Hot Chocolate Mornings

Michigan is very cold in the mornings, but on the plus side you get to curl up with a mug of hot chocolate and a good book. Which is quite possibly the best feeling on earth! 

Fanboy and Chum Chum

I had the wonderful privilege of meeting the creator of Fanboy and Chum Chum, Eric Robles, during the Savannah Film Festival. I've always liked watching the show for it's animation style, which went back to the classic Loony Tunes, but it was really inspiring to hear about how he got into the animation industry and the path that lead to Fanboy and Chum Chum. He also made me feel validated in watching abundant amounts of the classic Loony Tunes (like I really needed an excuse to anyway). I'd really like to see more CG shows and films take the Loony Tunes approach to movement. I think that it creates a depth and humor to cartoons that has been a little lacking since the discovery of CG. It's awesome that we now have the ability, through CG, to make things look and move realistically. But sometimes that makes us forget that they are still cartoons: pixels on a screen. They don't have to move realistically. We can make them do anything! That's the fun of being a cartoonist! Hopefully I can incorporate that into my own style more and more. 

Update

So I'm now into my winter break. It's nice to relax after the rough quarter, I'm definitely getting refreshed. The Pick-Up Princess e-book is coming along. Due to programming issues, the deadline has been pushed to early this year instead of the end of November. However, I did receive the very first beta test a couple weeks ago and it's looking awesome. Frank Ayars of Ayars Animation (the publisher) has been doing a great job and even included some things that I hadn't thought of (like a few clips of sound and a page jump option). 

In other news, I've picked up some work from a company called The Story Ship. They do educational programs for schools and they've asked me to design, build, and animate a few characters for an upcoming project they're doing. I'm becoming increasingly proud of the designs I'm doing so I'll keep you as updated as I can on the project and when it's released, you all should definitely check it out! 

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Stay tuned! 

Title Page of the Animated E-Book

Because I've neglected the blog for so long, I thought I would treat you all to the start page of "The Pick-Up Princess" animated children's e-book. In the actual app, there will be some limited animation on this, but for now just enjoy the still. And thanks to Paloma Schults for the awesome title and fonts!

An Even Later Update

Greetings to those existing out there in the ether! You may have noticed that I have not updated in a while. I'm deeply sorry for this. Life as well as several things relating to my animated children's e-book, "The Pick-Up Princess", have been occupying my time.

So here's what you missed:

Due to unforeseen financial issues, Andrews UK and Prairie Muse Press were unable to fulfill their contract with me. However, Ayars Animation has stepped in and taken over the project. Currently, the book is going through the programming stage.

The first commercial for "The Pick-Up Princess" has been finalized and is ready for launch upon completion of programming, which should be done in the next month or so. Everything relating to the book has been very exciting and it has been a great distraction from the ups and downs of life.

Life has been...life. This year I have had to face the death of a good friend of mine. I've slowly found a new normal, but being so far from home during that event was a challenge. My thoughts and prayers are continually with her friends and family.

But like I mentioned, life has it's ups and downs. I've been blessed with opportunities and it's my hope to use my talents to take advantage of all those opportunities despite the curve balls life throws from time to time. More on this later as I PROMISE to update more frequently.

Debbie

A Very Late Princess Update

As we're heading into the final turn, things have really picked up and I'm afraid I have neglected my Princess Update Duty! However, today holds some exciting news!

My friend Paloma is doing all the lettering for The Pick-up Princess and just got 10 pages done. In about 3 hours. Yes. She is a goddess. A goddess of lettering. Anyway this means that 10 pages are officially ready for publication! I've sent some things off to my editor to see if we're good to go. As long as the last few scenes get done this week, we should be in business in no time! :D It's hard to contain my excitement!

Pictures taken from Google, please don't hurt me for using them... 

Princess Update

8 scenes down and 6 to go! The team is really starting to cruise through coloring. On top of working on the book, I did some experimenting with Toon Boom puppets. It's certainly different from Flash, but not in a bad way. Working with the new software was a lot easier and more intuitive than I expected. I'm definitely going to have to play around with it a bit more to see what I can accomplish with it.

Princess e-book Update

In my mad dash to finish all the clean-up for this project, I ended up accidentally putting the wrong outfit on one of the characters. Oops. So this week has been spent going back and fixing everything. Sigh. It's my own fault, but finding out about it made me feel like a woman in an old horror flick. All I could really do is strike a pose and scream. On the bright side, I'm almost finished with it and two of my colorists are in the end stages of their most recent scenes. So this setback hasn't hurt production too much. Phew!

Fathers Day Owl

I couldn't find time to put this up yesterday, so happy belated Father's Day!

e-book update: SOUND!

This week I met up with the author and her mother of the animated e-book The Pick-Up Princess in order to get the narration for the book done. Originally, Katrina's mother was going to be the only one doing the narration, but she thought it would be fun if Katrina did a reading too. They both did a really great job, so I thought I would share a little slice of our work today! (note: the images in the videos are ones that I threw in because I couldn't post an mp3. They are not the final images attached to the sound. And for some reason they messed up when I posted them here. So just listen and ignore the strange visuals.)

The above is done by Katrina's mom Lisa.

This next one is done by the author herself.

We still haven't decided which narration we're going to use for the whole book. Katrina is the author and did a really great job reading, so it makes sense to use her. On the other hand, her mom has that nice motherly tone that goes great with a children's book. I'll probably end up cutting both and seeing which my editor likes better. 

Princess Update: The Start of Summer

Last week I finished finals and traveled back home for a well deserved break. My boyfriend and I are celebrating by watching continuous episodes of my new addiction: Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, this has also made me a bit lax about working on my animated children's e-book "The Pick Up Princess". I'm still hopeful for a launch sometime this summer, but I doubt much work is going to get done before I head back to Savannah for my summer classes. Long distance boyfriends and family sometimes take precedent.

Mirror

My final for 3D Production this quarter.

Princess Update. All the things. All of them.

Well it's finals week and that means a lot of deadlines and work ahead of me. On the bright side, I took a break from clean-up on The Pick-Up Princess to color another scene. So another shot is all done and ready for the next step! I can't wait for a break so that I can really get the rest of this out though. Oh, yeah, and that whole relax thing...I've heard that's nice...

My pardons to Hyperbole and a Half for the use of their joke. It just perfectly expresses how I am feeling.

Nightwing Warm Up

Today's warm up. Dedicated to my sister who loves this character and just had surgery. Nightwing makes everything better!

Nightwing (c) DC comics

Happy Cat

Warm up animation from the 16th. Flash has been giving me problems with exporting things lately, hence the late post. I'm not extremely happy with the movement, but it at least helped me get into the pose thinking stage so that I could go animate my homework better.

Sick Platypus Warm Up

Yesterday's warm up animation. 

The Leviathan Scene

On the upside, I finished another scene this week, so I only have one more scene to clean before everything goes into the color stage. The downside is that the last scene I have to clean up is a crazy mess of lines with 120 separate drawings that all need to be subtle and precise (you can see a few of them just above the drawing of Mom and Princess in that timeline). Through out the whole clean-up process, I've been working on this scene off and on. Every time I try to tackle it, I just get frustrated and move on to a scene I know I can clean quickly. This is my great white whale. Hopefully my story with this mighty beast ends better than Captain Ahab's.

He's a Smooth Criminal

Today's warm up: A smooth hamster in a hat. enjoy.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day everyone! I am so blessed to have the mom I do. This is a small tribute using the talents she's always encouraged me to develop.

Pick-Up Princess Update

The problem with leaving your two hardest scenes to clean up until the end is that at the end, you need to clean up your two hardest scenes! This leaves you pretty frustrated. Right now, I'm just having a crisis with these lines. One scene jiggles all over the place and the character is constantly shifting on and off model. The other scene has the problem of some incomplete animation and being pretty off model. I'm confident they'll come together in the end, but right now I'm pretty dejected. It's this final push that is turning out to be the hardest!

Pick-Up Princess Backgrounds

This week has been pretty crazy since it's midterms here at SCAD. Unfortunately that means I haven't gotten much work done, but I'll give you guys some cool stuff to look at anyway! Here are a couple of backgrounds I created for the Pick-Up Princess.

A Peek at a Scene from The Pick-Up Princess

Production still moves steadily forwards! Another scene has been colored and the end gets closer with each passing week. As a treat, I thought I would post the animatic of one of the scenes. This is what my animators and I used as a guideline for what our animation needed to look like. 

In this scene, the toys Princess tried storing in her closet burst out and overtake her and her Mom. 

The Clean Up Process

A great presentation by Blue Sky yesterday kept me from posting a Pick-Up Princess update until today.

I've mentioned before that I'm at the tail end of clean up and about to begin color, so I thought I would share a few examples of what that is and why it is necessary before any coloring can happen.

The animation that my crew helped me out on was the rough animation. This is where all the movement is worked out and the pacing is established. While the animator needs to keep the basic shapes of the character consistent, they have more wiggle room when it comes to keeping the character looking exactly like the character sheet and in a first pass, it's not important for them to be very clean with their lines. Rough animation is all about gesture, moving your lines, and letting expression control your hand. That's what makes it so fun.

Clean up is all about precision. The scene is about to move into color and the colorists need to know where to put that color. So not only must the lines be clean, but the character must match the character sheet to remain consistent through out the piece.To maintain consistency, I am doing all the clean up for this project myself.  It's a tedious job, but a necessary one.

Here are a few examples of the two:

rough animation by eric monchello 

 

rough animation by margaretta westerman

rough animation by debbie scheller 

 

The Pick-Up Princess--Character Sheet 3

Color is almost in full swing! This week I finished getting another scene ready for color by cleaning it up from its original rough animation. Now there are just three more scenes to do before all focus can be shifted to color! 

This is the final character in the animated children's e-book, The Pick-Up Princess, that I am working on. 

The cat character is the fun bit of comedy relief through out the animations. On top of that, it's the kind of character that animators love to draw. Because it's such a simple form, my team and I really tried to squash and stretch this character to get some interesting cat-like movement. With any luck, the audience will enjoy the character as much as we enjoyed animating it. 

Happy Easter

I'm a bit late in saying it, but Happy Easter everyone! 

The Pick-Up Princess--We Have Color!

Despite a pretty heavy work load from school, production of the animated children's e-book, The Pick-Up Princess, is still going strong! This week I have a few screen shots of the first fully colored animation! 1 down, 13 more to go! This scene was completely done by myself, but hopefully in the coming weeks I will be able to show some of the work from the talented crew of colorists that are also working on the project. 

The Pick-Up Princess--Character Sheet 2

Another update! Here is the character sheet for Princess's Mom. 

As far as production is going: right now I am in the clean-up and coloring stage. Unfortunately, I won't be able to meet the Easter deadline that I had hoped to meet six months ago (every production has it's hiccups), but I'm nearing the home stretch! 

With luck,  I'll have some screen shots of a few fully finished scenes next week. Stay tuned! 

Princess's Mom is caring but can only handle her daughters mess for so long. It is her parental duty to teach Princess to manage her things, lest they take over completely!

The Pick-Up Princess--Character Sheet 1

For the past six months I have been working on an animated children's e-book called The Pick-Up Princess. The project has been pretty hush-hush for the most part, but I just got the ok from my editor to start posting some sneak peeks and updates! My hope is to keep the updates coming each week, so stop in to see what's new. 

Here's the basic story: A little girl finds creative ways to avoid cleaning her room. 

Princess Character Sheet 

Princess is your average little girl with no desire to clean her room. She is fun, energetic, and a bit of a klutz. She's sweet, but she feels she has better things to do than pick up.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Another Screen Design assignment. The dialogue is taken from the radio broadcast of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

Something Living in the Subway

An assignment for my Screen Design class.

This is how cutting down my story for the final portfolio feels...

I understand the need to edit and shorten work to meet the needs of professors or editors, but taking a well sharpened machete to your baby can be a bit of a difficult experience for anyone. It's messy, there are fragmented limbs everywhere, and it only ever ends with you shivering in a corner, your manuscript clutched between your bloody fingers, contemplating the morality of what you have just done. Over all, not a pleasant experience, even if it is a necessary one.

Indiana Jones on a Pterodactyl Fighting Nazis

A project from my Screen Design class. Be warned: the audio will probably blow your eardrums into the next room. Just sayin'.

SQUIRREL WARS

This is a game I worked on back and high school with Gee Dbl. A and I highly recommend it for those of you with apple products and the determination to get through the classic game levels. Think space invaders. Except instead of space--it's a tree and instead of invaders---they're mud slinging gophers and instead of controlling a space ship--you're a squirrel.

Gee Dbl. A website

Squirrel wars app

Plus, it's only $0.99! How could you say no?

SQUIRREL WARS 

video intro

See what I did? An intro that matches my business card. Eh? Eh? Yeah, now that's classy. 

my card

The back of my card, that is. I don't think I could handle the pressure of putting all of my contact info up on the off-chance it's viewed by an axe wielding maniac who then wants to hunt me down and wear my skin as a fashionable ascot. Can't be too careful.

Introduction

Debbie Scheller is currently a student of animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA. She has an almost unhealthy obsession with both books and film, the result being massive collections of both which have taken over every space she inhabits and are threatening to one day topple and crush her completely. Her recent accomplishments include single handedly eating an entire container of Ben and Jerry's Brownie Batter ice cream, starting this blog, and writing this paragraph completely in the third person.