Storyboarding is way too fun
Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 08:04 amThe RangersUnited contest is on! I spent the better part of yesterday evening doing my storyboarding for the fight entry I decided I wanted to make. I've gone back in to add some between frames already for smoothness, though I suspect I'll need to do a little bit more of that.
For filesize reasons, and so I could kind of keep each chunk of the scene in my head as a separate entity, I split it up into four pictures:
One / Two / Three / Four
Hoping to finish storyboarding tonight and start work on making the clean lineart versions of everything. Clean line art leads to color and shading, and then I can smack it all together in some non-color-losing format and ta-da, entry ahoy. No idea how long each part will take me. I kind of want to make the scene longer, too, but I don't want to make it impossible for me to complete this in the amount of time I'm allotted for the contest, either.
Theoretically, we will finally start getting paid today. I'm hoping they're not lying to us.
Last night we caught the latest Adventure Time!. All the usual awesomes and creepies apply, I enjoyed it. We also watched The Weatherman, which has Nicholas Cage and Michael Caine.
It's listed as a dramatic comedy, but it wasn't really funny enough to count as a comedy (whether intentionally or not) and the drama was mostly that Nicholas Cage's character was an unlikeable entitled douche, and we had to watch him go around being a douche. For the most part the movie was kind of boring, and I found Michael Caine's sorta-kinda-American accent to be really jarring. Part of it is that I know the guy, so I was expecting him to be Cockney. The rest is, he'd slip in and out of it so it never quite stuck.
I wouldn't really recommend the movie. It's unrelatable, for one; here's a guy making 240,000$ US who's looking to make over a million per year if he gets the raise he wants. The kinds of concerns this guy has are completely out of scope for anyone making real-people money. (You know, where even 40,000$ sounds pretty good to you? Even while knowing that you'll be taxed 30% of that.)
The other thing that bugged me was that there weren't any real consequences for the few actions that should have had consequences. We're trapped inside this self-absorbed, sort of megalomanical bubble of this guy's head, as the audience, and naturally, because it's a movie and movies tend to frame these kinds of stories in a predictable fashion, we're somehow supposed to feel sorry for him. Despite the fact that he's pretty much at fault for his personal problems, he never owns up to it; despite the fact that he assaults his wife's new boyfriend and threatens to shoot him with an arrow at one point (I should note that his hobby is archery), nobody brings him to court and says 'okay, buddy, you can't go around doing stuff like this: this is crazy people stuff.'
In response to a pedophile trying to come onto his son, he goes to the guy's house and throws shit at him, then beats on him for a bit. Mysteriously, this doesn't come back to bite him in the ass either. I guess public assault in the middle of downtown Chicago isn't a crime. Or at least, it isn't if you're a rich white guy. (Yet we as the audience are probably supposed to feel satisfied that the pedophile got what he deserved. Right? I mean, no matter how reprehensible our main character is, he's a totally swell guy because he beats up nasty pedophiles.)
It felt cheap and whiny and self-indulgent, and suffered from that thing I hate in this genre of movie. I'm an author too, I totally understand the value of having characters hold different conversations with each other simultaneously, and the value of using the same line of dialogue, rephrased, to increase the impact of what's being said. There's such a thing as doing this too much, though, and I really feel like I see that happen in movies the most.
I've also done the theater-class exercise where you're supposed to just say a phrase over and over until it loses meaning and inflection. I don't think that has a place in a movie that isn't about theater-class, particularly.
Danny says the movie was extremely similar in plot and execution to American Beauty, which I've never seen (or particularly wanted to see), if that's any aid in describing it.
The good thing about this movie: his wife doesn't get back together with him at the end. I was pretty damn worried it'd just go that route.
In nicer news, I got to chat with Elenath last night briefly. It was awesome to talk with her again! After we caught up we discussed Game of Thrones for a while. Ah, Game of Thrones. I'm looking forward to the season finale!
For filesize reasons, and so I could kind of keep each chunk of the scene in my head as a separate entity, I split it up into four pictures:
One / Two / Three / Four
Hoping to finish storyboarding tonight and start work on making the clean lineart versions of everything. Clean line art leads to color and shading, and then I can smack it all together in some non-color-losing format and ta-da, entry ahoy. No idea how long each part will take me. I kind of want to make the scene longer, too, but I don't want to make it impossible for me to complete this in the amount of time I'm allotted for the contest, either.
Theoretically, we will finally start getting paid today. I'm hoping they're not lying to us.
Last night we caught the latest Adventure Time!. All the usual awesomes and creepies apply, I enjoyed it. We also watched The Weatherman, which has Nicholas Cage and Michael Caine.
It's listed as a dramatic comedy, but it wasn't really funny enough to count as a comedy (whether intentionally or not) and the drama was mostly that Nicholas Cage's character was an unlikeable entitled douche, and we had to watch him go around being a douche. For the most part the movie was kind of boring, and I found Michael Caine's sorta-kinda-American accent to be really jarring. Part of it is that I know the guy, so I was expecting him to be Cockney. The rest is, he'd slip in and out of it so it never quite stuck.
I wouldn't really recommend the movie. It's unrelatable, for one; here's a guy making 240,000$ US who's looking to make over a million per year if he gets the raise he wants. The kinds of concerns this guy has are completely out of scope for anyone making real-people money. (You know, where even 40,000$ sounds pretty good to you? Even while knowing that you'll be taxed 30% of that.)
The other thing that bugged me was that there weren't any real consequences for the few actions that should have had consequences. We're trapped inside this self-absorbed, sort of megalomanical bubble of this guy's head, as the audience, and naturally, because it's a movie and movies tend to frame these kinds of stories in a predictable fashion, we're somehow supposed to feel sorry for him. Despite the fact that he's pretty much at fault for his personal problems, he never owns up to it; despite the fact that he assaults his wife's new boyfriend and threatens to shoot him with an arrow at one point (I should note that his hobby is archery), nobody brings him to court and says 'okay, buddy, you can't go around doing stuff like this: this is crazy people stuff.'
In response to a pedophile trying to come onto his son, he goes to the guy's house and throws shit at him, then beats on him for a bit. Mysteriously, this doesn't come back to bite him in the ass either. I guess public assault in the middle of downtown Chicago isn't a crime. Or at least, it isn't if you're a rich white guy. (Yet we as the audience are probably supposed to feel satisfied that the pedophile got what he deserved. Right? I mean, no matter how reprehensible our main character is, he's a totally swell guy because he beats up nasty pedophiles.)
It felt cheap and whiny and self-indulgent, and suffered from that thing I hate in this genre of movie. I'm an author too, I totally understand the value of having characters hold different conversations with each other simultaneously, and the value of using the same line of dialogue, rephrased, to increase the impact of what's being said. There's such a thing as doing this too much, though, and I really feel like I see that happen in movies the most.
I've also done the theater-class exercise where you're supposed to just say a phrase over and over until it loses meaning and inflection. I don't think that has a place in a movie that isn't about theater-class, particularly.
Danny says the movie was extremely similar in plot and execution to American Beauty, which I've never seen (or particularly wanted to see), if that's any aid in describing it.
The good thing about this movie: his wife doesn't get back together with him at the end. I was pretty damn worried it'd just go that route.
In nicer news, I got to chat with Elenath last night briefly. It was awesome to talk with her again! After we caught up we discussed Game of Thrones for a while. Ah, Game of Thrones. I'm looking forward to the season finale!
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