for this Preview, so From here on I’ll be referring to the clip I’m making as the Preview for the foreseeable future. Hopefully that will prevent any confusion in the future.

Until Next Time

Marc Out~~

November 28th Update

Another week and we’re onto casual Civilians, with another double dose of concept art, First up if the Rabbit girl I posted earlier on my tumblr:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I like how this one turned out, I’m getting a lot better at picking colours for characters that let them blend in with the background, while also looking interesting, the blue one kind of reminds me of Rei from Evangelion, even though that’s not who I originally based her off of, but more on that in a second. For now here is the second design, this time Male:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I don’t know if I’m as into this this design as the first, but that may have just been the colours I chose, but the Easter egg these two designs will make kinda makes it worth it, the two white designs are inspired by the Characters Doki and Nabi from There She Is!! Which is an adorable series that I highly suggest you check out, the themes of race and love are a part of what helped inspire the story of Fade and if I can evoke even half the emotions that series evoked in me, I’ll be doing a great job.

In other news, I’ve started story-boarding the intro, there very rough at the moment, so I’m not going to post them up here yet until I have a second or third draft of them, but I wanted to talk about them because its a very different experience from just looking at examples online. With Openings in cartoons or Anime I’ve never put much thought into how deliberate each image on screen is, I’ve done about 8 shots at the time of writing this post, and each time I had to ask myself “What should be in this shot? Who should I frame? what should I foreshadow? Where is in taking place?” and so on, basically things we take for granted when watching cartoons, because it’s done in a way that feels natural, and with the TV and Cartoons having been around so long, the people making them have gotten very good at making them.

Anyway, that’s enough nerding out about the subject, See you next week

Marc Out~~

October 30th Update

Another week and more concept art, this time a business woman:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I had a bit of fun with the colors with this one, the suit colours are the same as the last extra but I wanted to make the hair a bit more out there, especially since this set were based on exotic birds. I’ve been doing research on extras in animation, and it would seem my estimate of six per sector is pretty on the money, check out this analysis of star wars rebels I found:

This has actually given me a lot of hope for the future, since I’ve found the take of designing extras a lot more intimidating that the main characters, just through the sheer volume that I’ll need to do. That being said, I’ve been trying to focus on taking this one template at a time, but its still going to take a long time, I’m giving each district 6 template characters, and I have 21 districts including a black market sector, so in total I have 126 templates to draw, so my main concern is which districts I can reuse extras on, the areas I have are as follows, with the human areas called sectors and the Otherkin areas called Districts:

• The Government Sector
• The Business Sector
• The Commercial Sector
• The Military Sector
• The Residential Sector
• the Industrial Sector
• The Entertainment Sector
• The Processing Sector
• The Research Sector
• The Agriculture sector
• The garden of Remembrance (a human owned area)
•  The Upper District
• The Mining District
• The Factory District
• The Business district
• The Residential District
• The Industrial District
• The Warehouse district
• The Market District
• the Focus Training Dojos (Otherkin Owned)
• The Lower district (or the slums, Neutral for both Humans and Otherkin)
• The Black Market (Also Neutral)

There are some smaller areas as well, but I’m planning on reusing templates there, over the next week or so, I’m going to see which of those areas I can get away with re-using templates in so I can reduce those 126 drawings, For example, the Mining, Indrustial, and Warehouse districts will all be using Otherkin Labourers, so I may use the same six template extras for those three areas. I’ll have a list in the Next update for all the extras designs I’ll be needing.

Speaking of templates, I’ve started work on the new female template:

You’ll have to forgive the gap in the middle, I’m only building half the model and copying and flipping it to give you guys a better idea of my progress, it looks very similar to the original templates, but under the surface is much cleaner for animation, the eyes and mouth have a lot more detail in them and the mesh structure around the mouth and eyes will look more natural when I’m animating it. I’ve been working off youtube videos, but its actually amazing how few people using blender take into account the muscle structure of the face when modelling and focus on only the appearance of the model, as a result the models look great up until the point were you move the features. That being said even my own model could use work, but its definitely been a lesson in “choose your teachers well”.

Speaking of learning I’ve been looking for ways of story boarding, so far the only thing that seems reliable is drawing the boards myself in photoshop, but that’s adding to my drawing workload, which from above is pretty extensive as is. there seems to be plenty of software out there for story boarding, but its all insanely expensive, and honestly seems more limiting then just drawing them myself, so for now I’m just sticking with that, Drawing in photoshop, and creating animatics in flash

That’s all for this week, till next time.

Marc Out~~