Tim's Time Machine

Well, as mentioned in a previous post, I chose to create storyboards for a story about a boy genius who has an obsessive love for everything related to Vikings. He therefore decides to build a time machine in order to bring a Viking of his own into the present day. Initially I had intended to create the piece in 2D using Toon Boom Animation Studio. However, I learnt afterwards that our lecturer wanted all of our work to be created in 3D and so I instead had to quickly model and rig a character (which isn't my favorite task) I also decided to change the name of my character at this point from Ted to Tim, as I felt it gave the title a little more appeal.

For this project, I chose to create the first thirty seconds of my two minute storyboard, which has my character finishing his Viking book then going to collect another book based on "Time Travel". Below is the completed piece, though the quality isn't great, the HD version can be found on Youtube here

Changes that I would make to the piece, in retrospect, would be to cut down on the ladder pushing/pulling scene to just having him push them towards the bookcase. I included two separate scenes for the ladder pushing to allow more animation of my character, and also to add a little humor into the piece. Our class had roughly a month to complete this project, but this included the sessions with Mark Andrews, which ate up about a week of our schedule. However, as I had planned on doing 2D I didn't consider a number of factors: the modelling, rigging or render times, so I caught myself a little off guard. In the end, I managed to get the entire project completed in about 10 days.


Overall, I am fairly happy with the final outcome of the assessment. We have had quite a number of assessments this semester, far more than I was used to during my time at my previous university. Our second semester has officially come to an end with this assessment and the third semester will officially start on Thurs 30th May 2013, where I will be creating a dark 2D animation, based around a child snatcher, more details to follow.