6/30/2014 Ideas

Held up by my parents visiting.
Have to finish my HTML and Java classes this week.
Now jury duty tomorrow!
Still going through the very helpful but very long rigging tutorials.
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Ideas:

Teacher compels (using grades) Ned to censor the class singing "Silent Night" by using an air horn when a religious lyric comes up.

Teacher has a sweater with a "telephone pole" on it. (NOT a CROSS!)

Teacher calls Ned "a diversity".

When the songs are playing, they all have the usual jingle bells. But every time, people can be seen actually stopping in place and jingling the bells.

There is always a blizzard going on so nothing can be seen beyond the houses and row of trees.

Cameras should have a very shallow depth of field.

I think I've decided against having Ned's parents in it at all.

The whole town is on one street going up/down a mountain.

The whole story should start at Ned's house on top of the mountain, travel down almost to the school at the bottom of the mountain during the first song, then travel back up the mountain until the end at the restaurant.

7/3/2014 Thoughts

Took a day of sitting through a full day of juror selection, but I dodged having to do a trial!
Still finishing up with my classes though.
Meanwhile,

I had second thoughts about the teacher being overtly Christian. I don't want to get into bashing anyone and try to keep the tone silly and light.

I still definitely want to do the air horn, though!

Speaking of silly, I think I'll have people continuously sliding on ice and doing pratfalls, including sliding helplessly down the steep sidewalks and knocking others over.

I'm thinking that maybe I could do all the voices myself a la South Park (most) or Fat Albert.

7/7/2014 Rig-tastic!

Wow! Found a really good auto rig plugin online. No more watching rig tutorials (for now). This will save me a massive amount of time! Hopefully it will work as advertised. If it does, it more than suits my needs.
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Also found a really great set of animation tools - pose library setups, etc. Very awesome.
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Next up probably modeling tutorials.
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Just about done with classes - just need to take the final tests this week.

7/12/2014 Slowing Down?

So things might slow down a bit - even slower than the snail's pace I've been on! Classes are done - I passed - but priorities are shifting a little.
I'm still doing tutorials - modeling now - and I counted up all the ones that I want to do before I start doing real work, and it works out to about 65 hours of stuff to watch. That's what I'm going to hold myself to.
Before really moving forward on Ned, though, I'm going to do a set of animations to upload to stock animation sites and see how that goes. Hopefully generate some income! I project about a month of that.
So 3 to 4 weeks of tutorials, then probably 4 weeks of stock animation, then really getting a solid start on Ned. Add in a little over a week of traveling.
But I will be loosely doing pre-production in the meantime. Continuing to come up with ideas, thinking about designs, song ideas, the script, etc... Not much CG stuff but important steps forward.
It sucks to put things in front of Ned, but it has to be...

7/15/2014 Sweaters

Everyone in Ned's town will have insanely tacky Xmas sweaters.

I thought maybe the teacher might play an instrument during Silent Night, but I'm not sure. Maybe a really loud bass? Pencils could vibrate off the desks...

Thinking maybe everyone should have noodle arms... 30's motifs (updated) like visible exclamation marks, etc...

7/28/2014 Background noise / the look

Idea:
There is a constant background of overlapping Xmas carols coming from stores, cars, etc.
What to do about realism vs stylized?!?!?!
Great idea from Emily: take examples of CG character surfaces and experiment in PShop...
Definitely not going for super-realism, but also not hyperreal simulations of things like wood, cloth, clay, etc.
Try to "mess up" the perspective and lighting (including shadows) if going non-real. Not exactly orthographic but something along those lines. Lighting individual surfaces with translucence instead of using lights? Or each thing having its own light? Hmm...

7/30/2014 Classroom ideas

More ideas for classroom scene:

• Every time Ned blows the air horn, the kids jump and get nervous - pants wetting suggested...
• Kids get increasingly angry with Ned...
• They sing "Silent Night" extremely quietly, contrasting with the loud air horn...
• Ned blows horn for "virgin". Teacher corrects him saying, "Very good, Ned, but you didn't need to censor the word "V- *BWAAAAAHHH*.  Everyone in this ROOM is a v- *BWAAAAHHH* and it has almost nothing to do with religion!"
• For "Completely Diverse Present Time", that one kid hands out mice from his father's pet store. They all have reindeer horns and are in snow globes....
• Ned complains that he didn't receive any presents. The teacher says, "Of course not, Ned! You're a diversity and it's against the law to offend you!" Ned stares angrily and the teacher relents and instructs all the students to give him one present. They all give him a mouse...
• As students leave the classroom, Ned has no mice but we see a snake in the foreground shaking his tail. Instead of rattles he has jingle bells strapped to his tail.