I'm so glad to introduce you to "The Snore", a new short movie currently in production..
After taking a short break after finishing the short movie "Arturo e il Gabbiano" (Arthur and the seagull), I rearranged my ideas and I've focused on some goals for the future.
Everything revolves around the "Make it Simple" idea.
The Snore was born on these foundations: a short movie, which can be a good exercise where to put on in practice many of the advice and criticisms received after Arturo and the Seagull.
First of all, among a range of different ideas, at the end I focused the attention on an idea that could be developed in a streamlined way and that from the premises it could have comic and visual cues (for this I refer you to the reading of J.Vorhouse ).
Basically, the short film will have a duration of 2 min maximum on one set. The idea is to create a character, the pirate who wants to appear to others but also to himself to be a great captain, and a parrot who, with simple parrot gestures, does nothing but remind him that he is a fairly naive pirate and, after all, everything happen to him.
After drafting the idea and deciding more or less the comic structure of the gag, I asked my friend Davide Ippolito to "adjust" the comic shot a little, having him much more experience on comic writing.
From this initial idea, we started with:
a first rudimentary storyboard
first sketches of the characters
Pirate modeling
First I made several sketches of the pirate (I made these on my ideas notebook)
After that I started to put down more precise shapes and also tried to draw in Blender with the Grease Pencil. Here a screenshot and below also the .blend file with the Pirate drawing
Download here the .blend file -> DOWNLOAD
I modeled the Pirate by recycling a few pieces of Arturo's model the face, the hands, the pant: cut and readjusted some meshes.
After that, thanks to the new Cloth Brush it was very easy to add wrinkles to the shirt and trousers.
I have to thank Nicolas D’Amore for some of the ideas on the model
In fact, he suggested me that I should alternate the 'defects' of the character such as wooden lego on the right, the hook on the left and the bandage of the head to the right, so as to have more possibilities in animation.
Also the idea of the wooden leg with a plunger for bath is by Nicolas.
Below is a turnaround in A Pose of the model made with Eevee.
After this phase it is useful, through screenshots or renderings, to redraw some corrective lines on the render.
Moving on from the hand drawing, in fact I can better understand what goes and what does not go in the shape of the model.
It is also usefull in this process to use silhouettes to control the general shape
Finally a first pose of presentation of the Character made by Nicolas.
We used a rigify but we would like to point out that this is not the final rig at all.
...next steps
We decided to focus the production on a single shot which should theoretically be ready in May (for the BIC- Italian Blender Conference).
After that we will focus on roughly finishing the short for the BConf in Amsterdam.
Next steps will be:
Pirate rig (Nicolas D’Amore)
Parrot modeling
Planning the shot (sketches, reference etc ..)
Stay tuned .... !!!