Blog Post 34

What I did this weekend-


Okay, I caught up on all my left over work from this semester. So all the videos now have titles and audio. I put those on the teacher machine.

The only project I'm having trouble with is the AE demo reel. I can't find my puppet animation. I guess I can redo it quickly and make the reel. But I didn't have time to do that today. So that is the only project you don't have from me.

I also made some layouts of still images from my animations to show at my review panel.

Blog Post 33


Okay, it has sounds and temporary titles. I think on wednesday I will try again to make a nice title in AE. The current one is sorta bland.

Other than that I'm pretty much done. I'm happy with this and it was actually really fun to make.

Blog post 32

Life update: My travel arrangements for Thanks Giving changed unexpectedly and I'm not going to be able to make it to class on Monday. So I got as much done on my final as I could and I'm like probably 85% done.  I have everything animated and moving etc All I have left to do is add sound, titles, transitions etc.

Issues I've run into- After Effects makes my videos super grainy. I can't figure out why. I'm rendering it as high quality as possible. I thought maybe it was just the preview but when I export it looks the same.  So thats irritating.

blog post 31

Okay, I got the skull filled I got the background pieces all done and all vectorized. For over the weekend I am going to make the the fly through of the background. Finish the pyre the skull sits on and hopefully animate the man dropping the flame.

So here is all the separate elements and then them put together at the bottom

Blog Post 30


What am I going to accomplish today??

Well, that's a good question. I'm gonna quickly finish up the rotoscope of the skull. It's still transparent and I need it to be solid white.

And I guess I'm gonna do the background. I'm a little unsure what it is going to look like, and I'd like to not waste time messing about with it. In retrospect more sketching would have been helpful.

So, best-case situation, by the end of the day I have a finished background and have each background element saved as a separate file for use in AE when I do the fly through.  

Blog Post 29

finished the skull rotoscope

Blog Post 28

Alright, well I have 1 second of animation completed.

Wish it was smoother, but I still have the other half of the turn to finish. I'll try to have that done for Wednesday

Blog Post 27

Finished Story Board

Blog Post 26

This was work form this past weekend.

This is Scene Three completed

This is the beginning of the Rotoscope for the skull. I'm having some issues with it at the moment. I think I'm going to work more in photoshop. 

Blog Post 25

Alright, I just put the Walk Cycle and the Still Walk Cycle on the teacher machine. I don't feel like I did very well with these ones.

Blog Post 24

Final Animation Proposal

CONCEPT

This animation takes place in the remnants of a recent battlefield. We focus in on a particular pyre in the center. On top of this pyre is an impaled skull. We focus closer into the skull, it then turns to face us slowly. After a moment, its jaw jerks open to reveal a dark abyss and we are sucked inside. Now inside the darkness we see two white silhouettes, one laying on the ground and the other poised above him ready attack with a long pike. A moment of hesitation, and then the man strikes his stake through the head of the prone man. The abyss flashes white for a moment and now we see the impaled head close up. Everything but the head and pike fade into the background. The head and pike begins to rotate into a vertical position and the head turns to face us, morphing into the same skull as earlier. Once completely upright, the battlefield background fades in around it. We switch back to the original long shot, a strange pyre in middle of a battlefield, but now a vague man stands next to the pyre. In a swift movement he lights a match and drops it into the base of the pyre. It lights immediately and starts to burn. The man vague man sinks to his knees and eventually to the ground.       

TOOLS

I'll be working with Flash for the parts the require roto-scoping. So mainly the skull. I'll be using photoshop to create backgrounds and potentially some other drawn elements I can import into flash. And I'll be using AfterEffects to do fly throughs of the backgrounds and other zooming and rotating requirements.  

TASK LIST and Calendar

Right now my top priorities is getting the well lit footage I need of the skull turning. Starting to work on all the background elements. And doing the animation of the stabbing. Those are the three main parts of the animation, the rest is just fades in and out and camera movement. 

  

Blog Post 23


So update on that work I was planning to get done. Today is the day my Creative Cloud subscription decided to run out. So I've just spent at least the past hour figuring out how to renew my subscription. Which is now done, but I still can't open any of my Adobe products. The error says it should only take 15 minuets for it to update, but that's not working. In other news, my tablet driver keeps not working. So it's been like an hour and half of trying to get anything working. I'm like practically ready to just hand draw this thing and scan it later.

At this point I'm just gonna go to school and see if I can get anything to work there. I also have a two hour break tomorrow that if I have anything really last minuet to get done (exporting etc) I should have time.

Blog Post 22


I ended up missing class last Wednesday, by afternoon that day I wasn't feeling well at all, and I figured I could just keep working on the walk cycles at home.

So to the best of my knowledge, our finished walk cycles are due tomorrow (Monday). I'm not sure how detailed or clean these are supposed to be, I feel like mine is going to be very loose or at least simple. I've started but still have a decent chunk of work to do to. So my plan is at about 4 or 5 today to go into the lab and work all evening on the walk cycle.

I haven't even really looked at the requirements for the final project, probably since we have off on Tuesday I'll sit down and start story boarding for that.

In other news I'm signed up for the DANGER CAUTION WARNING class, and I'm excited about that. Looking forwards to next semester.

Blog Post 21


I don't actually know whats due tomorrow. I checked Canvas and it says to just keep working? SO, I'm not sure if I should scrap the muddy man thing I was doing in class and start something new or just move on to the new walk cycle. I'm feeling like I should just move on to a new thing. So I'll try to have that worked out before class tomorrow. I'm thinking of doing some sort of space/galaxies theme maybe with a constellation person.  

Blog Post 20


So I've been kinnda crap at making these blog posts lately. The past few weekends I've been really busy and I honestly don't usually get to the homework for this class until Monday morning. But I'll try to review everything.


So AfterEffects is insanely confusing, but also really cool. I wish we had like a moving logo project, just because thats really cool and I'd love to try it. So, while AfterEffects is really intimidating I hope we keep using because I want to get better at it.

The Warp Puppet animation in AfterEffects was kinnda cool. I'd taken a digital class over the summer and we had worked with puppet warp in Photoshop so I was somewhat familiar with how it worked. I might do some of my own independent research on how to make animations with the puppet warp.

I like the fly-through a lot. At first the multiple views and cameras were confusing, but I think I get it now and its really cool. So, like I said, I'd love to keep going with AfterEffects. Lots of potential for really cool animations.

Skipping forwards to the class today- I like doing the walk cycles. I feel like this is gonna be one of the harder projects for me since I'm still somewhat uncomfortable with frame-by-frame animating. But we'll see. Walk cycles are something I want to get better at so I'm into this project.


And I'll try to make more blog posts.
 

Blog Post 19



I really liked seeing everyones animations. Some of them we had seen progress on and it was cool to see how they had changed. Other people's were a surprised since we had never seen them in class before. I thought the crit was really chill, which was nice. I wasn't sure how harsh these were going to be, and I'm glad that everyone seems laid back.

This new way of using flash is really interesting. The demo cleared up some of my confusion about symbols and tweening within a symbol. Definitely a technique I'll be using later. Looping a walk cycle was something I hadn't been able to figure out and now that I know how that should be so much easier

On that topic, I'm really glad we are moving onto walk cycles and turn arounds. That is something I'm very interested in and that I want to get much better at. So looking forwards to improving.

   

Blog Post 18


I finished my RCF on Saturday, but forgot to blog about it. It went better than I was expecting. I had less work to do than I thought and adding sounds was not as hard as I imagined it might be. Premiere is still rather difficult to use but I figured it out more or less. I don't love the sounds in my animation, but I think they are effective and help tell the story. I'd like feed back on the sounds the most because I didn't even think about them until Saturday, which was an oversight on my part. I was so focused on the animating process I didn't really think about post-production at all. But it is done, I'm very happy that I was not up all Sunday night working like I was afraid I might be.

Other things.

I know I have to get my rotoscope exercise onto the teachers machine. I put it on this blog, so it is here and finished etc. I just need to find the file. I'm trying to stay organized but there are just so many files it can be really hard to keep track. But I know I have it and I will try to get it on the teacher machine today.

Because I've been so busy with RCF I have not picked a presentation topic yet and I will do that ASAP. Maybe in class during break or something.

I'm looking forwards to seeing everyone's animations today. I thought this project was really pretty fun and I'm happy with my first finished animation.

      

Blog Post 17


I wasn't able to export my animatic for class today. My account has been incredibly slow lately, and I'm not sure if it is the network and everyone is experiencing similar issues or not. I cleaned off my account today and moved any large files to my flash drive and the working volume to see if that would help and I can't tell if it has or not. I'll probably end up emailing IT if it doesn't seem to resolve itself. I can barely download things like attachments etc. So, I'll have the animatic on the teacher machine as soon. I'll try exporting it form my computer at home and see if thats any different.


I'm trying to stay on top of this project, but I'm worried that it doesn't look very good and I want to go back in and do some frame by frame animation. Obviously time is just an issue.

Blog Post 16

I went to Sarah Hill's artist talk. I wish the presentation had been a little bit more informative. The show and the work is very symbolic and tackles really big issues, I assumed that Sarah as a speaker would be really clear and talk intelligently about their philosophy and method and opinions on art etc. But that really wasn't at all what the talk was like and I was a little disappointed. I had a lot of questions, which were echoed by other people, about exactly what kind of art Sarah actually makes. Some of it is performance, other is performance documentation and still other works are what I would call experimental films. Most questions from the audience were met with vague undefined answers.

I'm still really glad that this show and there artists are here, the issues they are tackling are certainly really relevant to a lot of the student body. I hope they get mores artists like this and hopefully have more artist talks about these issues in the future.      

Blog Post 15

Well other than being really hot all class, the stop motion was kinnda fun. I don't think I would want to pursue it any further, but I'm glad I had the experience. I'm not terribly happy with my stop motion, but I think its acceptable as a first attempt. Maybe I will do another one with more planning later, but for right now I'm okay with this first very abstract animation.

I will probably spend all of next class working on RCF, which I will hopefully have finished animating by next monday and have a week to do edits and sound in premier.

If I budget my time well this shouldn't be difficult. More or less I should be able to dedicate most of this and next week to this project. Illustration will be the only thing really splitting my attention.

Blog Post 14


So I brought a bunch of stuff to class to do the stop motion project. However I really have no idea what my "system of rules" is going to be. I figure it is easy enough to make geometric patterns with the shapes but I want to do something more interesting?  I think I want to do something where they stack or change. I'm unclear how well thought out this has to be. I am more or less hoping just to move stuff around and see how this program works in general. I'm also just realizing now that I do not have my flash drive, so I hope thats not a thing I need today.

I'm also now freaking out a little bit because Oct 15 is not really that far away. And I'm not "behind" on the RCF project, but I would like to be further ahead. So I hope we have in class time soon to really start working on that. Obviously I'll be working on it outside of class as well but I always find the in class time really productive.

I'm just starting to stress about grades and my work load.

Blog post 13


I really liked the Paul Hornschemeier talk. I'm very glad I went, I want to go to more artist talks this year because some of them can be really interesting. I liked hearing about his progression and how he got into comics and the art world. It was really pretty informative and helpful.

I also think the moving comics or animated illustrations is a really cool art form that I'd love to get into.

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/animated-illustration

Blog Post 12

Alright, the flipbook now has sound and a title screen, I didn't have any trouble importing/exporting.

I actually really liked going to the show in 301. I wouldn't say that I completely agree or disagree with the opinions of the artists, but it was definitely a great talking point. And the rotoscope was really cool. I'm gonna try to to go to the performances at the gallery on friday.

Blog post 11


Just finished up the rotoscope of my hand.

Blog post 10


Okay wow. I'm a little overwhelmed right now. So here is where I am with my work and my plan of action to get it all done.


Right now I have all the backgrounds and still objects done for my animatic. That being said nothing moves in my animatic, so that's a bit of a problem. But it also says the animatic does not need to be finished and I am probably half way done with it. Because just to tween the objects to move and show the pacing shouldn't be that hard.

I will try to have that started before class tomorrow.


The homework also says "Finish adding sounds and titles to Flip Book, Object, Relationship and ball/box animations. Export these files as .mov files (if you get stuck... blog about it and do what you can do... don't get frustrated just keep working in Flash if you need to)"

If we said that in class I must have missed that and I only just checked canvas now. So I'm not going to have those all tomorrow most likely. The flipbook is done but the other two have no sounds. However that should take maybe a half hour to finish. I might be able to get them done before class I'm not sure. I feel like working on the animatic is more important, but I'll see if I can mange both. If not I will have sound added to everything by next class on Wednesday.


And heres a link to a cool rotoscope animation, the dialogue is crap but the animation is pretty cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxR-oKkwJLI

Blog Post 9


Really several blog posts and a do-to list. I had a horrible weekend and while I'm up to date on class work I'm falling behind on this bit. So this is me trying to catch up again.

• Think of sounds for flipbook, object and relationship animations - make notes on your blog 

Well I more or less like the sounds I made for the flip book. I have horse hoof noises and a kinnda ambiguous dragging noise for when the footman leave the screen. I don't want over whelm it with noise. But I suppose the falling ground could have a noise and maybe a squeaky noise for the wheels? That sounds like too much though.

For the wind sock I think it should be easy to make so some whooshing noises. And maybe the flapping sounds for the sock itself.

The spaghetti maybe harder. I don't know that spaghetti really makes noise. I suppose I can do a bubbling/popping noise for the water.

• Develop an idea for a Rock, Cat, Feather Animation in your sketchbook/blog 

So I have no idea what I am doing for that yet. I might do a Halloween themed animation, since it tis the season. So something with a black cat and a witch's broom (stick) and maybe a witch's hat (feather). That gives it a plausible reason for them to be flying and falling etc.

• Read Chapters 8-10 in Animation: The Whole Story. Post a response to your blog. 

I keep forgetting to blog about the book. Its really interesting and informative. I'll dedicate a longer blog response to the book over the weekend

• Do some research into storyboards and Animatics. Post an image of a storyboard you found on line onto your blog. Post a link to a web resource or video of an Animatic to the What is an Animatic Discussion 

I have not posted in the discussion yet, but I'll stick stuff here so I can get back to it.



Alright this link is awesome. Its got a bunch of samples for story boards for stuff like The Avenegrs, Hellboy 2, Starwars, Batman, X-Men etc In a bunch of different styles and techniques.

http://screencrush.com/movie-storyboards/

I had a much harder time finding animatics. But this Batman one is really cool. Its not an official video or anything, just a personal project some one made but its really pretty amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBO8pk4jJ88

Also here is a cool website with a lot of animatics for commercials which is neat to look at

http://www.brain4est.com/index.php

blog post 8

For my two objects interacting I made spaghetti soften when it interacts with the hot water in a pot. I'm still not 100% happy with how the spaghetti falls, but this was the first time I was really using shape tweens and the pen tool to make the curves. But I think it is obvious that it is spaghetti when it moves. And still mostly not recognizable if you pause it, cuz it just looks like scribbles in a bowl.

I've done story boards before when I took animation pre-production. I was pretty horrible at them though and it was really stressful. So hopefully this time it will go better. 

Blog Post 7


Okay, so I made the "object that is not recognizable till it moves". I think it looks pretty abstract most of the time. If you stop it on any one frame it just looks like a weird tube and stick. Or just a bunch of geometric shapes. But when it moves I think it pretty clearly shows the sock blowing in the wind.
I'm not sure if it need more work, its a little rough but I figure it doesn't have to be super polished.

Blog Post 6

I really like the "heart" animation we watched at the beginning of class that was really cool.

It looks like people's flip book translated pretty well the flash.

Blog post 5


I think for the next project I have decided that I want my object to be a wind sock. I think that would work well for only being able to tell what it is when its moving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKO_TWSlhMk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88SI2bWfR6M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaUxtzKGV4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsHi6HdkiU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzFTOWVyFIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAgkolyJro

Blog post 4


Alright, well I finished my flash animation. I don't know if I did it right really. Its the first time I've ever made a flash animation so I watched a lot of youtubes videos to figure out how to do stuff. So this is it.

I really liked looking at everyones flipbooks in class today. The other videos we watched were really informative, if a little dry.  My favorite was the animation of the dinosaur.

Now we are making spinning fruit, which is going better than I would have thought. My banana looks like a macaroni noodle but it is pinning so success.  

Blog Post 2


Okay, well I spent most of today doing the flip book. I still have 30 cards left and I need to ink all of it. I tried to draw horse walking, which didn't come out as terrible as I thought it would? Over all I'm happy with my flip book so far, I'm mostly just worried about the pacing and wondering where I should add frame since it is most likely too fast.

Blog Post: 1


First class was a lot of new information. In general I understood that film and animation were just a lot of still images, but seeing how a projector and a zoetrope work was really interesting. Doing the zoetrope in class was harder than I expected. I really like the poem we are working from for the first project I see a lot of potential for it. I'm slightly intimidated by the amount of homework we have the first day but I understand we have a full week to finish it. So, I'm still optimistic and will probably prioritize this class.  

What I did today: well I made this blog and this test post to make sure it works