Little Blog From Heaven

Making Progress

2010-03-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Posted by Bernard

Having fun getting the animation up & running with T-Bob!

First simple Illustration EAR

2010-01-20T00:46:00.000-08:00

post by Don

After the 27 hours of travel time to Cape Town I was surprised to be adjusted to the time change so quickly. And although I have been filling my days getting out to see the Cape, I do have to rest in the evening and was eager to get into the software that Bernard has been learning.

It looks like we will be able to import illustrations from Adobe Illustrator right into Toon Boom so I wanted to do some import tests and see what would be our best method of export to import.

While Bernard and T-bob have taken up the task of character design, I am eager to contribute by taking those hand drawn sketches and turning them into vector art. I have been using Illustrator for years and am pretty quick so drawing in Illustrator then exporting would be ideal for an efficient work flow.

Had a few minutes this morning and went ahead and did a quick line art based on Tbobs original Evil Asian Robot painting. Will be experimenting with best export / import methods later this evening.

Really excited to see Bernard has made some great progress animating. I hope T-bob starts feeling better - food poisoning is the worst!

A Little Break, or so I thought.

2010-01-17T12:36:00.000-08:00

by T-Bob

Don is off to South Africa for about a month for work. And I was a little worried that Bern and I weren't going to get much done with Don gone, because Don definitely is the big producer (because he's the one that makes us get stuff done even though all of us are producing this together).

And I came down with food poisoning or a stomach bug on Friday the 15th, the day Bernard and I were supposed to have our next meeting. We had planned to start sketching the basic body angles for the characters, but I was barely able to leave the couch, so that didn't happen.

So I was really excited to see what Bern had done with the animation- just to see that we're continuing to make progress without Don's push. Seeing what he did made me think that the animation is going to be a lot more sophisticated than we had originally planned. I was thinking it was going to be even more simple than South Park, but now it looks like we may be able to do more articulation and a little more detail. Of course, it may end up taking much more time than we anticipated so who knows which animation we'll end up going with. Only time will tell. But I'm glad that we're not taking a break.

Had to...

2010-01-16T23:49:00.000-08:00

Posted by Bernard

Like a true junior director...

A dolly zoom is a cinematic technique in which the camera moves closer or further from the subject while simultaneously adjusting the zoom angle to keep the subject the same size in the frame. The effect is that the subject appears stationary while the background size changes (this is called perspective distortion).

The dolly zoom is often over-used by junior directors. Many film critics see it as a cliché.

Lets get animated

2010-01-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by Bernard

B2 here. Guess it's time I weighed in...
I'm having a great time working with my brothers on this project. It's a very absurd concept, which is awesome, because i think we are all big fans of the absurd. With T-bob scripting and doing character development, Don doing scoring and production, and all of us bouncing ideas off each other, i think it's going to be fantastic and a half!

I'm working on character design and animation. T-Bob's original art is great, but I'm trying to take all the strong elements and translate them into a style we can more easily animate, without losing any of the tasty goodness. I've got some sketches I hope to eventually scan & post, but since i procrastinated long enough on that I already have a couple bits of animation. Keep in mind, I'm leaning new software & this is really my first shot at any kind of animation...

That said, enjoy!

A Little Inspiration

2010-01-07T14:07:00.001-08:00

by T-Bob

First of all I want to say how excited I am to be not only working towards bringing this story to life, but also to be doing it with mis hermanos! It's quite an adventure.

Now onto your irregularly scheduled blog post:

A couple years ago I created the two main characters as illustrations and figured they'd never be anything more. They're shown below. After seeing them, you may be wondering, where the hell did I get the idea for them?

Little Hog (LHFH) was inspired by one of my best friend's and my favorite pastimes; singing songs and changing the lyrics. One day we were singing Roxette's "Listen to your heart" (of course) and we changed the last line of a verse to "A little hog from heaven in your dreams!" Obviously that character we were singing about had to be brought into the world

Evil Asian Robot came by us in a completely different but equally ridiculous way. Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a huge fan of Joss Whedon. Well in his show 'Angel', Daniel Dae Kim played an evil lawyer who was not very threatening, or emotional but was still technically evil. He was so uninfluential in the show Zabeth (my bestie) and I began to call him Evil Asian Robot (EAR). So I went about creating him.

The originals were done in literal layers (as opposed to Photoshop [PS] layers). The bottom layer (background) is water color. The top layers are done in pencil which I went over with colored marker, then cut out with exacto blades and glued onto the first layer. And let me tell you those curly Q's in LHFH's name were not easy to cut out! The exception is that EAR was put together in photoshop even though I cut out the pieces. Also part of his name was drawn in PS, but I can't remember which part now.

LHFH Theme Song

2010-01-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

Post by Don

Since the beginning, we have really wanted a theme song that contains the story of how LHFH got to live with the Evil Asian Robot and explain why he is named Little Hog From Heaven. It could act as a title and front credit song.

I had written a simple little verse-chorus-verse-chorus back when we first started playing with the ideas in 2008.

I have been a really drawn to acoustic Americana recently. I got to see Ralph Stanley live (of O'Brother Where art thou fame) a months back and am a really big fan of the Cold Mountain soundtrack, both of which have lead me to discover some great Americana.

Reflecting back I think these as well that the Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazard theme songs really inspired us.

On Tuesday January 5th, I refined some of the lyrics and settled on producing it in a Folky - Early Americana style. Bernard and I started to record a demo for the theme and we really liked it.

T-Bob look a listen when we met the next day for our production meeting. He really loved it but felt it was way to long. It was almost 1 minute long. So at T-Bob's suggestion we cut extra beats and removed some lyrics and tightened it up and got it down to 46 sec.

We were still laughing when we played it back for the last time that night, so it has passed the bench mark.

Here are the lyrics we are working with now.

Little Hog from heaven
was a curious pig
so he snuck out the fence to see what he could see
hit by a tractor
dead by 4:11
and that's how the piggy became
Little Hog From Heaven

Little Hog From Heaven
Little Hog From Heaven

waiting in line
at the pearly gates drank to much
and he just could not wait

followed Evil Asian Robot
to the bathroom door
and little hog from heaven
weren't in heaven anymore

Little Hog From Heaven
Little Hog From Heaven
spends all of his days with a robot friend
the adventures continue .. . .and they never ever end.

LHFH Production Begins

2010-01-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

Post by Don

The story, which is inspired by chaotic and ridiculous real life events of our friends, was refined and edited by all three of us in a brain storming session on December, 28 2009.

I think we were all really excited at how easy the brainstorming went. T-Bob spent the time on his laptop editing and changing the script as we all three refined ideas and dialog and in general we laughed and had a good time.

Compelled by the ease of collaboration and collective desire to make this short come to life we set another production meeting for the following monday.

We met as planned at my place on January 4th 2010 around noon. We were all hungry so we made a giant scramble egg dish using left overs from my fridge (spinach, onions, garlic, cheese) and had some toast with assorted jams. Bernard noticed that the blackberry jam we were eating had mold in the top of the lid, so we quit eating that.

After brunch we began sketching storyboards and shot lists and worked till about 7:30 till T-Bob had to leave for his dance rehearsal. The storyboards were really coming together. Bernard was sketching and started to really get a feel for the look of some of the characters. T-bob manned the laptop and guided us with his input on framing camera movement . . . etc.

One thing that I thought was really funny was that I was doing really rough sketches with notes for character and camera movement but Bernard and I were essentially drawing the same angles and framing with out evening discussing it. The only exception being that almost every shot we drew mirrored from the others sketch . . . very interesting.

Got about 80% through the story-boarding and planned to meet again on Wed. The 6th.

The Birth of Our Piggy

2010-01-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

by Don

The name of the short is "Little Hog From Heaven" (LHFH) and we are titling the 'first' episode "Switcheroo".

T-Bob designed the basis of main characters a couple years ago in a couple of his paintings. Our main characters are Little Hog From Heaven and Evil Asian Robot and the main stories are inspired by chaotic and ridiculous real life events of ourselves and our friends.

In 2008 T-Bob and I spent an evening together flushing out a story idea and outline. T-Bob came back a week later with a written screen play and we recorded a rough read through of the first draft. T-Bob had been writing screenplays for a couple years already and had received a few awards for his finished scripts including being chosen as a finalist in the 2009 Slamdance Teleplay competition.

In Fall of 2009 Bernard finally moved out to Los Angeles to "pursue production opportunities" and we started playing with the idea of all three of us working together to create a film together.

Although none of us consider our selves cartoonists or illustrators, I was inspired by completing my first animated video for a holiday promotion earlier that month and was excited in trying to do something scripted on a larger scale.

Right after Christmas we decided there was no reason we shouldn't team up and see if we could make a little short film.

Little Blog Gets His Wings

2010-01-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

Entry 1 - by Don Bodin

Having completed 3 very productive . . . um . . . production meetings for . . . um . . . producing an animated short film with my brothers (T-Bob and Bernard) my hope is that we can use this blog to document the journey of this collaboration.

I'll try and get all of us to update this regularly and there may be some overlap, but I think the difference in perspective alone will be educational.