Our New Site Revamp

So we are currently in the process of building a new main site, it is coming together page by page but it is the place to see more images on Wulfie and other projects too.

Enjoy :)

www.amanandink.com

Wulfie Characters - sized comparison

So in an effort to post a little more often, here is coloured size comparison page of the characters of Wulfie. We are hoping to start posting more images from our other projects too, so keep on coming back for new postings soon.

Libby Outfits

Today I spent a couple of hours sketching different outfits for Libby, so I figured I would post some of these sketches. Including one inspired by the current Euro 2008 tournament, although I don't think Libby would be too happy by her teams current performances.

Wulfie Scene Illustration - amended

So here is the finished scene illustration from the previous post, I thought it would be interesting to post this as well as leave the other one up so as to see the evolution of the design for the image. Enjoy your Friday all.  :)

Wulfie Scene Illustration

I haven't posted artwork in a while, holidays and other stuff getting in the way. But I wanted to post something I have been working on today, it's a scene illustration for Wulfie, it's not completely finished, still working on the background but I'll posted the finished one along with this when its complete.

Wulfie Animation - win the race

Here is a looping clip of one of the scenes from the Wulfie Trailer. I thought I would post it to show the different stages in the process all in one scene. 

Most of the characters are in the key animation stage, with the turtle animated in Anime Studio with his shell a line version and his skin textured. The skin works really well and is easily achievable in Anime Studio, hence the reason we are going with it, but as the case with alot of computer generated animation its just too clean and the best description of this I have heard is from a Japanese 3D animator, "the computer animation will never be as perfect as hand drawn", kinda sums it up really, but its a trade off, time, money and texture animation for not hand drawn. I miss the pencil though.

Incidentally this entire scene was made in digitally, from storyboard image all the way through. Oh and in 2 different countries - (another reason for the digital process).

A Quick Update to Yesterday's Post

As a quick update to the Backgrounds Posting here is an image with the characters placed in.

Happy Friday.

Wulfie Backgrounds

Here are some Background Images for the Wulfie Trailer.

The image of Libby's Room took a while to get this far and I'm still thinking of changing it a little, such as the window.

We wanted to keep an illustration look to the backgrounds, leaving white space in some images.

They were made with Art Rage which is a paint based colouring programme and allows for the use of stencils (used for the cobwebs in Libby's room). Click the images to see a larger version.

One issue with Art Rage though is not being able to adjust the colour after the fact, so I have been exporting to psd to adjust the colour and saturation in Photoshop.

Wulfie Voices Recording

Yesterday, during another rainy day in Galway we ventured into The Forge Recording Studio to record the voices for the trailer. It was great fun and all worked hard for the morning and we came out with some great audio. Left, I'm getting ready to start taking notes in the control room, but really thinking about the possible pancakes for lunch, it being Pancake Tuesday and all. For those interested they never materialised.  :(

Below are our talented actors, Aoife Moore (Mother), Rachel Rath (Libby), Deborah Wiseman (Rex) and Gary Hetzler (Wulfie). A new trailer update and some footage from the records should follow soon. Also at the recording was Michael, our in-house producer and Erika our intern for the day.

Wulfie Trailer Update - 30th Jan 08

So here is a Wulfie Trailer updated animatic, it is still really, really rough but most of the animation has been keyed out, if not inbetweened in some places, and some of the backgrounds have been sketched in (some in b&w), but we still have the temp audio and even have the people playing the characters changing throughout the animation. 

The animators have done a great job, and over the next couple of months we will be doing the Anime Studio pass.  Incidentally the backgrounds were sketched in Art Rage 2.5, an excellent programme costing approx. $25, a steal i think for what you can do.

Enjoy and hope to post another update in the coming weeks as we are recording the final audio next Tuesday. Back to phrases such as "can we turn the cuteness up a notch or two" happy days indeed. 

:)

Wulfie Creator / Writer

Just a post to mention the Wulfie creator and writer Lindsay J. Sedgwick. Lindsay and her daughter Libby created the character explain the missing single socks, a sure sign Wulfie is about, as he is partial to the odd smelly sock.

Lindsay is great to work with and her details can be found here...

And some background straight from the author's mouth.

“Wulfie was born over a number of years out of stories ad-libbed for my daughter, now 8. Of all the characters I have developed for her in this way, Wulfie is the one who has remained part of our lives. We have shared him with every other child we know – my daughter’s version and
my own – and now we want to share him with a wider audience. With every child who has ever wanted to have a Wulfie of their own.”

Wulfie Work has started

I haven't posted in a while, but I have my reasons, Christmas and New Years came and went but now animation has started on Wulfie and it has been all consuming. We have Tom C (his blog), Alfredo (his blog) and Alessandra (her blog) all doing great work keying out the animation in Flash and they have been motoring through the scenes. 

We kinda did it a little wonky though, we have been auditioning voices over the last week and a some composers for the music. It was great, talking about the show and the characters, motivations and relationships between them all and now we have to go thorough all the recordings and cast the roles, it is a tough decision I have to say. And I will hold my hand up to some awful directing sayings when dealing with the actors, terrible stuff such as "turn the cuteness up a notch or too", I cringe at thinking about it.

This seems to be the wordiest posting so far but one last thing, we have had 3 birthdays so far in a matter of 2 weeks of production of the trailer. Alfredo, Michael and myself all became that one year older. And friend of the family, Tomm M of Brendan also added another notch on the belt of time.

So in commemoration, and to post some artwork here is an image TC did for Alfredo.

A Couple of Posters

Over the last week or so between myself and Tom we designed up and coloured a couple of posters for Wulfie. Wulfie can transform between small and big so we based one of the posters as our take on the Stars Wars Episode 1 poster of Anakin. 

Enjoy

Wulfie Colour Concepts

Below are some colour concept images I did over the weekend, still trying to figure out the character colour separations on Wulfie and wanting to keep the illustration feel.

Wulfie Animation Test

We wanted to do a little animation test for wulfie, to see if we could get the water colour colouring to work and I have posted it below. A fairly successful job I think, although it still has some issues that I feel can be solved on the next test.

For anybody interested, the Pencil animation was done by Tom C, in a programme called Pencil and on the cintiq. Then the movie was taken into Anime Studio and using the pencil animation as the basis re was reanimated and refined and finally the texture applied, oh and the texture was made in Painter Essentials.

Anyway thats how we did it, on to the next test and a little harder animation i think.

Wulfie Cleaned Images

Below are some images from the Wulfie series we have in-development. Tom C has done a great job working from Aurelie's concept sketches. Talented young people the lot of them. And for anyone interested all the sketches were drawn directly into the computer, but Tom still misses the paper :(

It is Flash based so just click on the image to cycle through them.

Wulfie Trailer

Wulfie Trailer 22.11.07

This is the animatic version of the Wulfie trailer with temp music and our own great voice acting, well done to Tom C for the artwork which was all produced in the computer using our cintiq and Painter programme.  Roll on the paperless workflow.

Wulfie Starts

We are currently working on a tv series development called "Wulfie" and what happens when a young girl finds she shares her room with a big bad wolf.

Libby’s parents are mean. So mean that every time she annoys them – even accidentally – they threaten her with the Big Bad Wolf.  She never could figure out why he only ate naughty little girls when Libby had a perfectly horrid brother to whom he was welcome. One day, fed up with yet another of her parents’ threats and left alone in the house, Libby set out to find and confront the Big Bad Wolf. She would persuade him to at least eat her nasty brother before he ate her and, ideally, her parents.

And here is some artwork from the development...

...firstly my original concept for the project

...Libby concept work from Aurelie Blard-Quintard. See more of her

work here... 

...another concept from Aurelie

... then Tom Caulfield came on to the project and produced some fine artwork