Long time no post (sorry)

So, okay it’s July and I was supposed to premiere Nivadahmandi in June…
It’s my first animated series!

SUE ME!

For the last two months, production on Nivadah was held up (choked, & drowned in a river) by a side project for the NFWF.
I was not only art director, but lead animator on one of the characters with the most screen time. All my free time was spent working out issues with that project or helping other artist on the project with thier scenes.
I never even got to glance at the turnarounds for the characters in Nivadah, much less animate them.

And honestly...

it’s my first attempt at doing a project of this scale and I have to admit, while few…
there were some loose ends.
Mostly everything is under control and I should be posting some actual finished (or close to finished) scenes next week.
I’ve changed so many scenes recently and that is what keeps pushing back the episode one release.
I’m finally getting to sleep at night (the entire night) and so my brain works properly once again, meaning I have creative ideas and thoughts coming to me nonstop.
I’m back to the old me 100% (scary)

I’ve only been animating for just over a year so… I shouldn’t expect to animate at the speed or skill of say the guys from Studio 4°C (Mindgame, Tekkon Kinkreet, Genius Party [beyond], Gainax (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, FLCL) ,
or C’MON…Production IG
(GITS, Blood: the last vampire, and that animated sequence in Kill Bill)

I am however, working on Nivadah.
It's coming along tiny scene by tiny scene.
You never really get the full complex scale of something as seemingly simple as a thirty minute animated show, until your knee deep in it.
I'm not going for thirty minutes, but just the few minutes I'm working at are made up of several tiny seconds worth of scenes.
SEVERAL.

I'm thinking episode one won't be ready until sometime later in July, then episode two will come late August.
I think that this is a doable schedule.

So to tide you over until episode on is over, I've posted some background pics and screen shot of the process.

YAY!

cut me some slack.
not only am I one man...but I'm only human.

RESTRICTED!

I've added some slight updates to the website. Mostly in the map section. I promise I'll update the map often and add more pics for your visual enjoyment. So far I have only been happy with a few of the finished pics, so all the work set for the initial launch was scrapped. But the map will be updated as the series progresses, that's something I have always wanted to see on a site. A map that actually shows the progression of the characters involved in the story as they explore their world. Altross like a few of the areas on the map as you will soon realize are restricted to humans due to their overwhelming population of Impea. No one can get around in these areas without suffering serious bodily harm.
(and by bodily harm, I mean death and dismemberment.)

So, the Impea eh....

The Impea are vicious little buggers, and they're not all little. The original concept for them involved tentacles and slime, but that was definitely going to be an animation nightmare... not to mention really silly looking. So I decided to try and create a new design for them and naturally I started thinking about arthropods, ants to be more specific.

I wanted a bold, strong design so I went with marker comp silhouettes. I needed them to read as menacing as possible, either that or other worldly. After a couple of pages I really started getting a good idea of the variety that can be used in the Impea.

I definitely didn't want them all to be bipedal. It's hard as a character designer to get away from what you see every day. (that being humans.) Some of the Impea I designed apparently have only one leg, which makes them move about like a pogo. I know it sounds slightly amusing, but in my mind I could see the horror of this creature madly hopping after you hungry for a kill.

Not all these designs will be used, some are just clunky looking. I do like the idea of some Impea being able to fly (or at least float) That to me makes them a little more scary. Ultimately I want the Impea to be as unusual as possible, like so much of the insect and sub insect (is that a word?) world that we take for granted. I looked through pages of electron microscope pictures and images of insects and a few lobsters as well. I still have yet to decide on a final set of colours to go with the textures of their exoskeleton bodies.

Marker comps... so, many, MARKER COMPS!
In the end I don't feel that they are creepy enough, but maybe once they have some sound added to them it will make them a little more intense. I actually have to do a Impea "pencil" test with sound. So look for that post soon.

new year, new logo, new site!

Welp, it's been a long while since I last updated this blog. I've been updating my "normal" blog smars unlimited and neglecting this one. So, I guess I should say...happy new year? "sigh" I have been working very hard on Nivadah, I created a new version of the logo (see, uptop). It's more intricate and better developed. I've been story boarding and doing the backgrounds for all the upcoming "shots". I've even been doing some advertising for the June 2009 premiere of episode 1. I don't want to make too big a deal out of it as I don't even know how the people will receive it, and it's not like I'm launching full half hour episodes. (I wish I had that kind of time.) Speaking of launching, The official Nivadahmani website is up. go to nivadah.com to baste your eyes in all the flashlike glory.


It's a bit glitchy and I have to go through the innards of the site to figure it out. I just started making Flash sites this year (cut me some slack) I have to upload more content to it soon, maybe weekly I'll do this. I'm mostly going to focus on the Emmothan map until the series starts.


Oh, and the world is called Emmothan not Emmotah like I posted earlier. It was the original name I created for the world, but I wrote it on a scrap of paper, then lost that paper. Forced to rely on my terrible memory, I wrote what I thought was the name I had come up with. WRONG. Close, but wrong. It's like one letter short and switched around, big whoop.


So, I'm going to post some Impea sketches soon, and if you don't know what an Impea is...maybe you should go over to the site and look it up in the Definitions section of the Story of Nivadahmandi. hmm? GO NOW!