While my project goal is to complete an animation a week, that does not mean it will take only 1 week to make every animation. While most of the work will take place during that week, I will probably brainstorm and layout ideas beforehand, to help get an idea of what to do before I dive into it. Considering the amount of work that will be involved with a single animation in a week, along with keeping up my workload with my clients and working on web comics and preparing to submit applications to various colleges (not to mention the ever-present distraction of video games), I will have my hands full every week. However, I do have time to work on brain storming, which for me works best when i can throw ideas off of someone else and get ideas back.
This is exactly what my brother and I do. We have done this for his comic idea, which I have started to draw and (with any luck) will be ready to post the beginning of the new year. Well we are also going to be doing this for the weekly project. In fact, this works out really well for both of us. With all these ideas going around in our heads, not to mention the ideas from both my sisters and my wife and friends, we need to brain storm these and attack each one we like the most. In the past, we considered making blogs or podcasts (titled "Hixonitis, have you caught it yet"... not that catchy actually), but they always fell through when real life took over. Well I am tired of these things never happening. SO, I am taking the initiative to just start it. And for my family, this works very well to brain storm off each other. My sister is full of clever and witty ideas, my other sister has notebooks full of her own ideas (usually in drawing and comic form), and me and my brother... well you see he is the writer, and I am the visual artist. He can put any story into a writer's perspective, and I can visually layout the series of events and such (like camera angles and layout). I am a very visual person, and he is very verbal, so combining the two works really well for us.
And this is what we did last night. Since we are no longer living close together, we have to chat via AIM, which works well since my iPhone is almost always logged in. Before our brain storming session devolved into penis jokes and wise cracks (don't think I'm kidding on this), we did come up with some good ideas. Usually our sessions end in a chaotic mess of jokes and off-topic explorations, but while we are still focused on the project at hand, we can come up with a lot in a short time.
What did we come up with? Well I'm not going to just say them all. But I will say that we have several ideas for an ongoing theme, with existing characters from the Tangent Artist web comic group we are part of. That is not to say all of these animations will be directly related to Tangent Artists, but we are planning to use some of these existing characters (which are caricatures of us) to better visualize the events and jokes of some of these ideas. There will be many that will not involves these characters at all, but we will be featuring a series of them as well. We also worked on future ideas, and fleshing out some more details on the first project.
As it stands right now, we have a little more fleshing out to do, such as story boarding, which will be the first step here since we know what all the characters will look like already.
I will be posting all the details once they are worked out later this weekend, or at least by Monday. I will also be posting some of the story boards, character designs, animation tests, and maybe even photographs as well as I work on them. Look forward to all the crazy happenings and insane deadlines I will put myself through, and please enjoy the animations and posts. See you all at the start, in only 3 days!
And wish me luck! ;)
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