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~~

November 6th Update

Another civilian template, this time based around a lizard:

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Not sure I’m 100% happy, but for now it will do, I’m very happy with the color scheme of green one which is inspired by the Reptoids from the webcomic Trying Human which I highly suggest you check out for the art style alone, the other two I just got from googling different types of lizard.

I’ve also been planning out how to approach the massive amount of concept art I’ll need to do for this series, I broke it down into civilian types per region, and then cut out the areas that aren’t going to be seen in the first season, then I decided to cut my 6 templates per area into 3 per civilian type, which cut my workload from the impossible 126 concepts to a manageable 40.

If your curious what Civilian types I’m planning to use, here they are:

• Human Military officer
• Human Businessman
• Human Businesswoman
• Human Civilian
• Hojo Operative (human)
• Hojo Operative (Otherkin)
• Otherkin Civilian
• blindfold code follower
• Otherkin shopkeeper
• Otherkin worker
• Otherkin Businessman
• Otherkin Businesswoman
• human Slum dweller
• Otherkin Slum dweller

Now I’m not including the redesigns or side characters I haven’t drawn yet, but in comparison to the load of civilians I have to draw it really quite insignificant.

That’s all for this week, sorry I don’t have more progress made but its honestly been a very hectic week for me.

Till next time

Marc Out~~

October 30th Update

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

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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~~

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~~

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~~