The King

Okay! Muscle man's scrapped. There was something I just didn't like about his character. I may revisit him in a later project, but I'd rather this project kept chugging along, instead of stalling at anything needlessly complicated.

Good news, though! I finished animating a little piece of test animation for 'The Wall'. I wanted to see how the King would behave and how I could visualise my vision of his character - a large, but childlike, King, who means well but is a burden to his people.

Also, I've been figuring a few things out regarding Adobe Premiere. It turns out I can import raw SWF files straight into Premiere without having to export them as a video first. It cuts down on rendering time, and minimises loss of image quality due to compression. The downside of this is that you only get to see the King as an animated GIF for now.

Sorry!

A change of pace

Taking a break from all the Basil Fawlty work before I turn into the man and start shouting at people for disturbing me - "Can't you see I'm trying to inbetween an arc here! No! You're too busy poking your noses into other people's Flash documents, looking for something to complain about, aren't you?" - I've done a bit more work on another character I'm going to animate, a generic muscle man.

His design's developed over time. His face is much more geometric and exaggerated - weirdly resembling Vladimir Putin! - and his pectoral muscles have become more... breeze-block-ey. I like him.

I'm not sure how he'll animate. It might be an exercise in restraint. Very limited facial expressions, but powerful poses. A good exercise in anatomy, too. Should be fun.

So yes. All's good. Nothing... Fawlty... to report this time. OH MERCY

Basil Update

I've fleshed out some more of the movement, and gotten to grips with some of the facial animation. Looks pretty nice so far.

Here's a GIF of the best bit, as the video quality's a bit poor:

Keying out the movement

I've found the perfect audio clip from Fawlty Towers - the bit where Basil loses his temper in front of all the guests - and I've started keying out the movement.
Here.

More Basil

Here are a few more sketches of Basil Fawlty.
After hours and hours of drawing this man, I've reached the point I was so desperate to get to - the point where I can draw him without even thinking. Of course, the animated Basil will be much simpler, but it will be based on the same sets of instructions I now instinctively give myself when drawing him. Hopefully, when it comes to the animation, all I will have to think about is his performance.

An attempt at some sort o performance template.

The montage of actions at the top of this picture weren't meant to be a sequence, but they marry together so well I might use them as templates for keyframes in a separate bit of non-spoken character animation.

Basil's cracked! I really want the face on the left to make an appearance, in some form, in my final showreel.

The bottom two images here are among my favourites. They pretty much sum up my enthusiasm and how good I want this to look. Animating something with this much detail is unlikely, but it's nicer having to rein in your ideas than starting with something that needs improvement.

The darkest Basil here was a test to see if I could replicate the roundedness of vector imagery in biro. Trying it the other way around - sketchy expressiveness in Flash - is tricky, but I wanted to at least reach that middle point so I had something to work with, something to enhance my Flash drawing. This drawing helps provide that link.

By the time I'd filled this page, I more or less knew I'd reached the point where Basil was coming instinctively to me. I was in a pub when I did this.

Basil Turnarounds

With a character like Basil, there is going to be quite a lot of animation, so it's important for me to have a solid understanding of how his cartoon form is going to be, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of construction.

I always intended the character to be fairly simple, to make animation easy, but still be definitively Basil. As demonstrated in the previous post, I started by being quite faithful to John Cleese's features at first, creating fairly detailed studies. I then worked backwards, removing superfluous details until I had a character I could animate.

Starting to turn the character around, I simplified the design. However, there were still slightly too many unnecessary details, such as the creases in his clothing and the stripes in his tie...

...so I simplified it! I also improved his stance and silhouette. His arm is thicker in profile, which suggests flatness - might remedy this.

Concept Art

Some concept art for the characters of The Wall, and further development of Basil Fawlty.

The Wall:

Basil:

For The Wall, The King is more or less established, being such a simple character, so less aesthetic development is required (there are some other concept sketches, though - watch this space). Basil, on the other hand, has to be an authentic caricature of John Cleese but simplistic enough to animate successfully.

More of the same soon!