The 2nd Character.

Hey there guys, been fairly busy, by which I mean I have been procrastinating.

But yeah, first year of college is almost over and that will probably give me A LOT of free time, not that I don't have enough free time already I just never spend it productively, and if I know I don't have college work to be stressing over then all shall be good.

( I had actually just written out below here about the main character based on me but decided to delete it since it spoils the whole point, basically there is a secret hidden within this animation that no one but me and my absolute closest friends would know, if you have read my thread on moulding minefield then you would know but that is all I am ever going to say about this little secret, also the secret within the animation is kind of personal, and is basically something I put in there for my self and the people who know me the best, the rest of the animation, story, characters is for you guys, the audience!)

This drawing is enough for me to get the general idea for the character in my head using my own style of sculpting, except it'll be much darker because I can't draw like that haha.

Well, I had planned on this being a big post with all those spoilers but I decided to cut them out!


See you all in the next post!

A New Project has been begun!

Hey there guys! I finished up the Test Compilation just the other day and I have now decided to start working on my next major project since OGVTD (One Guy Vs The Dead).

I had a hard time deciding which of my 3 or 4 ideas I was going to expand upon and eventually make my next animation project, but I have now decided. A few days ago I picked out this idea and wrote 2 different possible stories for the idea, they were only very brief but they made sense to me anyway.
Today I started thinking about how the heck I am going to get this project moving, I always find it hard to get going with a project, especially when choosing all your shots when doing a storyboard. I thought that the best place to start would be by designing the characters, there are only 3 characters, at least now there is.

As you can, they're very basic, and stiff looking (I apologize for that, I can not draw poses. Full stop). The head at the bottom looks a little too feminine for some reason, probably the eyes.

This character is loosely based off of my appearance and is sort of like an over "cartoonified" version of my self. His personality will also be based off of my own, he will be like me, but in stop-motion form!

I made a big mistake in my WIP thread on Moulding Minefield by spoiling the whole point of this animation, one thing I am worried about is that the majority of my viewers are fairly young and might not be as open minded as someone a little older, an adult or my self.

When I release it, after seening some peoples interpretation on the animation, I'll write up on here what it is actually about and why I made it.

All I can say for now without spoiling anything (Like I did on the forum) is that this will be a very personal animation, this is going to be tricky for me to pull off though as I've never done anything like this before, this one has to look completely different in terms of style other wise it going to be hard to take it seriously.

All right so in the next post, I'll either have a start on the story board or a rough sculpt of the character. Oh and before I go, this one is going to take a long time to finish, I have about one or 2 days a week to work on the project and not only that I don't always feel working on it.

The Test Compilation Thing.

All right, today I'm going to start this sucker. A lot of what this is going to be is me just messing around with what I can and can't do with animation up to now. I want to finally get my characters jumping, full on fighting and some kind of acrobatics. Actually, fighting isn't such a big deal since I don't have any fight related animations planned until the next instalment in the One Guy Vs: series. I have a lot planned for that in the future but for now I'm leaving it alone as I'm quite honestly sick of it after how long it took to do, I'll talk about that later in the post actually.

So anyway, the test reel, compilation thing is something I want to do regularly. It's something I am just going to make by using practise footage, whenever I animate something it'll get thrown into the compilation. As you probably know, I like to post everything I animate because I like you guys to see how I am improving but now I feel like I need to be entertaining you. When I made "BagiClaymations", the whole idea behind the channel was just something for me to look back on and to see how well I have improved, I used the channel as a way to show you what I have been doing and to hopefully receive some critique. There aren't many other younger animators out there who post everything they do, at least as far as I know, but now I actually want to entertain people as well as provide some kind of progress so that's why I'm creating the test compilation, as an easy source of entertainment and good practise and progress.

So from here on, I am here to entertain you rather than update you. The channel is changing, if I start a project and it turns out crap then it's going straight into the test compilation, anything I would usually just put straight up on the channel will be thrown into the compilation. I want bigger projects to eventually be more frequent, OGVTD was my first successful project in the 5 or 6 years of animating I have done, but the amount of project I started and never finished is ridiculous!

All right, time for some quick new on OGVTD, back in November 2010 when I first came up with the character I said i wanted him to have his own series which would be my first major project, the series would simply be One Guy vs whatever random thing comes to me, the two I originally thought of was the dead and Hell, Dead being the first one that I thought of though.
Then much later on in around October or November 2011 when I made the 3rd version of Guy, I got the whole story line idea with the whole backstory and prequel type thing going on. As much as I like having a story and such, I think I'll stick to the VS series with Guy versus random things, each one being different in terms of style and setting rather than just the desk.
BUT! That will have to wait for a while now, I have all the time in the world to animate things but I'm putting Guy to rest like I said earlier. I suspect that he will be making a return some time next year in a new fight versus something other than the dead, the whole story concept is going to be them main inspiration for the other project I have been talking about which I wanted to write a deep story for.

Phew, that's quite enough writing for now, I think you get the idea. Guy returns in 2013, Test compilations will be my new way of showing progress.

If you made it this far then thanks for reading! See you in the next blog post! :)

What's Going on As of Now 3.0

Well, i had planned to get personal in this blog post but i don't think that is necessary to be honest with you since i don't really think anyone cares what I'm feeling right now, you guys just want to know what im doing animation wise!

Anyways, that project i talked about in the last blog post is going to pushed back a little since i have been stopped by an invisible wall which is trying its best to take a big dump all over my creativity, i haven't animated anything since i finished OG and to be honest with you, that kind of worries me in a way. When i stop to take a short break that often leads onto this phase where i can't think of any ideas. Taking a break is the worst thing for me to do when it comes to animation!

Enough of that for now, onto the project! All right so i already talked about this project and what i wanted to do with it and now i have decided to push it back so i can concentrate on it when i get my head straight and get all my creative juice back, so instead of working on that project I'll be starting a new one similar to the weekly animations, I'll be producing a practise footage reel/compilation type thing, rather than the weekly 5 second or so videos i will be compiling practise footage and test footage into one long video. Hopefully this gets me pumped up and back into the flow of things, unfortunately, there wont be as many videos this time around like before so i'll have to keep you all posted on the blog and through facebook, twitter and youtube bulletins!

Now when i said i was going to get personal with this post, all i really wanted to talk about was some personal health problems that have been getting in my way, i wanted to speak up and get some crap off my chest but there is no real need, all you need to know is that I'm having some problems with some health scares and personal problems, no need to go into detail about it to be honest with you, unless you really want me to?

Enough of that boring old stressful crap, what really matters is my favourite hobby and how im going to eventually expand it into a living! 

See you guys in the next blog post and thank you for taking your time reading!

OGVTD finished, so what's next? (Quick Review of Finished Animation)

As you probably know One guy vs the dead is now out of the way and fully completed, with this project over it has given me a load of space to think of my next project.

The whole idea behind OGVTD was that it would be a high speed action fight sequence between a bad ass character and a bunch of un dead guys, later i thought it would be even better if the bad ass unleashed hell on the undead creatures via some kind of demonic transformation. So anyway the whole project DID indeed turn out just the way i want it, but nothing is ever perfect. If i was to remake this the first thing i would do is make a load more zombies and increase the length of the animation by at least 3 minutes.
One thing that annoyed me about animating Guy was that he was hard to move around, his arms and head were easy to animate but his legs were a little too thick and chunky, might not have looked like it but newplast gets hard when it's not being played with or under heat so that made it so when i moved his legs there would be a chance the legs will crack, when they get hot they tend to squash down when i move them so you have to be ready to take Guy off the set and fix him up (Thank god for onion skin!).

So basically, whilst Guy was a very simple little character he was actually a pain in the backside to animate, thankfully he kept his upper body shape when animating, which brings me to my next point! Guys upper body was hard to twist around, during some shots i wanted his body to twist around to look towards the zombie but the clay refused to cooperate with me, when i would do this he will lose his shape which means taking him off set to fix up again.

Now for the zombies, which was probably my favourite part to animate. These little guys, believe or not, gave me no trouble to animate at all. They had small stubby feet and thick arms, since zombies are lifeless you wont see them do much beside flail their arms around and move forward and these little guys did this perfectly! They were really fun to animate but it's a shame i didn't get as much gore in as i hoped, and yes that brings me to my next point. Gore. I never knew how animators did all the gore business in their claymations, leehardcastle is a good example of what level of gore i was after but i couldn't actually figure out how to animate it without wasting my valuable clay, i didn't want to use ketchup or fake blood because it would ruin the clay but i had to use the red Sculpey 3 which stains other colours and especially my hands. This would be frustrating because i would get red on my hands and then i would handle Guy without realising i just got a big old red stain on his leg or something, this stuff get's really hard and crusty too so it would crumble when i handle the zombies who have all the blood on them and it left tons of sculpey crumbs on the desk which then get into Guys feet or in his body!

Well I'm going to leave it there for this review type thing so now onto my next project details!

All right so some of you wanted to know what's coming up next, I've talked about this in previous blog posts but this time I'm going to give you even more information! So anyway, OGVTD was an animation to test my ability to animate a high speed fight scene and to animate camera movements and plenty of angles, this next project will be testing my ability to tell an in depth story. Well im not too sure about an IN DEPTH story but we will see, one of my main strengths that I find is story telling.

I also said that very little will be released about this project, it's going to be one of those "You'll have to wait and see!" type things since it's such a story heavy project. I had originally planned to use a set but have decided not to and will save that for my next project. (Phew, im saying project a little too often here) A new thing ill be doing with the characters (Hopefully) is some dialogue, telling a story can be tricky without dialogue but to make things a little challenging there will only be very little dialogue!

For now that's all i want to say, sorry for the essay length blog post so i congratulate you for making it this far!

See you in the next post hopefully with some kind of pictures or maybe even a storyboard?!

1 Last bit to animate!

Just finished animating the extra scene AND the transformation scene which leaves only the last fight sequence, boy am i pumped to animate this!

I hope to finish this bit off tomorrow and finish this project for good, it may have been a quick fun project to work on but due to my lack of time during week days it's took much longer, can't forget all of the changes ive made to the project either!

I can hopefully finish editing and upload it tomorrow but if not then it will be the next day or even on Tuesday since i don't have much free time on a Monday.

Also, R.I.P.

Guy MkIII will always be in our hearts, you served me well on this animation project, now may you rest in piece..

So yeah, haha, no more Guy!

2 Scenes left to go.

All right, this is going to be quick blog post to let you guys know that i have just finished animating the second scene for OGVTD, it turned out very good, and bloody!

There are only 2 scenes left to go now, one of which i have just added in at the last minute. I don't want to hype it up or go into detail about it since it wont be anything special, just a way of adding a little extra to the over all run time of the animation. The very last scene is of course the demon chaos scene, this one might be hard to animate, well todays animation session was a very hard one, the particular actions i animated were a pain in the back side to animate, Guy kept wanting to fall over whilst his feet became all soft and mushy, thankfully it isn't present in the animation!

Some of you might be wondering what i have in mind for the next project, i can assure you that it isn't anything to do with OGVTD, but the sequel/prequel thing i had planned will be a project for 2013 or even later, i may have covered this in the last blog post but i have a list of ideas in a note pad document on my computer which have a butt load of potential if i ever get this project finished. I don't remember any off the top of my head since they were just very random ideas that came to me whilst i was using the computer or playing a video game, i just typed up a quick brief of the idea that came to me before i forgot the idea.

Next project, i want to work with a small minimalistic set with 2 characters rather than 1, a story of some kind and maybe some voice work and lip syncing.