final project:

My project is coming along pretty well. I finally got the camera move the way that I wanted. It took a lot of messing around with all the settings and playing with the zoom function on the camera to make it look right. Now it’s on to the depth a field effects. The goal I want to achieve is a rack focus. As the boy moves through the forest I want the tent to be out of focus and as he gets closer to it the tent will come into focus. From the videos I have watched I think it will work out fine. If I can get it right I think that it will be very effective.

http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Adjust-the-Depth-of-Field-in-Adobe-After-Effects-7-85331974

Working on Project

I am working on my scene and everything is coming along. I have created most of my graphics and composed my shot and I like the looks of it. Now I have to figure out how I am going to convey what is going on. This shot in the movie is pretty important it’s the point where everything goes from mundane to weird. I think that I want to move past the bushes and push in on the tent but I am not completely sure how to achieve that. I know that aftereffects has cameras in it, so I looked up how to uses them. I hope that it works for my shot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&hl=uk&v=_PPdW0oLPDw

From messing around a little bit I think that the camera will work just fine.

My Movie:

This week’s project is to work on s scene from our movie. So I went back and looked at my animatic. I think I am going to do the scene where the boy walks through the woods and sees the tent in front of him. It seems like a good scene to start with, it’s not too complicated and it will give me a chance to show what my film is going to look like. Which brings me to my first problem; I am conflicted on what the movie should look like. I really want to animated the whole thing frame by frame in flash, but I don’t think that will be feasible. Its not the drawing out the frames that is going to be the most time consuming, it is going to be the coloring/texturing of each frame that is going to be the problem. I have been working on it for a couple of hours now and I don’t think it is going to work. I want it to be stylized, and I don’t t think I will have the time it takes to do it right. I am going to have to think of a different way to do my movie…

Emotions project:

This week we are doing an emotion project. The goal is convey an emotion through music and animation.  At first I didn’t know what emotion I want to do. My first thought was to do something horror related and make the emotion fear. I started a storyboard for it and I just wasn’t getting any ideas, but while drawing I remember a script that I had written. It was a ghost story but at its core it was a story about loss. There was a scene in the beginning where the man is standing in the cemetery and reflecting when it starts to rain. I thought that this scene would be the perfect for this animation. I got to work on the story board and worked it all out, created all my graphics. Started to import them and then ran into a giant problem: I had way too many layers to get anything done. This problem made me go to the handy dandy internet and look up what to do:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7e7c.html

Shy layers made this project possible. Thank you shy layers button!

More Puppet Pin:

During My found images project I tried to use the puppet pin feature of AE. It started out ok. I cut up monster and labeled everything. I imported it into AE and that is when the fun began. I didn’t realize that having all of the body parts in their own layers was going to be very hard for me to keep track of. I had keys every where and everything got out of control. I ended up keying the arms and legs separately and they started doing some crazy things. I wasn’t happy with the way things ended up looking and scraped the whole animation. I then went back and started over and only ended up moving the arms I couldn’t get the legs to look right.

This week, we are working on another puppet pin project, so I looked up some videos to give me some inspiration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOp81XM49gE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVTF7uX0LII&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIvySB_Bdbs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPCSIHC3loM&feature=related

I think is something that you just have to be learned by trial and error. But these have given me some interesting ideas.

Found Images Project:

This week’s project is out first in after effects. It has been a while since I have worked in AE. It is taking a little while to get back into it, but I am getting back up to speed. I like working in AE. It lets you do a lot of things that you can do with Photoshop but you can animate it. My project is coming along, I have all the pieces in place and I have animated all of the simple stuff. I am now working on the monster. I want to puppet pin him, but I was not totally sure what to do. So I looked up this video tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WFmcQXwnfs

It’s not the best but it helped some I now have a better idea what I am doing. Ill start work on that tomorrow.

I like cut out stop motion:

I have been working on my project for a while, and I like the way it is starting to come together, but I wish I could film it again. I am not totally happy with the amount of frames I have to work with. If I could do it over I would have stuck more to my story board and made my characters head fall off. I think that would have looked really cool in stop motion. I also would have made a more solid puppet. When I was moving him around, the fasteners were getting stuck on the other pieces and ripping the paper a little bit.

I am taking a break now, and I looked up some cut out stop motion animations. here are some I liked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m75xgnpOu2I&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58nLHhE277Y&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSPIDbcaQus&feature=related

Stop Motion:

This week’s project is a stop motion puppet. I have always liked stopped motion, I remember being young and seeing the Nightmare Before Christmas. It had a big impact on me. It looked like something that I had never seen before. Even if you know nothing about animation there is still something “real” about the way those characters move. They are not always the smoothest but they are always some how very organic. The characters in this film really come to life, it amazing what the animators can do with simple characters. My favorite parts of this film are the sets/props, and the amazing camera work.

This sequence has some impressive camera work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaxKiZfQcX8

 I am looking forward to animating my paper puppet; I just hope he stays together.

Character Moving Weight In Perspective:

For our new weight project we have to have our character lifting or pushing the weight with some sort of perspective. I am not really sure how to do this. I understand how two point perspective works, but its little weird doing it on a character. On this site:

http://www.drawmarvel.com/chapters/foreshortening.html

They have a little run down on how to use the perspective line to make the character have the right perspective. I understand a little better now, but I am still not totally sure what I am doing. I still don’t really understand what the perspective grid is going to do for this animation… I guess it will determine how large the character is and what angle they stand at. That will be helpful. If I can figure it out it will give this animation a 3d feel.

Weight:

Our next project will be on how to animate pushing/ lifting something heavy. I went and searched for some tips and I couldn’t find anything worth while so I decided to go and fine some good animation of characters lifting and pushing some thing heavy. I came across some of these animations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LVN3Vpvqog&feature=related

I like the poses in this one; the character gets low and tries to lock out his arms but seems to be having a hard time. There is a great sense of weight in this animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAX1psrxe-4&feature=related

This is another push animation and it is nice how the character changes his pushing grip around when the first one isn’t working. It makes the character seem like he was thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzAQmDIZRJY

This video has a lot of anticipation and it seems like goofy is thinking and trying to figure out what grip will work best. It looking like a pencil test but you still get the idea that the ball is heavy

For this project I think that the key poses are going to be very important I may have to animate the key frames, and then add the in-betweens instead of just animated straight ahead, like I normally do.

Perspective:

Perspective isn’t my favorite thing to do. I think I have a hard time with perspective, because it involves being exact. Having to map everything out, and measuring everything frame takes away form the “flow” I normally have while animating. It may not like working in perspective, but I understand how important it is to creating realistic animation. I hope with more practice it will become second nature and I will be able to eyeball it. For this weeks project I looked up some websites to help. I came across these two sites:

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-understand-perspective-for-animation-154267/

http://www.animatedbuzz.com/tutorials/perspective01.html

These sites have some good tips, and on the “wonderhowto” website there is a cool perspective animation at the end. It was interesting to see perspective on a simple character. When you plan everything out it seems like perspective isn’t that bad.

Four Legged Run Cycle….

I was looking for some flash run cycle tutorials when I came across this one:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/animation/animate-a-continuous-quad-run-cycle-with-flash/

Finding this now is convenient. We are working on run cycles in 2d and talking about four legged animals in character design.

I think the art style is interesting and it caught my eye. Its simple but you can still tell it is some sort of large cat. Maybe, I will try something like that in one of my animation. It is interesting how your mind still understands the movement, even with all the negative space.  Reading through it, it seems like an easy tutorial. I like the fact that it has a lot of reference images, so I can create my own key frames. There is some action script in this tutorial which seems like it could be helpful when I have to do my traveling loops. When I get some free time I want to do this tutorial.

Peur(s) du noir…

I was going through my files and backing them up when I came across my animaitc for my film. I watched it and stared thinking about what kind of style that I wanted to do it in. I knew that I wanted to do it in black and white. I also know that I wanted to do it more like a silent film, but with music and sound effects. I always loved the old black and white look of the old universal monster movies of the 20’s and 30’s. This reminded me of the movie that I bought a while back Peur(s) du noir or Fear(s) of the dark. This is a collection of animated shorts that are very stylized. Some of the animation are 2d while others are done in 3d . All the shorts have a dark tone and are very in line with the type of stories that I want to tell. The short that I like the most was the one with the man with the dogs. There isn’t much to the story but I just really like the line quality, it’s messy but still some how crisp. The lines almost seem to have a life of their own, and if I do my movie in 2d this is something that I may want to emulate.

I couldn’t find any real clips so I will just post the trailer…

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoG3gLa6Ik

Running

While doing some research for my upcoming run cycle I came across this clip:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYD6xG7UzrI



I still haven’t seen toy story 3 but I really want to. Pixar does some of my favorite animation. Looking at this clip I got a good look at what it takes to create a realistic run cycle. While doing my walk cycle last semester I had some troubles with my walk cycle because, some of the frames looked so similar to one another. It was difficult to make the movement look smooth. No matter what I did I always had some sort of hiccup. As of right now it looks like a run cycle may be somewhat easier. It seems like since the character is moving faster that there will be a bigger difference in the key poses, so this should make drawing the inbetweens a little easier. Also from this clip I see how important it is to shift the hips of the character. The shifting of the characters weight from left to right is what really sells the effect. It also looks like the head movements will be very important.

Week 1: Flow

This week’s animation topic is flow. I never really thought about how important flow is to creating a realistic animation. Flow is something that we take for granted in the real world. I just got home from the first class of the semester and had some time to kill before my next class, so I figured I would fight a few rounds in Super Street Fighter 4. while playing I found an interesting example of flow:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg18mUyy9KE



There is a character in the game named Ibuki, she has extremely long hair and looking at its flow it is pretty impressive.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_emzqUi17Q



This is Ibuki in an older game in 2d sprite form. Her hair still flows, but it is not as interesting as is in the 3d game.



Video game graphics have come a long way, and they unlike animation for film, have to react to what the player is doing. This makes the animation all that more impressive.