Finally I feel confident enough to go one step further in my CG environment and try to let a long standing dream come true - the production of a short film - the initial reason I started using blender 2,5 years ago.
I decided to document my progress at my blog and here in this thread, to let the interested take part in my journey.
I will do this whole project in my spare time only and due to this fact and fluctuations of my level of motivation and my totally lack of experience with such an undertaking, I have no idea, when it will be finished, but I ( optimistically) aim for a release date end of 2009.
I do not want to give away the story but will try to find a proper balance between documenting the progress and keeping the important story parts in the dark.
Some basic facts though: The story is about a girl (Ara) and a dragon. The style will probably be somewhere between comic and realistic. Estimated running time will be 1:30 min.
After having finished the script and the first version of the storyboard, I am now starting with the design studies, first for the environment including various color/mood tests. This is currently quite educating in many ways. Not having any formal education in drawing/painting, this turned out to be quite a challenge.
The image below shows some images from the actual storyboard to give you some idea. The boards are not in order and a lot of boards are missing of course. The complete storyboard has a count of 38. (click on the image to get a higher resolution)
See next for a very first environment test - only pencil and with color.
For storyboarding and design sketching I use mypaint, which is really a very cool 2D drawing tool.
I think it will take quite some more time to get the environment and the colors as I imagine them.
I make use of the excellent guide Animating With Blender by Roland Hess and various guides and infos available on the internet. I also hope to get some useful input through this thread.
I really want to finish this one, so lets hope I have enough strength to pull this off.