Opening Title

Here's the Opening Title for my graduate thesis animation. I hand drew the type, which I had based off of BorisBlackBloxx.



You can download BorisBlackBloxx for free from: Dafont

Hermit Crab Character

So I started to rework how I was going to depict the crab characters during the ocean floor scene. At first I thought I was just going to use these plastic figurines I had photographed but I don't think they were meshing with the overall style of piece. This is what I've come up with instead, a construction/tissue paper crab. There is still some more work to be down to it, like give a bit more dimensionality to the claws and legs but this is basically it.
Here's the crab in a modified style frame. I think he fits in much better with the overall look of the piece.

StoryReel

So I've started to add in some finished and not so finished art work into my animatic and am in the process of turning it into a storyreel.

Below the Surface(In progress story reel) from Mike Moreno on Vimeo.

Behind the Scenes

So I thought I would post a bunch of behind the scene photos of my production.

Making what is hopefully the one and only model boat that I will ever need to make. Above that is everything for my Hermit Crab character.

The following photos are all of my make shift photo studio that I had set up in my living room for a few days, much to the dismay of my girlfriend.
Photographing the model boat.

Photographing a plastic hermit crab figurine that I thought I might be able to use.

That's 10lbs of sand right there that I was photographing to use in my ocean floor scene. It took just about a day to set it up, photograph it and clean it up. I ended up however using a scan of 180 grit sandpaper, which took me a minute to scan and retouch, for my ocean floor. Oh well.

I thought this was actually pretty clever. I needed some shots of plastic bags kind of blowing in the wind/floating in water. So I tied a plastic bag to a fan using fishing line and photographed it.

I had my girlfriend photograph me holding a fishing pole in this set up.

Updates coming soon

Check back tomorrow for a bunch of updates to my progress!!!!!