Casting casualties and mapping mishaps

We're moving forward with the project - sort of. Like any production, we've had our share of difficulties and issues, and we're slowly getting them sorted out.

A major change has occurred in our casting. The characters need a wardrobe change, and remapping the characters we selected has been...challenging. We've had to bench a couple of our characters, and we're going with one rig for all three parts, with appropriate changes in maps, clothing, and stature so we can tell them apart from each other.

We continue to be grateful for the generosity and assistance we've received from the guys who built the rigs, and they'll all still show up in the credits once we're done. Right now, though, we've got to get going on the animation - the semester's moving fast, and we need to crank out some footage.

The call sheet...

In order to expedite production and keep the focus on the animation, rather than modeling and rigging issues, the team decided to use pre-rigged characters that are freely available on the web for anyone to use. Just to make sure everything was in order, I contacted the creators of the character rigs, told them of our plans, and asked permission to use their rigs in the short.

I'm happy to report that all three creators got back to me within 24 hours with their enthusiastic permission to use their characters. So our cast is now set; the players are:

"Alfred," created by Rodri Torres. Rodri is in Spain, so "Alfred" gives our cast an international flavor...


"Max," created by James Hunt.


And finally, "Bloke," created by Jason Baskin.


All three artists will be appropriately credited when the film is done, but I wanted to mention them here too. We're grateful for their generosity and support of student filmmakers.

Animatics

So we've been meeting for three weeks now. So far, we've pitched ideas, selected one, and begun the storyboarding/animatic process. We took a pass at the storyboard, and spent most of last week's meeting fixing the issues that we didn't see the first time through. The second set of boards showed up in my mailbox yesterday, and today I put together our second pass animatic. It still needs some work on the timing, but I think the story's shaping up nicely. Keep your eyes peeled; we'll have the animatic up here soon.

Follow our progress...

"Friends Like Mime" is a short animated film project being produced by 3D animation students at Cañada College in Redwood City, California. We've set up this blog to track production, post work in progress, and give the animators a place to share their thoughts on the project. The participants in this project are:

Animators:
Courtney Caldwell
Tony Hargrove
Chelsea Hiatt Farley
Lisa Roecks
Alan Wong

Faculty advisor:
Paul Naas