Last Chance started out as three pencil drawings. The Comet, the Trees leaving and the Dancing Lady. They were the key scenes and became the first storyboard panels.

The animation ended up with 27 paintings in the end. At least that’s what they’re supposed to be, moving paintings. The idea was to make something “impressionistic”, where the first glimpse of the painting contains all the information.

The story is intentionally on the darker side. We start of with a brief heavenly glimpse, Shipibo patterns of the Amazon, and then it’s all downhill from there. Only towards the end when all options have been exhausted are we allowed to fly again.

Anyway, here are the original three drawings that started the whole thing.

Here’s some old R&D renders. This one shows an individual paint stroke. First flat, then displaced and finally with highlights. The idea was to have different paint pigments, some metallic etc. based on the actual “tube” they came from – but as usual, I didn’t have time for that.
The rendering doesn’t do paint mixing anyway so it wouldn’t have been worth it.

The last image shows the same stroke repeated – so it’s a little boring. What’s noteworthy is the curving of the strokes which gives some neat effects, especially on animated objects.

This image shows the preview options available when constructing the image. Points, lines, sprites and strokes. This helps in constructing the image – the density can be visualized with Points, the direction and lenght with Lines. Finally the Strokes show how the render will look – although without the canvas.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.

Seems like the sun has moved south for the winter.
Means we have two options – hibernation or migration.
Maybe we should take a poll.
There is something about finishing a project on a sunny beach.

Either way, no sun, no pretty pictures.

Should really be the bar down the street.
Most of the work has been done on the laptop. Because there’s so much to render I had to get an extra workstation to help out. So this is the space where it’s happening. Nice sunny view of the garden in the morning. 2 blocks away from Main street in Vancouver.

The sunshine and music over here is putting a big dent in the schedule. There’s a ton of finished shots from the last two weeks that I never uploaded. So here’s a more final version of what will appear on the big screen

This one was inspired from my vacation in Israel chilling out on the beach whilst Cobra attack helicopters flew overhead to do their little thing a few miles away. Jolly good.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.

Before I disappear for a few days to work on the trailer – here’s a quick peek at what last weeks Despair image ended up looking like.

After a slight runin with a case of egoloss our hero wakes up next to a stream. New reality, new rules. All good.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.

Here’s a little work in progress from yesterday-

The character wakes up next to a stream.
Disoriented at first but soon realizes that even despair is a temporary state.

It’s funny how when you think of something it’s already happened.
Below is an image from lastchance – above not quite the inspiration for it but it might as well have been.
Don’t you hate time bandits

From naughton321 on Flickr.

This is where the Piggie image got used. Not sure about the colors yet but it’s getting there. Shot some cool video for animation reference as well. Good fun!

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr
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Here’s where the oilfire picture ended up going. Ditched the Humwee and put an M1 in there instead. Like the graphic better that way.

From Project_Last_Chance on Flickr.