Pandora Preproduction: Refined Previs

Taking into account many of the critiques I got over the last week I refined the story a bit. The previs is still fairly rough but is sufficient to show the shots in sequence.

I received a lot of good advice over the week but ultimately I decided to keep the actions simple. My weakest part is my character animation so I decided to minimize that aspect without ruining the story. The biggest change was keeping the character on the initial part of the dock after he releases the shadow army instead of returning to the end of the dock and continuing to fish. Instead he watches as another villager runs by in fear from a shadow monster. This is what prompts him to kick the box off the dock. The end closes with the fisherman looking at the "no fishing" sign that was just revealed by the shockwave of a big explosion.

I had received some good feedback about modifying the story so that the fisherman was unaware the whole time of what he unwittingly unleashed upon the world. However, upon reflection on how long I would need to complete the character animation I soon realized that it was not within the scope of this term.

PREVIS

Crazy Fairy

Alchemy is such a sweet program. I never seem to use it in my usual work flow of paintings or illustration. Since I am generally so busy, if its not in the usual work flow I don't get around to it. I've written about Alchemy before and in fact the header of this blog was created using Alchemy. The strength of the program is randomized sketching. After using it a bit though it tends to get predictable and less uncontrollable. Good thing or not I'm not sure. Anything I've done from it definitely has an "Alchemy" look to it. This one I drew in alchemy then brought it into Photoshop to add some more depth. (ahhh texture overlays, where would I be without you)

I was following links over at CA and ended up at alchemy. If you are into drawing, or even if you aren't, this is freakin sweet. Go there and download it. Basically its a sketching randomizer. Andrew Jones describes it really well in the video they have there. In it, he is using the mic tool but theres a good selection of different tools that are really cool. Sometimes I get really uptight in my work and this is just the thing to shake it up. Here is one of the sketches I did in Alchemy and then imported into photoshop for some expansion. Its not particularly exciting but the process was lots of fun. Anyway, try alchemy out and see what I mean.