12th of May to the 16th of May

This week I have been able to completely dedicate to making the 3D blockout. It’s going really well because of Anton taking on China now. I’ve received the China file from Anton this week and it looks lovely, much better than my version of China. I’m so glad he took that on and it took a whole weight off of my shoulders. I was also really pleased to hand over Paris to Josie this week as now I don’t have to worry too much about that either.

I had originally planned to ink in China in blue ink so that it would look like those white and blue China plates but Anton's version is much nicer. Here is my started lineart before Anton took over.

I have received the final copy of Paris from Josie too over this weekend which i'm really happy about although i wanted the colours changed a little so Andrew said he'd fiddle with that a little.

I also over heard Mike Hirsh saying that the Eifel Tower was horribly out of proportion so i have changed that and put it behind the layer of trees. I think it looks more believable now. Thank God i decided to do everything on seperate layers in preperation for After Effects.

The blockout is going well and i've had to learn to put IK handles onto George's rig in his arms so that when we attach him to the bike we can parent his hands to the bike's handles and his arms will move as they would in real life. This makes the whole process much easier as if i hadn't made the IK handles and parented his hands i would have had to key every frame for each animation on the bike. Dave very kindly made the bike for me but i put the Ik handles on myself.

In this blockout i've been setting up all the cameras. They may change before we finish the final film. However on some it has not just been a matter of placing the camera but actually changing the focal length on it too. In this shot the stamp lands in the road. We wanted to show the house in the background but still have the stamp close to the lens so i had to play with the focal length to make this effect work.

This week i also managed to draw the images for the beginning of the film that Andrew wanted to put in. The idea was that we would begin on a picture frame and see a couple of photos the first being the stamp collector, George and his assumed wife outside a very nice neat cottage. the second of him and her in a wheel chair indicating that she had fallen ill. They both hold stamp collections in these photos to show it was something they did together. The last photo however is of him alone holding two collections to suggest that she has died. Morbid i know but we wanted to show that he did have someone once and he cared about her but hes become lonely and let the cottage fall into a mess.

Here are the pictures.

HEre is the animatic so far