A Proud Member of
Animation World Network's
Affiliate Animator Program
The Princess in the Glass Tower
a Work in Progress by Linda
Kudzmas
New! Improved! Fried Egg Intro!
This Intro will be my new logo sequence used in my shorts.
These pages contain an on going e-journal of my current project, "The Princess in the Glass Tower" (working title). Updates will include production notes on problems, techniques, changes, etc., and criticism from viewers who take the time to e-mail me with their suggestions. These pages will act as an online production journal as work continues, for benefit of my students, faculty administration, and who ever else might have interest.
Synopsis:
Once upon a time....
The story is a fairy tale, in which the Damsel in Distress has to slay her
own Dragon when her 'Prince Charming' fails.
The young and naïve Princess has married the older Baron, a wealthy man
who collects rare and priceless objects, along with possessing mystical powers.
Treated as part of the Baron's collection, the Princess is imprisoned in a
Glass Tower, shut away from the rest of the kingdom, for only the Baron to
enjoy. She becomes lonely and destitute, until a chance meeting allows her
to befriend the Shepherd. Once the Baron realizes the two have nurtured a
friendship, he unleashes his jealous rage and both the Princess and Shepherd
are doomed to suffer the Baron's wrath.
There is no dialogue, the narrative told visually with a musical score.
6/18/01: Due to rereading (and rereading and
rereading) Ed
Hooks' Acting for Animators, I gained insight into the characters and
have added approximately 30 storyboard panels, and plan to add more. I am
now estimating the length of the short to almost quadruple to 30 minutes.
I have also come to the conclusion (after working on characters designs) that
years of sitting at a computer station have depleted my drawing skills and
have to spend more than a few hours working on my life drawing.
I have also transfered the 'test site' to my sponsored AWN site.
6/03/01: I started writing this story 6 years ago, and have been working on it off and on. I decided to wait on production until my style had evolved to a level I was satisfied with. With the experimentation of 2D character animation and 3D backgrounds in my previous independent animation's, I felt I was ready to tell the story. This will be my most ambitious animation to date, estimating the length to be 8 minutes long (I know, Willie, too short {Willie keeps hounding me to do a feature, just because HE'S animating a feature and feels shorts are a waste of time :), and total production time spanning 2 years. I started modeling the backgrounds in November of '00, and the following pages show the progress of the project thus far. It doesn't show the changes in the storyboard, advances of the character design and layout changes, although these will be added a a later date.
Production Notes:
All backgrounds are created in Newtek's Lightwave 5.6, Character animation will be created in Flash. Compositing will be in After Effects 5, along with providing additional animation. Painter 5 is used as the primary paint program, providing the texture maps.