Production,Weeklies

Weekly, 22 August 2014

22 August, 2014 |  14 Comments | by Ton Roosendaal

Quickly grabbed six pictures from our weekly folder to share. Character development is still continuing, hair solvers are being investigated, Hjalti arrived this week to start doing animation tests, and I am recovering from Siggraph jetlag still! 

Now – we get a beer and Thai food!

-Ton-

tara_sarah_10 dragonfly _researchs rene_04 franck_caterpillar_mat_01 1_fullscreen integrator_loop


14 Responses

  1. Mystery O says:

    Oh Ton, you came back from the future with those 6 images ! Thanks a lot. Maybe it’s time-travel-machine lag instead of jetlag.

  2. frankdarijo says:

    August. no september

  3. manuel says:

    Hey gooseberry team,

    I am really curious or rather excited about this project and enjoy your progress a lot. Always nice to see updates and decisions made on characters, stories and development and seeing things shaping up. It also seems to be a real fun crew and I imagine it’s real nice to be part of this.
    Due to work hours I recently couldn’t follow the video live stream and actually missed where I can see the recorded stream … could you post a link please?
    Thank you
    Manuel

  4. wazou says:

    I have a question, the models we can see, it’s just for research or it’s for the movie ?

  5. metatomato says:

    I do know that Thai people live in the future (from Belgium time referential), but a month ahead!! ;-) Nice to see the month improvements!
    Good luck Gooseberry Team!

  6. Wayne says:

    Hey, thanks for the update Ton. Jet lag is the pits isn’t it?

    Just a question really about these designs… I hate posting negative comments on threads but I failed to post my thoughts early on the Sintel saga regarding the heroin’s hands. That they were ridiculously huge for a female of her stature, when I did mentioned it, the reply was that it was finalized and it was too late to change. To be honest it distracted from the beauty of the movie because of the haste of finalizing characters without much thought for anatomy.
    Now, I know the project is still in it’s infancy, and I hope I am proven wrong in my naivety, but I must say, that a lot of these designs seem amateurish at best. The sketches above must have done in less than a few minutes before the meeting I am guessing. The original designs though in the teaser done by many other studios from around the globe seemed to have shown a lot more appeal and character to them than these that have been posted here. I hope that these are just simple model tests and not finalized characters that will be in the film. I know great things can be achieved by your team, they are indeed talented, no doubt about it, but these samples frighten me to say the least, they lack character… and too many styles mixed into a single character… Just my 2 cents.

    In any case, I hope you all have a great time with this project, but remember the purpose of this film is to create a wanting for the bigger feature film. This is the make or break for that goal.

    • Deevad says:

      Hi Wayne,
      Thanks for sharing your feedback.

      >> Sintel saga regarding the heroin’s hands. That they were ridiculously huge […] because of the haste of finalizing characters without much thought for anatomy.

      You miss some information about Sintel’s anatomy. Art director here. It wasn’t a problem of something done in haste. Big hands were a design choosen by the team ; more precisely : a compromise between a part of the team who wanted cartoony proportion ( aka big hand and foot and elastic part of body ) and another part who prefered anime proportions ( aka doll-like, and classic/academic body with mostly facial stylisation ). Sure, we choosen to do a compromise and mixing both can be criticable, and certainly broke a part of appealing for both audience too. But at least we tried as a team *something new*.

      Now about the appealing of the Gooseberry sketches :
      Yes, nothing finalised or 100% solid for now, we are still working on it.

      • Wayne says:

        Thank you for your comment and reply regarding the Sintel background decisions. I am glad to know that you answered the questions actually, as I have a lot of respect for your work. With regards to the above sketches I actually should have watched the video on Youtube as it answered my questions anyway. Just I failed to notice a link to the weekly video on this post thus, rushed to my hasty posting. In any case, I am still glad that there is room for these characters to improve as I can almost definitely see Disney coming after you guys for copyright infringement on the dragonfly with the mustache bottom left hand corner. Very similar to the rescuers dragonfly

        Well good luck and thanks for your gracious reply.

      • Caleb Fox says:

        I think you mean Heroine, not heroin. But still good point!

  7. Those characters are off to a really good start. They look very alive, there is a lot of personality showing in their faces.

  8. Leon Cheung says:

    The caterpillar one really made me thinking of the below sheep, 6 years unshorn. lol
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzSNM_umqqo

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