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

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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.  

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finished the skull rotoscope

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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

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Finished Story Board

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

  

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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.