Undersea News Official Blog

  A bit of a belated welcome back to the production! When spring quarter started, the whole crew hit the ground running. We've been cranking out animation since the beginning, hand-drawn and puppeted alike. Hand-drawn animation is entering clean-up this week, and puppet animation is almost finished being roughed out. Audio and layouts are also being wrapped up. The audio had been running into problems, but layouts are almost completely finished for our film. We're excited to have them done and see the entire project come together as well! Really what's happening now is a lot of clean-up and finishing. We're very close to having a new, updated animatic to show everyone and we're really excited to show off all of our hard work! Thank you for your patience, and we hope you are looking forward to seeing our show!

  It's been just a little while! Apologies for the slow updates, the producer sadly had some unfortunate life events that prevented updates. But we want to update you with everything we've been working on for the past few weeks! The puppets are ready for animation! They finished up in week 17 and animation for them began in week 18. We've begun animation for 9 different shots using the puppets. Right now our goal is to get some movement happening in as many shots as we can before the week 20 mark! We're still discovering and learning new things about the puppets every time we use them, so more fixes are on the way while we get used to them as well. Progress continues on hand-drawn shots. While we don't have many of them, the keys for each shot are almost complete! The goal is to get the keys done by the end of this week and begin polishing timing and movement by the end of next week. As shown above, our MOME artist is working hard on new shots for us as well! Here...

  We've wrapped up another midterm week! Each of us has been working hard on testing and fixing puppets and catching any bugs or glitches that occur. Our puppets are almost done being cleaned up, and we'll be ready to begin animating with our puppets very soon. It's exciting stuff! A couple of our hand-drawn scenes have been started as well. We're working on getting the keys drawn and feeling out the timing of the animation. We're hoping to work alongside the puppet animaters to keep the movement consistent and the characters similar! More layout work is being done on the side. Our layout and asset artists are doing fantastic work and we're really glad to have them! More to come soon, please stay tuned!

  Layouts have been lined this week as we get ready to put together our latest animatic! We've brought on Layout Artist Daisy Julca to help us with our coloring process for layouts so that we can move onwards to other things so our core team can focus.  We also have Cora Keene as our motion graphics designer to help with a lot of our news-station graphics! Cora has been creating fantastic graphic designs for our project so far, and we are so incredibly lucky to have Cora on our team! Alongside the help we've been getting, our core team has been focused on cleaning up the puppets and dropping them into scenes. This is to help us get ready to put our next animatic cut together! We've also started a hand-drawn section as well, prepping to get roughs of those done ASAP! All in all, an exciting week! We can't wait to get further along in the process and start to see it all come together!

 Puppets, puppets, puppets! This week was filled to the brim with work on the puppets! Hand packs and mouth packs for the puppets have been completed, so most puppets are completely done and ready to be animated with! Above is some test animation footage of Jeff by Andrew, who has played with puppet test animations for the better part of the week. What comes next are layouts and the beginnings of animation. We're going to start getting into the nitty-gritty parts of the animation, as well as working on the hand-drawn segments to get them out of the way early! Be excited; we're setting sail shortly!

Here's a short update on what we did over the past week! Puppets are finished and being tweaked by our riggers. Mouth packs for characters are mostly completed, with one currently in progress, and hand packs are being created and finished! We've got a little bit to go before we're fully ready to begin the animation, but above is a video testing out the mouth pack for Jeff. Once all the packs are completed, we'll move onto more fleshed-out test animations.

  It's week 1 of the new school quarter and week 11 of production! Over the break, more work has been done on the puppets for our characters. This week, to get back into the swing of things, we begin working together on the hand and mouth packs for the characters. Above is a mouth test for the character Chester! Next week, our goal is to wrap up work on all the puppets and get as many hand and mouth packs finished as possible! We have two people working on hand and mouth packs as we move forward, so it should go by fairly quickly. Look forward to seeing these puppets in movement come week 3 of the quarter!

        Well, this is it! After wrapping up all we could from the previous weeks, we completed our animatic and other deliverables! Now we just wait for feedback on our short. It's very exciting and everyone had a blast working on the short. We are hopeful that it'll continue production into the winter quarter! We're tying up loose ends as we wait for the news, hopefully next week will bring us good news for the winter!

    Preproduction is steadily wrapping up as we gather our work together for our big presentation! Board clean ups are being finished as we speak and the animatic just needs a few more tiny tweaks before it's ready to send out. There were a few set backs this week, but all in all our team feels prepared to tackle the next challenge! We are very excited to see what becomes of our project, and as we wrap up these next few tiny threads, we look forward to seeing what the results of week 9 will be!

  Week Seven finally wraps up! There's not a ton to report on this week that hasn't been covered in a previous week. We got some more concept work done, one for props and some color variations for a character. More boards have been cleaned up and ready to add to the animatic. The more we focus on working the better the project gets! Jeff's puppet has been started - Most of Chester is done, and Gibbs is being wrapped up. Here's a video of Jeff's puppet in action so far: We are looking forward to doing some test animations with these puppets very soon!

  Week 06 of Undersea News Preproduction is finished! Board revisions continue going strong as the animatic undergoes more changes as acting beats are finalized and sections get cleaned up. Puppets have been started for Jeff, Gibbs, and Chester. Jeff and Gibbs are still having their puppets rigged, while Chester is getting a fresh dose of drawing substitutions added onto his current rig! Facial expressions are being added onto Chester's rig as we speak. Chester is almost completed, we are just waiting on the finalized colors to be imported so he's no longer just a white blobby boy! We have been working hard on getting the colors for our characters finalized all week and most characters are finished! There's only two characters giving us trouble as far as colors go, but they're incredibly close to being completed regardless! Everything is starting to wrap up from here. The animatic will take priority moving forward so we complete it to be the best quality it can be!

  Undersea News wraps up it’s fifth week of development with more puppets and board revisions! The rig created for our character Chester is close to complete. The front, side, and 3/4th views are all rigged, and reformers have been added to the head of Chester. The puppet for Gibbs has also been started, but has yet to be fully rigged to show an animation of sorts. Board revisions continue as we also meet up with voice actors to get a voice pass to use for the next version of the animatic which will be completed by the end of this week (hopefully!). With the rigs started we inch closer to being ready to start putting together a test animation of our characters. Exciting!

    This week was a busy week for characters! Our character turn arounds have been completed and we are making progress with expressions and poses. We've even got progress on puppets! Here's Chester's WIP: We've also officially casted our voice actors! We are very excited to work with the talented cast of people that have been selected to work on our film. Last but not least, we've started on prop design for the film: Since we are such a small crew, everyone has at least two props that they are to be designing. Since character design is being wrapped up, we hope more people can focus on prop design. It'll also give our puppetors suitable time to work on their rigs!

      We are really getting into the thick of things! Characters are mostly finalized with a few tweaks here and there for future updates. Gibbs and Luis have 5 point turn arounds now as well! Colors on characters are not final as of yet, but they give the general idea of what to expect for the final puppets once they are made. The board revisions have started as well! The first segment of the short has been revised with the next part under way, and with the revisions we have as of now we have started the process of creating our animatic! The first pass will be rough as one might expect, but it's exciting to get to see these character start coming to life with sound! We also managed to call back a few actors and have them read through. We are fairly certain we know which actors will play which characters at this point and we're waiting for confirmation on them. This week we hope we can start passing on turnarounds to start getting them puppeted, so we are very excited for...

    Week two rolls out strong with more storyboard updates as well as some deeper character exploration for character designs! The script went through another rewrite and the boards were updated accordingly. The second major pass of the storyboard will be completed this next week, which is extremely exciting as we explore more interesting camera angles and funny expression and poses for our characters. We now officially have a sound designer for our film! We are happy to bring on Prajwal Kandel for our sound design, and we look forward to working with him. Friday, September 25th we held auditions for character voices from 1PM-6PM. We auditioned 15 people in total, and while we are still in the discussion phase of deciding actors, we have a pretty good sense of who will be playing what role in our upcoming film. All in all, the future is looking bright for Undersea News as we wrap up this busy week and head on into next week. Our goal is to finalize character designs so we can ...