CUPdates 2: Nays 2084 Preview & Nay Recruiters Game

For this week's CUPdate, I've been working on three projects, so I'm gonna show some of the progress I've made so far on each. A lot was admittedly writing, so if there's not a lot to see, that's why!

*Note: Some of the links in this post are private Google Drive links and only in there for my presentation, you won't have access to these files. I've provided some screenshots to show what's included in these links to give you an idea though!

Nays 2084

I started on this animation back in 2017, but hadn't worked on it since 2019. Well, a few weeks ago I got inspired to start working on it again since it had been a while. At this point, I've spent over 40 hours working on this project, and I still have a lot more to do.

Here's the animatic that I posted 2 years ago, just with the rough storyboards and layouts:

The idea for this is that I wanted to make a trailer for a bunch of events that take place in the year 2084 in The Nays (which is the current year for the most recent parts I'm writing). At this point, about half of this video has already happened, but there are still some moments that I haven't written yet.

This was inspired by my brother's Nays 2008 animation that was made over 10 years ago at this point, but that was always one of my favorite animations that he created.

So I ended up creating a lot of the more finished drawings when I was making the Truth of Yaguzi Eventure, but I didn't do a lot of the animating. Recently I finally composited together a lot of animations that I had drawn and started to realize I was getting closer to finishing this than I had originally thought.

My plan is to finish this animation by the end of this year (maybe by fall if I'm lucky), so I'm hoping that'll happen!

Here's where I'm at in terms of progress so far:

Nay Recruiters Game

Another on-going project that I've been working more on is the Nay Recruiters RPG Maker game. It was originally an MV project that I started back in 2019, but I updated it to an MZ project and have mostly been working on the battle system, GUI, and overall concept plans for how the game works. 

Well, recently, I decided to start working on the sequence of events and overall story. My plan is to make the story basically an abridged, shortened, retelling of my huge The Nays story. In this version, I'm planning to focus on some of the main characters and a lot of the characters that come later will be side optional characters, where their stories will be optional quests that aren't required for the main plot. I really wanna focus the story in more for this game, and it could be a chance to explore rewriting the story without affecting the Eventure structures too much, and it'll be a kind of fresh start. I've narrowed down the opening scene to 3 different ideas, but still trying to figure out which of those to go with.

Then I also started working on style inspiration boards, mainly for the text boxes, and then a bit for character/background art. I'm still kinda all over the place and not quite sure what I wanna do, but the art won't actually be coming for awhile since I need to finish the story and programming main parts first, so that's okay. I might do some style tests in the near future though to try and at least explore some of my options.

The Nays

It's been awhile since I wrote anything for the main storyline of The Nays (since December actually, so I haven't since last year!). Well, last weekend my brother and I wrote the Garlint Eventure, which has been planned for awhile, but never actually written. I also drew some storyboards for the Hot Ice City Eventure that was written a few months back, and turned it into a Google Doc.

Here are the storyboards:

And as a bonus, I also discovered Hero Forge this week (thanks to my friend Anna!) and I decided to make The 6 Main Nays on there:

Exit 84: CCAD's 24-Hour Animation Contest

In March, I participated in the CCAD 24-Hour Animation contest, alongside 3 of my other alumni friends, Jinny Hinkle, Hillary Hastings, and Laura Mansfield. This year they let alumni participate, so we were excited to have the opportunity to participate, since it had been something CCAD started doing after we graduated.

Before I take you through the process behind our short film, I'll post the extended version (with additional credits and a custom title screen) that we created here:

Now I'm going to go over our process. The kickoff video in Discord started at 6:30 PM on Friday March 19th where we got the prompt, which was this video. And from there, we all hopped into a Discord voice chat where we brainstormed ideas. Our first idea was about someone watching movies on their TV in their living room while all of their food came to life. But then we came up with the idea where there's this afterlife that looks like a drive-in theater, where whichever food you eat, it makes you remember a different memory.

Once we had that idea, we started to draw concepts of the main character. Hillary drew our storyboard thumbnails and I timed them out into an animatic. Then Jinny started to create the color scripts while Laura drew more character concepts.

Here's how our storyboards, color scripts, and final animation compare:

We finished our edit of the color scripts into an animatic about 6 hours in, so we were ready to start animating and working on backgrounds! We figured out some final looks and color tests, so I made these color tests based on Jinny's color scripts:

Hillary and Laura went to bed at some point while Jinny continued to work on backgrounds and I worked on the sound design for our film. I made a shot list in Google Sheets for us to keep track of the progress of each of our shots.

In the morning around 7-9 AM, Hillary and Laura came back online to help out with backgrounds, while Jinny finished up the character rig that she created in Photoshop. From there, all of us animated various scenes and basically just kept revising as we went.

Around noon, we finished all of the animations and I put together a final edit while everyone went to grab some lunch. We wrote notes and make some final edits to adjust some of the timing and make final changes. Around 3 PM, we finished entirely and exported the final video and watched it a few times together as a group. And by 4 PM, I submitted the final short film for judging. Jinny and I ordered Noodles & Company, then passed out immediately after.

Here's an image I put together of our OCs before we worked on the project:

So overall, we had a lot of fun and were really happy with how it came out! For me, this felt more intense than Global Game Jams because animating is a lot of work, and also we had a lot less time to work with. But I would do it again! We all felt super motivated to work on our own projects after this, so it was a huge booster for us.

I also learned a lot while working on this. I hadn't done a lot of sound design edits on projects before, so to spend hours focusing on that, I had a lot of fun. And overall this was probably the largest Premiere file I'd ever created, with tons of sequences nested inside of each other. My main job on the project was editing, since we were constantly updating the film and needed me to do that almost full-time. I did get to draw some concepts and animate a scene though, which was fun!

And then afterwards, we put together a documentary where we talk about our process and the whole event!

So anyway, thanks for reading this post and watching our short film!

Check out Jinny's blog post here!

Discovery of the Rebirth Stone Animatic

I took about 3 hours to make this rough animatic that summaries the Discovery of the Rebirth Stone Eventure in 5 minutes. I took some of the key moments and made a bunch of quick storyboards to showcase them.

Discovery of the Rebirth Stone from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.


And here are some of my favorite moments:

Nays 2084 Preview - Storyboard Animatic Complete!

This is a project that I've been working on recently. It was inspired by my brother's animation that he did back in 2008, where it was a preview of stuff in The Nays that was to come that year. This one is about what is to come in the next year of eventures (in their year, which is 2084). Some of these things may happen in 2085 though, since some is very far future, but close enough!

On another note, this is still in the rough stages, but I finally finished drawing all of the storyboards so I wanted to compile what I had together so far. Sounds are still very rough/unedited, and I haven't added sound effects yet. But the timing is pretty solid for what I'm planning for the final. Same with the compositions. 

I also want to point out that a couple of the scenes towards the beginning were drawn at least two years ago, so that's why some of these look a bit lower quality than others. Those are also the ones that have old recorded sounds that are probably gonna be redone when I get time to.

But overall this has been fun and I'm excited to start working on the actual animating! It's taken about 8 hours and 30 minutes so far for the drawing, compiling, and recording parts. But I'm a lot happier with this than I was with my previous animatics for this project and others.

Nays 2084 - Storyboard Animatic from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

Lie City - Layout & Timing

I finished up layout for an animation that I'm working on. The layout was due for class two weeks ago, so that's what I've got so far. I plan on revising the layout a bit for a few of the scenes, based on notes from my professor. But overall, the layout stage is pretty close to being finished, and I plan on actually fully animating this at some point in the future.

Super Rough Animatic

So I'm starting up another little project. I'm planning on doing some rough animations for a trailer-type video of The Nays. I don't really plan on finishing it with color, I just want to practice some animating, since I haven't done it in a really long time.

Here's the super quick animatic I made in a few hours. The "storyboards" are nothing close to being finished, I just wanted to make this for timing purposes, since this is a small little project.

Ronny is a very energetic orphan who loves to have fun. He's very curious and always asking questions, even if it is not the appropriate time to be asking so. He has a lot of fun and makes do with what little resources he has without a home. Flink is a last name that the orphans made up together, since they don't know their actual birth last names.

Some doodles from earlier today. I did these while I was waiting for my parents in the parking lot of a store.

Lots and Lots of Wolves

I've been working a lot with trying to figure out my character designs fully for my class. This week is a bigger week where deadlines are super important for this class, so I made sure to catch up and have more done.

Animatic that I created for the scene that I am working with this week.

The design I decided to stick with for Armon, until I have time to play around with re-designing him more. I got a lot of help from Jinny.

A bunch of variations on my character Armon, still not any finalized designs.

Some various wolf character concepts.

Wolf gestures I did from videos taken at the zoo.

And here are some re-design ideas for Lilith. I still have yet to find the right direction I should go in.

Animation Planning!

For Animation III, our first assignment is to create a character and storyboard an animated short. So for mine, I decided to go with the idea of a black mage named Kai, who seeks out a new master in the art of magic. That master is Mikey.

Some quick character sheets I did for the two characters in my short.

Here's the first draft of the animatic for the short.

First Semester of Sophomore Year: Completed!

So I just finished up my first semester of sophomore year this past Friday. It was a very busy semester, as you can probably tell from the recent posts I've been updating with. I haven't even had a chance to really upload anything not for my Design for Media class since early October. Now I'll be uploading everything else that I've done in my other classes and in my free time. Enjoy my massive update:

"Neuro's Evil Torture"

This was my gift for the Secret Santa Swap that the Animation and Illustration Collectives did at my school. I had a lot of fun with this and I really started to realize how much more I enjoyed using Painter Tool Sai after working on this.

"Abra's Concentration"

A piece I did for the Illustration Collective at my school. This was also one of the first pieces I finished in Painter Tool Sai.

"Light Festival Massacre"

This animatic starts out with the protagonist, Benedict, standing outside of a large, fancy building. Benedict's mission is to assassinate Harrison. He faces his arch-enemy Blaine in a race to kill the target. As he runs through the masquerade, he is not only faced with his mission, but he also comes across a woman named Kali. This was my final animatic for my storyboarding class.

"Entering The Link Between Worlds"

Music Interpretation animatic for storyboarding class. This is basically about the beginning of The Nays. The Nays find themselves in a mysterious new place known as The Link Between Worlds. They are faced with many obstacles that they must overcome.

"Return to Muko Inc."

Ted and Doge come across a mysterious box in warehouse. They decide to return the box to Muko Inc. because they think that the owner would like it back. Once they push it outside, it is revealed that there is Lotus, a slave boy, inside the box. Lotus seeks their help, but they are scared off and retreat. This was my final for my Animation I class. We had to make a 20 second animation about pretty much anything.

"Eather's Banjo"

This was my first time animating to sound. We chose a sound clip out of a select few, and this was the one that I decided to go with. It's from a clip of MLP:FiM with Pinkie Pie. So this animation is really rough since we weren't given all that much time to come out with a finished piece. In fact, he wanted us to keep it rough in order to focus more on the movement rather than an actual finished animation. So this is my character Eather, since I figured this clip was close enough to her voice.

"Marker Sketches"

This was my first time using markers, so I did some experimenting with mixing colors to start it off. Jinny gave me a quick demo on how to use them.

"Colored Pencil Tests"

This semester I started experimenting with more various mediums in my sketchbook, thanks to Jinny. These are some tests that I did using colored pencils.

"Sketches of Me"

So I was trying to figure out how to draw myself. I couldn't really get the right style or way to draw myself though, even after this many attempts. Drawing myself accurately and stylistically is a lot harder than I thought.

"More Sophomore Sketches"

A whole bunch of various sketches from throughout my first semester of sophomore year. The majority of these are my characters, but at the very bottom there are a few sketches of Abra and Missingno.

"Gesture Practice"

A bunch of practice gesture drawings I've done throughout the semester.

The Ugly Dinosaur: Finishing up Pre-Production Work

This week I've been pretty busy with my team's Ugly Dinosaur Project. Here's basically what I did this week:

Animatics:

(If you cannot view Scene 2, click here)

I put together the Animatics for Scenes 2 - 5. I only drew the storyboards for scenes 3 and 5, but I timed out all 4 of those scenes. Hillary put together scene 1 and combined all of them into the final animatic, which can be found on our Youtube page.

I also updated our Youtube page a bit. I added a Production Playlist, which includes all of the videos created for our project. I also added a Crew List of links to our Members' Youtube pages on the right side of the page.

As the Pipeline Director, I've been continually updating our Dropbox account. As I receive files, I  upload them to the specific folders.  This provides for easy access to all of our files among our group members.

Thumbnailing:

Since I am one of the general animators, my job was to do some basic thumbnailing for some of the characters. Jinny suggested experimenting with the Torvosauruses and Dot's parents, since they were not assigned any specific members to animate yet.

Practice Sketches:

And as always, I have been practicing drawing the characters. Since Vincent finalized the model sheets earlier in the week, I was finally able to experiment drawing the characters in the finalized style.

Lots of Work

So I haven't really updated my blog recently that wasn't for my Design for Media class. I've been working on a lot, I just haven't found the time to upload it all. Design for Media's definitely been keeping me the most busy though. But here's everything else that I've been working on that is not for that class.

"Meteor Age Animatic"

My first actual colored animatic I've made. This is a trailer for a movie I made up called Meteor Age. It's basically a small portion of my slightly larger series, Biggert City. This is basically just a story about R and how he is kicked out of his band and forms a new group.

"Arianna Digby Model Sheet"

A Model sheet I created for my character, Arianna Digby. You can see her walk cycle animation below.

"Arianna Walk Cycle"

My first time doing a walk cycle. This is Arianna Digby, a shy and nervous girl. I did this for my Animation I class.

"Character Doodling"

A bunch of various character sketches. The first two are Jinny's characters, but the colored pencil ones are mine. And then the girl on the right is a concept idea for my game proposal I made last week.

"Trailer Storyboard Thumbnails"

The thumbnail sketches I did for my current storyboard, Meteor Age Trailer.

"Biggert City & Nays Sketches"

Some sketches I've been doing. The Biggert City ones are on the top, which was basically me re-designing some of the characters for my trailer. The bottom are just a couple of sketches of The Nays.

"Gozo Morph Animation"

A morph animation I did for Animation I class. So I did a milkshake turning into Gozo, then turning into a cheeseburger.

"Various Gestures"

The first portion are just from figure drawing sites that I did with my roommates one day. The majority of the others are from the day that I went with Renée and Chris around Columbus to draw. There are some from when I went to Gamestop to the Pokemon Black & White 2 midnight release. And then the rest are of my friends Blair and Austin, who volunteered to pose for us to draw.

Animation Demo Reel

I finally got around to making a quick demo reel for myself. So far I only have a couple of first animations, animatic, and model sheets from my Animation I and Storyboarding classes, but I'll definitely make another one in the near future once I have more work to show.

Starting Back Up

So this was my second week back at college and I've been working on a lot of stuff for classes. This week has had its ups and downs, but I've been able to get through it so far.

Neo Obelisque Animatic from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

"Neo Obelisque Animatic"

This is my first finished animatic for my storyboarding class. It's about Pubby being initiated into the Dusty Dimes after confronting Lonny.

"Animating Concepts"

Some concepts for my next animation assignment. I was just planning out some punching poses.

"Ralphie Scott Concepts"

Just some concepts for my animation class. I tried to draw Ralphie and Scott more simplified.

"Bouncing Ball Animation"

CLICK HERE TO VIEW ANIMATION.

My first project for Animation class. Just a simple bouncing ball animation.