[michaelcawood]

I thought I'd take the opportunity to show off my team's work in progress on 'Devils Angels & Dating'. We're a growing team of passionate artists working together to make this CG Short Animated Film, and we're looking for more talent.



Current opportunities include:
Character Rigging (Maya)
Texture Artists
Storyboard Artists
Sound Effects Designer/Engineer
Compositors (Digital Fusion or After Effects)
Technical Directors
Prop Designer
3D Modelers
2D Animator


Death was designed by me, modeled by Arthur Baranov and Iskander Mellakh, with textures also by Iskander.


These are my sketches for Cupid, we're currently looking for a modeler for him.

If you want to see the latest work check out our development website at:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/

[michaelcawood]

We have lots of cool new work being done on the project all the time. Here's a couple of cool videos:

The chair rigging:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...ir-seat-squash

The Hologram Sphere:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...vsphere_maya-1

The rigging for the Cloud tail for Cupid:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...-tail-idea-v02

Storyboards:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...s/storyboard-1

We're looking for some strong talented artists. Mostly Texture artists and Character Riggers.
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...2810:Page:1232

[michaelcawood]

We have a Facebook Fan page now. If you become a fan you'll get regular updates in your home page feed, or you can just use it to follow our progress.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Devils...g/124683406303

There's also a new version of the animatic with lots of new storyboard panels:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH1OMP2S9a0

[michaelcawood]

Keith Lango is now a Supporter of our film production. He'll be donating training videos to our strongest contributors as we go along. Check this out for details: http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...-team-official

[michaelcawood]

Episode 4 of the podcast is online now. In this one I talk to, team member, Iskander Mellakh and then go over a quick Filmography of my work before a status update of our short animated film ‘Devils Angels and Dating’.

Blog Entry

Direct

[michaelcawood]

Episode 6 of the 'Animation in Progress' Podcast is out, and in this episode I talk to Director, Lucas Martell about making animated short films and his labor of love Pigeon Impossible.

Podcast.

[DamageDoneVFX]

You seem to be a cool guy but the whole thing with the non payed work and free materials sounds soo naive.Anyway,good luck with y'r film.

[michaelcawood]

We've had an exciting year with most of the asset creation out of the way we're currently in the early stages of animation, debugging rigs and looking for any other issues that we might trip us up going forward. I'm currently planning to roll out Animation on a larger scale early in 2010, so that we can have our 30 second teaser trailer ready in the first few months. I'm going to start working on a poster which should also be a good test case to get a 'close to final' look for our characters.

While Devil and Death are having some more advanced functionality added to their rigs, Cupid is nearing an animation ready state. Devil and Death are already being animated in their first shots with only a few challenges, that our team members have gallantly concurred.

We've had some support from Keith Lango, and Digicel's Flipbook which has been a nice touch. We have over 240 videos and 540 images to look through, with over 140 members on the website. All very exciting but I just want to say a huge thank you to our regulars who have made the project what it is today. Have a wonderful holiday period.

In the mean time here's a few recent highlights:
Render tests:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/video/sh0420dvltesting-2
Holograms and Peeps:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/video/couplemeetlovev01ms-1
Animation in progress:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/video/sh0460deathfakelovespliningv00-2
Colour Script in progress:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/photo/colorscript01-1?context=latest
Animatic:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/video/animatic-v35

Don't forget you can follow our progress on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Devils...g/124683406303
And you can subscribe to most of our videos on YouTube as well:
http://www.youtube.com/user/michaelcawood

Merry Christmas!

[michaelcawood]

Here's our plan for the teaser trailer. Thanks to Stoyan for the Music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0YnvkwRNH8

Here's our new Video intro that tells you almost everything you need to know about the project to get you started:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...2810:Page:1232

[michaelcawood]

Here's a set of Dailies for the 31st January 2010

[michaelcawood]

Well what a month! We've been building up steam with the animation and I've been busy setting up shots for lots of new animators. We're actually at 25 active animators assigned to shots right now, but I've been trying to grow the team slowly in order to avoid over extending myself and neglecting anyone that's actually working on a task.

There was a new edit a week ago:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...o/animatic-v43

I'm twittering the highlights of our progress and various other related musings here:
https://twitter.com/michaelcawood

I posted up our entry on IndieGoGo which is a fund raising website for Indie Filmmakers. We might not raise any funds but it's still a good site to have a presence on.
http://www.indiegogo.com/DevilsAngelsAndDating

It's really exciting to see the project progressing so well, thanks for the support everyone!

[michaelcawood]

Our latest animatic.

[michaelcawood]

Just a quick update. We're in pretty good shape for animation with over 20% in the can.

We're on the lookout for strong animators to join the team. Check out the Animator's Handbook for a guide to what you need, and come prepared with some idea of what types of shots you'd like.
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...ators-handbook

Shane Davis has recently started as a Production Coordinator. He'll be helping me to sort through the progress of all the tasks and keeping everything moving forward.

If you're interested in doing any shader or rigging work please get in touch as we've got a couple of assets to finish off and any help would be greatly appreciated. We have some colour script images done, as you can see by the edit, but if anyone else would like to lend a hand and do some I'd really love to get some more done to flesh out the timeline.

I'd just like to say the team is doing amazing things and it's incredible to see it coming together like this. I think we're well on track for completing the teaser trailer animation in the next few months and the rest of the film by early 2011, if not sooner.

[michaelcawood]

We've been doing incredibly well for an online team with no budget. I can't stress how impressive it is, and I'm in a huge debt to such an amazing community of artists persisting to perfect their craft.

We're now 30% through the animation process, which only started animating back in January this year. You'd expect the first few months to have teething troubles while we worked out the kinks in the pipeline and the rigs, but we've moved into a decent routine pretty quickly and the process is very stable now. I've talked to a lot of other short film directors and they've all stressed how hard it was to get animators, so what we've achieved here is very unique.

We're on the approach to getting the teaser trailer done. Most of the animation is done with just a few shots still in progress. I'll be spending the next month picking up the scraps and helping with the lighting and rendering setup. Then we can expect a large chunk of rendering and compositing time. If we have any team members with strong Maya Mental Ray experience we'd love to hear from you to assist. Hopefully we'll have it all done in time for Siggraph in LA, which I'll also be attending. Here's the latest Teaser Trailer edit:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...r-animatic-v54

If you know any Austin, Texas based generalists with strong Maya skills please send them our way as we can certainly use the extra on-site help over the next couple of months to get the teaser trailer done, while we're juggling the rest of the production.

The latest full film animatic is here:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...o/animatic-v54

Thanks to everyone that's made the project what it is today!


Mike

[michaelcawood]

We've had a lot of different types of activity over the last month surrounding Siggraph including getting the first few decent rendered shots out, and they look great... even without being quite finished. Check out the shots in the teaser trailer:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...er-trailer-v58

We have a new Animatic with lots of new content:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...o/animatic-v60

I'll be working on the remaining 31% of the Layout that needs to be done soon in order to prepare for a push in the animation department. Part of that push is to re-assign some flagging shots and we've already been contacting animators to check on their progress.

The color panels have really been making progress and we have samples of the color palettes for most of the time-line now. A big thanks to Danielle and Alex for their hard work on those. We'll try to bring them into a consistent colour script soon.

I'll try to make some sort of lighting guide, either written or possibly a video tutorial. We are close to being able to distribute lighting tasks to other team mates but there's a lot of notes to communicate in order to make the process easy and consistent for everyone. This may not happen until I'm done with Layout though, and...

... we have a number of remaining assets that need their final shaders refined. It's become a bit of a bottleneck so we need Shader Artists with experience that can help us out. Let us know you know anyone that would be interested. The list of assets is at the bottom of this tracker table:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1289261/Devi...et_Tracker.htm

If anyone is looking for a task to work on we maintain a list of available tasks here:
http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.co...2810:Page:1232