The Wonderful World of Color

I am very behind on my updates, but here is a first look at the first sequence with color!  Full color coming soon! 

Brief Hiatus, but back on track!

It's been a busy summer for both me and the animators, but we're back on track, and moving into the wonderful world of color!  Josh has already got started on some fantastic color animations, which I'll be posting very shortly.  For today though, the spotlight is on Mike, who did the color on the background for Scene Two! 

Big is Beautiful

Jess and I gave Mike a few comments on his sketches for the Principal's office.  One thing we agreed on is that he should have lots of BIG items in his office, mostly to hide behind when problem kids are dragged into his office. 

Mike did a rough sketch, and labelled all the big items in the office.  My personal favorite is "giant zen fountain.".  Colored background is coming next! 

A Glimpse of Scene Two

As you know, we're in the process of turning our black and white animatic of the first part of Scene 1 into a pretty, colorized version.  While that is going on, Mike has sketched some background options for the next scene, which takes place in the Principal's office. 

More Moving Pictures

This is our nearly-finished animatic, missing only the "mishap" that sets all the chaos in motion.  However!  This version DOES include an ultra close-up of our dastardly bug.  Don't ever say I never give you people anything. 

Our other animators have moved on to creating the characters and backgrounds for the next scenes. Our next steps are to:  build the polished, colorized version of the animatic for the teaser trailer and also begin work on the next scene.  Stay tuned for some color animation and new scene work coming soon! 

All dressed up...

Josh has been making more progress on the animatic, and I'll have a new video next week.  Until then, Dwight has dressed our two gals, Dusty and Alice, up in their private school girl uniforms. 

Building a Trailer

It became clear early  in the pre-production for Bug House that the best teaser trailer we can make was creating the first thirty seconds of the movie.  The team has really hit their stride and we’re getting close to having the rough animatic for the trailer done.  In the video below, the animators built on the previous animation of the Show and Tell boy droning on….and on….and on….about his Venus Fly Trap.

I’ve been getting updates from the team fast and furiously and have a backlog of art to share.  Keep an eye on this blog for updates.   

And last but not least...

Allow me to introduce our final main character...Mandy!  Mandy becomes an unexpected mentor to Dusty. I envisioned her as a perfectly ordinary teen girl with an extraordinarily welcoming face.  This is what Dwight came up with. 

I have more video of the animatic coming next Thursday, so stay tuned for more moving pictures!  

Test Animation

The team is hard at work on the big animatic, but here's our first glimpse at some test animation.  This is the first couple seconds of the film.  It's Show and Tell day, and Plant Boy is droning on and on about his venus fly trap plant.  The plant clearly has better things to do. 

Big Hair

There is a screenwriting mantra that says, “show, don’t tell.”  Basically, the more you show through character’s actions, the less you have to actually speak through dialogue.  And when you are producing a dialogue-free cartoon such as Bug House, well -- it’s your only method of communication to the audience. 

But this is where the benefit of animation comes in.   In animation you can give a non-verbal cue to a body part not generally considered emotive.  Like, for instance, hair.  Our main character Dusty has big blond pigtails, and our character animator Dwight came up with the idea to use her hair like a dog’s ears – they perk up when she’s happy, and droop when she’s angry and mad. 

In other news, we have another animator on board with the project to assemble the pieces of the animatic.   We’re always looking for more, especially those that have their own animation software.  We’ve been doing a lot of the work on this film remotely, so they don’t need to be Boston-based necessarily.  If you know someone, have them contact Jenn at bughousemovie@gmail.com

New Characters

We’re still in the process of building the animatic movie.  But for now we have two more character sketches from Dwight – the detention monitor and the school principal.  I’m pretty sure I’ve had this lady in detention….

Animatic Production Begins!

And we’re plugging away!  A couple more images to show you. 

The first is Dwight’s image for the teacher.  The look I wanted was “Beaten Down Grade School Teacher”.  He succeeded quite admirably.

The second is Mike’s colored background of the first shot.  We’re still finalizing it, but as far as color scheme, this reminds me perfectly of a grade school classroom. 

The third is placement of props and characters into the first scene. 

It’s a-coming! More updates next week! 

And so it begins...

Bug House has officially moved from pre-production to production!  Jess and I met over waffle fries, and came up with a plan to animate the first 30 seconds of Bug House to use as a trailer.   First step is creating an animatic, which is a video of still images from the story filmed together to show roughly how the final product will look.  The animators are hard at work on it right now. 

To kick off production, one of our illustrators, Michael Lawrence, did some fantastic work on storyboarding.  Here’s a small snippet of his storyboards below.  I’ll post a few more in the weeks to come. 

Bug Mug Shots

Jess sent me a couple more sketches of our dastardly bug. She has apparently named this beast "Fuzzball".  If this whole thing works out, I think we're going to have to go with Fuzzball Productions for our enterprise. 

Bug: Prettified

You know what’s really cool about doing an animated film?  You can physically see progress.

As a writer, you don’t see progress; you feel it.  A paragraph “feels” right or a line of dialogue “feels” natural. But the black words on the white page in Draft One look an awful lot like the black words on the white page in Draft Seventeen. And there is a good chance your “feelings” are far too kind to tell you that Draft 17 isn't noticeably better than Draft One anyway. 

But the progress of animation is unmistakable, as it evolves right in front of your eyes.

As I have mentioned, Bug House is essentially the story of a kid’s pet bug.  And while I was busy eating Christmas pierogis, trying to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne, and playing far too much Wii Jeopardy with my family, Jess was hard at work taking this rough sketch she drew of our bug: 

and turning it into this concept sketch. 

There is more “bug” concept art coming, and I will post when I receive.  I will also be meeting with the other artists this month and will have some storyboards to post.   Happy New Year, all!