Animatics
are roughly animated storyboards used to work out any problems with picture
editing, timing, sound and everything else before your final film is completed.
With that in mind, here is the animatic for our Watchcat Holiday episode.
We are trying to keep our episode shorter in order to finish more than on a year. Any feedback is good feedback, so please let us know what you think, like, dislike, hate, don't understand, etc. Any comment is helpful. Thanks!
While research continues on our next Watchcat episode, we thought you might be interested in seeing a few cat vs deer videos. I was amazed to see that there are a lot of cats out there having to deal with large deer entering their neighborhoods.
This
weekend, Greg and I attended this year's 2017 Asifa Annie Awards where Greg got the chance to meet one of his animation heroes; the voice of the WB animated Batman series, Kevin Conroy!
It was amazing to learn that Mr. Conroy was already a big fan and alwayscarries an official Watchcat card wherever he goes.
Here's the view from our seats of Disney Animator/Director,Glen Keane sharing the stage with basketball great Kobe Bryant...
We handed out a lot of Watchcat business cards and took photos of well
known animation professionals.and met lots of people like actor James Hong,
I got the finally meet two of my animation heroes, Animation Director Henry Selick.
And the creator of the Simpsons, Matt Groening.
Next Post: Watchcat meets Bambi
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Over the weekend was a very successful one for writer & co-creator of Watchcat, Gregory J. Bradley, with the help
of his producing & co-directing partner Lee Anthony Smith just
completed principal photography on of their independent feature, "Noir."
We all did different jobs and roles to make this project happen. I was the special-effects make up artist as well as prop master and even filled in as an actor. But now, after two years of shooting, Noir has finally wrapped principle photography and is now headed for the editing room! Congrats everybody!
And with the new year, we at Watchcat Films are beginning to work on a brand new episode. I'm currently in the process of re-designing our animation workflow. I know its a very exciting thing to talk about, but I have been doing a some research into other films about cats.
There seems to be two types of Cat designs.
Cartoony cat characters based on real cats, either on two legs or on four.
Stylistic catsin human formwho wear human clothing and are bipeds.
Beginning with a film from 2008 called "Second Wind", Ian Worrel from CalArt,features a very tall legged and stylized cat character who's owner is a tiny white bearded man.
The cat has very large and expressive eyes with cat like mannerisms. Its a very unique and interesting story about the two characters discovering a windmill spirit character. Very Celtic in its style and presentation.
Another very interesting film is "The Cat Piano" from an Australia studio called the Peoples Republic of Animation. Based on a poem by Eddie White, the co-director of the film with character designs and animation by Ari Gibson and crew. This is a very dark film where I really like the cat designs with human characteristics and the look of night throughout the film. The cats are more human than real cats as if all the cats evolved to become bipeds on an island faaway from mankind.
The classic "Cats don't Dance" is set in more cartoony and upbeat world than "The Cat Piano", featuring the world of working biped animals in 1940s Hollywood.
It features very traditional animation using cartoony cats in period clothing of the era. The story isn't as good as the animation or the character designs, but there are some funny moments.
And then there is Felidae, a 1994 animated feature from Germany which is set in the modern day world. I had never heard of this film before researching this post and after watching it now I know why. This film has a lot of very graphic and adult themes within and I would not show it to kids under 16. The cats are shown very realisticly in this Film Noir world where cats swear, kill each other and have sex just like real cats!
Spoiler Alert: The main cat named Francis is the detective cat character who discovers several murdered cats in the neighborhood he's just moved into. Eventually, he meets a blind female cat named Felidae, who is introduced and soon winds up dead. There is way too much dialogue in this film and forget about any musical numbers or humor.
Not for little viewers...
This is film looks like it could have been animated by Don Bluth and could have been retitled, " All Cats go to Hell". After viewing it, I can now see what kind of cat story we need to avoid. Do you have a favorite animated film featuring a cat as a main character? Please let me know in the comment section below.
New Year's Resolution January 2017 = $26.83 from clicks on the ads on this blog. Help boost this amount by clicking on the ads and when its over $100, Google will send us a check which we will donate to a local animal shelter.
2017 begins and this is the time when New Year's resolutions are made and broken a week later. We hope not to break this one, which is to make more shorter Watchcat episodes this year than last year. We begin the year, by thanking all our 2016 viewers, many who live in different countries around the world. The top ten countries are as follows:
United States 7964
Russia
686
France
417
Germany
295
United Kingdom
111
India
81
Mexico
67
China
62
Canada
57
Ukraine
50
And we are still amazed that "Famous Felines in Animation 2" got 1127 views, this post appeared 2 years ago when we started on Watchcat 2 and needed something to keep people viewing our blog while I worked on shots to talk about later. The first "Famous Felines in Animation", only received 100 views so far.
Early Beat boards from Watchcat Episode 2
That was then, this is Now...
Now that we have a few Watchcat episodes under our collars. We want to streamline our productions into shorter episodes and set up scene files, so that other animators can work on them. Once in place, we hope to be able to send scenes to interested animators who they can animate and send back to us to be used in a future episodes. The participating animator would receive screen credit and they could use their finished animation scene in their demo reel. We also want to take our Watchcat ideas to the big studios around town to see if making these shorts might lead to something bigger. We are continuing to find a bigger audience,really appreciate the growth of viewers over the past year and hope you will continue to support us in the coming year.
Let's face it, 2016 sucked When
the year began with Jason Wingreen, the voice of Star Wars' Boba Fett
dying at 95, most would chalk it up to old age. But when Princess Leia,
Carrie Fisher died yesterday on my birthday, it was hard to celebrate it this year.
But we did celebrate finishing Watchcat episode 2 by putting out episode 3 in the form of a "Holiday Special" which is up to 336 views. We also started the year with 15 subscribers and on the last Watchcat Wednesday of 2016 we are up to81 Youtube subscribers. You can subscribe to our Watchcat Films Youtube channel too!
We are planning on making more Watchcats episodes in the new year, in the meantime, please share our episodes with your friends and family. Help us to make more of these little dreams to come.
Thank you for all your support and letting us know you are out there and interesting in we what we are doing. We started 2016 with about 4500 views to the Watchcat files blog and we end this Watchcat Wednesday with:
11,000 all time views!!!
y
Happy NEW 2017!
We still want to hear from you and you can always click on the ads to generate a Google check over $100 to be donated to a local animal shelter. We are still at $25.39, so click those ads and we will post when the check arrives.
