New Project

I've just started a new project - an animated silent film, set to classical music. It's called 'The Flood', and here are a few screenshots of it so far:

This is the title card for the film. Pretty much sums itself up.


I 'hand draw' all of the backgrounds in this film. Well, actually I use a piece of very realistic drawing software called ArtRage. It provides the look and feel of a classic animated film.


This is the hero of the film. A nameless hiker, who through a series of events, saves a village community from a terrible flood caused by the bursting of a nearby dam during a storm. His personality isn't yet defined - he'll develop instinctively as I animate him more. As you can see, this isn't a film that relies on tweening to animate people. I wanted to go old school and draw each frame by hand (of course, things like panning scenery will use tweening, but only because that looks no different to old films).


A good example of the power of ArtRage to capture that hand-drawn look that I wanted. Note the first signs of the approaching storm!


I was going to do it with no dialogue at all, but I have already set myself so many challenges with this project that I decided to make it into a proper silent film and add the classic caption cards. As you can see, our hero is lost.


That bloody cottage took ages to do. I got the shadow wrong, but couldn't undo it without undoing the whole cottage, so I had to rub it out and then 'mix' loads of different shades of green for an hour to replicate the green used for the grass to cover up the rubbed out area, and so on, and so on... However, I like how it turned out. The cottage belongs to an old man who hears about the storm during the weather forecast on the telly. He phones up his friend, who lives near the dam. This seemingly irrelevant old man has therefore provided the audience with a reason to see the dam and figure out what'll happen. Clever, eh?


Well, I've run out of possible screenprints to tantalise you because I've only just started this project. And judging by the amount of effort that's already gone into what is only a minute of film so far, this is going to take bloody ages to finish. But God help me, I'll give it a go...

Wivell out.