Shot 2

This was our second establishing shot that Oly did for the Cat and Rat. We still needed to work on lighting because we had some issues with it messing with the textures.

It was a very simple shot but we wanted a nice establishing shot to show off our environment.

Shot 1

This is one of the first establishing shots of the main characters the Cat and Rat. I did the really quick animation for this shot. It was then that we discovered that this cat rig could not lie down, nor could it bend its head properly.

We also had a problem rendering the characters in Vray. So for this shot they weren't rendered in Vray whilst we tried to sort out as to why they weren't rendering properly. When rendered in Vray the cat and rat just disappeared.

We were still working out kinks with these renders, Vray proved a lot of hassle but it was the only way we could render with textures and have a thick line outline for the effect we wanted.

Problems....so many problems

I cannot begin to list off the problems we had. I think we've spent more time problem solving rather than making the damn film.

To name a few:

-couldn't get Vray working on my Maya
-couldn't open the environment without severe lag
-cat kept crashing nearly every time I opened it

This was becoming bothersome and more hassle than it was worth, I couldn't animate the main character. I couldn't open the main environment to animate within, this wasn't so much of a problem as my animations could have been imported into the scene via someone else's laptop.

It was strange that the Rat and Ox rig were fine, whereas the Cat was causing so much trouble. Its probably all the times we kept updating the cat and not deleting history?

Storyboards

I never had any official story boards, all the scenes I drew out I put straight into the animatic, rather than setting them out in a story board first. Thinking back on it I probably should have layed them out in story boards first.

After my animatics, Oly and Sarah went through my work to see what we could take from the story whist still keeping the plot.

Sarah drew up some story boards:-

They kept some of the shots I had originally done and built upon them, removing unnecessary scenes so to keep the audience from getting bored.

Oly then re did a new animatic.

Animatic redraft

This is the second shorter animatic.

The previous one was too long and the audience lost interest before it finished, so we shortened the script and screen play and re recorded the voice over so that it was more consistent.

James Tomkins re did the narration for me, this animatic was far shorter than the previous one but there are still a few pacing issues, we needed to try and shorten the story without losing any of the crucial plot points. This proved far more difficult that anticipated.

The main points we needed to keep in the story were:

-establish the Cat and Rat are friends at the beginning
-establish the race and its prize
-make sure the audience know that the Rat pushes the Cat into the river
-show that to this day the cat and rat are enemies (due to the rat tricking the cat)

These I considered the more important points to the story as it is mainly a story about the order of the zodiac and why the cat does not appear, and as to why cats and rats do not like each other.

I admitted to not being very god at animatics, I have a million ideas for it I just have poor execution when it comes to these things.

Animatic

This was the first rough draft of the animatic I drew up.

I have come to the conclusion that animatics are not my forte but I wanted to try and give them a go. This animatic was merely to sort our shots and the script.

James Waters did the voice over for this animatic, I just needed a rough dialogue track as I needed the narration to work out what shots went where.

Ox

Originally James was in charge of the Ox's character design whilst I was busy doing the animatics. But after being told that James drawings were not professional enough, I offered to do the OX so that he could concentrate on re designing the Jade Emperor.

I went for a very simple design as the Ox is only a side character and merely a "boat" for our main 2 characters. So I went with the traditional musk Ox (I hope to never draw another Ox again).