A slightly revised version of my previous animatic. I slightly altered the sound, and added a darker background to enhance the contrast of the overall piece.

Phil Tippett is a Californian stop-motion animator and creature designer. He is most notable for his work on the Star Wars movies, where he fabricated and animated various creatures and vehicles including the four-legged AT-AT walkers during the opening battle scene of "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back".

He is credited as being the founder of the "Go Motion" technique of stop motion animation, which differs from standard stop-mo as the animator does not move the character, then take a picture, the animator uses rods and wires to move the character and capture the frame as the subject is moving. This creates a unique motion blur effect, that gives an incredibly smooth movement. This was a particularly successful endevour in the 1981 movie "Dragonslayer", which I feel stars the most exceptionally well animated dragon ever commited to celluloid. So well animated infact, that Tippett was nominated for an Academy Award that same year.

An interesting point to note about Phil Tippett, is that he was in-line to be the lead animator on Jurassic Park, before Steven Spielberg opted for CGI creatures instead of Go Motion puppets.

In recent years Tippett has worked on hugely popular films such as Starship Troopers and The Spiderwick Chronicles as a Creature Designer.

Above is an image of how my character Humphrey may look if he were to be made for a CG feature. The high level of rendering capabilities in such films means that Humphrey can be realistically textured, his skin can be made to look like a real amphibians skin, and his clothing can be made using Ncloth, so that it hangs naturally around his waist. In summary, if Humphrey were to be made for a CG feature, all of his little details could be catered for, as there would be more time and money to do so. If he were to be aimed at a quick turnaround medium, such as TV series', certain aspects of his design would have to be compromised so as to better adhere to the time and technical constraints of such an undertaking.

Above is an animatic portraying the first meeting of my two chartacters. This would act as a visual aid if I were to be working within a team, as the team I was working with would have a better understanding of the timing and pacing of this specific scene.

This image above demonstrates how my characters could be simplified for use in video games etc. A computer would be able to cope far better with the simplified lines of these characters as opposed to the more elaborate designs of the puppet schematic drawings. Less curves, means less polygons for the computer to generate.

Above is a presentation storyboard scene. Though this time I decided to draw out how the scene would look and colour it digitally. I am aiming these characters at a Stop Motion production, but  felt it quite prudent to explore other avenues for

The above image shows how the underlying mechanics of my character might manifest themselves.