3-D or not 3-D

The length of time between posts recently has been due to the blood sweat and tears I've been pouring into the Storyboards and 3-D animatic for "Doctor Glamour."

I did this for "Frank DanCoolo" as well. You can see my original blog post from nearly two years ago here:

http://nkbproductions.blogspot.com/2009/02/animatic.html  

This time around, I'm not creating elements from scratch to create rough approximations of the environments for the film. Instead I'm using the ACTUAL final environments from the film. 

The other major change is that as opposed to using 2-D cut outs to stand in for characters, I'm using crude 3-D armatures. This allows the many complex shots in the film to rotate and weave around the characters appropriately. Note in the movie below, bare minimum render and lighting settings were used and in no way resemble the aesthetic of the final product.

Unfortunately, there is a major drawback to this approach I've encountered. While rudimentary, the 2-D cut outs I used for DanCoolo could emote. The story, as told by the expressions on the characters face, could be told. With the face-less 3-D models, I'm able to get something that is far more accurate to what the technical aspect of any given shot will be, but I don't feel that the animatic will give me a strong sense of how the movie is working as a narrative.

So here's a snippet of animatic from the first song in the movie, "Techno Glove-o-Love". Doctor Glamour comes out of a portal (not rendered here) unexpected by Walter, who was trying to reach another dimension to rescue his fiance. I think you get a good sense of Doctor Glamour's powers, which is kind of like if Bugs Bunny were a Jedi Knight. He summons objects to himself and teleports all over the place.

Remember, this is a crude internal communication device, only meant to be seen by myself and the crew. Of course you, dear reader, are just as important as any crew member to me, so here it is!