Final Animation

We've been working on our final animations for the past month or so. I almost wish we'd been working on them for longer than the four weeks we got but I suppose we actually had to learn at some point before that, so.
I've realized what I wanted to accomplish for this animation is just not possible for me at the moment. I really wanted to make something that didn't look like it was made in flash (that look of heavy bold outlines and wow look at all the vectors) but I haven't figures out a way to accomplish that, unfortunately, which to be honest was a huge downer for me. That, and that no one seemed to enjoy my concept in creating a 'teaser trailer' for a longer series sort of combined to make this project more difficult than it probably should have been. This whole project was just one disappointment after another, and not even the actual animating part, but the conceptual part of how I wanted to render it and how my ideas were received by my teacher and classmates. By our second animation update I didn't even want to continue making this piece, I just sort of wanted to go to sleep.
Now I could say something inspiring about how giving up 'just isn't in my nature', but really I finished it because 1) I still wanted to see my idea pan out even if nobody else wanted to see it (for all I know college will be the last time I'll have the ability to create whatever I want to) and 2) because I wanted the practice. Besides I figure there will be a lot of times in my life where I have to work on something that I don't particularly want to, so there's practice for that too. Look at all that life experience. How great.
Animation-wise, everything is fine. Still using the same types of tools - tweens, movie clips, anything I've used for my past two projects. This time I tried to do a lot of movements that I hadn't done before, like running from a different angle, movement of semi-humanoid character, fire, some other things. I really enjoyed working that that stuff and I wish I had more time to go in and refine everything. With limited time and other classes to worry about I feel like my final animation will read more like an animatic than a finished project, especially because of the lack of shadows. Backgrounds also presented a problem here continuity-wise. Some scenes were planned from the beginning to have backgrounds drawn in photoshop, but for some scenes a background was drawn in flash for the sake of understanding the transitions. I think it sort of works in some ways - after all the different scenes are supposed to be taking place at different times so in that way the changing background types might help to differentiate the scenes a bit - but maybe it just looks sloppy. It's hard for me to tell - partly because I've been working on it for so long but mostly because even when I render it out to watch in quicktime my computer won't play it without skipping around. It's also started to like a really fun game called 'crash every adobe program'. Despite that I feel like I've gotten a fair amount of work done.
I did end up cutting about 30 seconds out of my animation somehow. It was just a few scenes here and there that I really wasn't feeling anymore, but they added up. I'll try and add a few more things to push the time up but I don't want to just add filler that makes no sense or is boring to look at. I think I'm also going to add a few (by a few I mean one) effects from after effects to help with the scenes with fire - after doing one layer of fire that repeats and has disappearing particles I realized shading was not something I would have time for. I think it reads as fire, but maybe there is something I can still do to push it further in after effects. Maybe.
Right now I'm actually most worried about sound. I've sort of accepted that I'm not at the skill level yet where I an make flash look not like flash (and definitely not at the skill level where I can make all my movements completely smooth and perfect), but I still haven't even started on sound yet. I have collected a small sample of sounds from other classes and personal projects from summer, but it seems off to work with a sound I've already worked with before. Especially when the projects are really different. That just makes it weird.
Anyway I'm sure I'll finish on time and I'll be happy that I did. But if anything I feel like I learned that sometimes no one will like your ideas and you have to work through that (which I already learned in my horrible but brief time as a fashion major - which is actually the only thing they teach you) more so than I learned about actual animation. Still, a lot of good practice and that's the most important part. I think. I mean, the idea of 'art school' is kind of strange when you think about it. People are attached to it because they like creating art because it's fun or it's personal or it's expressive, but then you get to the 'school' bit of it and you sort of have to decide what 'art' really means.

And while “Art” is itself, it is also reflective of the artist, it is deceptive in beauty or subtle in meaning, and it is subjective to the audience. But before all this, it must be applicable to society, marketable to a population, and responsible in message - otherwise no one will see it (or in the case of a stupid message, it will...just be pointless). The problem is there really is no way to measure these things so it's a very hard thing to learn, because there is not right or wrong answer. It is also a community that seems to be in a constant civil war where old ideas are either seen as the 'correct' way or are predictable and overrated and new ideas are seen as 'incorrect' or 'innovative' - and the only difference is which new ideas worm their way into pop culture for whatever random reason and which ideas stay in obscurity. And the whole time the idea of 'art' is sold to people as some 'noble and ancient pursuit' about 'the human mind and/or the soul depending on what you believe - because we're all artists and artists have open minds - except when it comes to other artist's art, in which case only one way of doing things can possibly be the right way'. It all just feels a little disappointing.
Well that went way off topic. Anyway, animation.
I'm putting everything together in premiere and of course nothing will play in real time (hence the rendering to quicktime), so that's frustrating. But I don't really have a choice, my roommates have to work too and neither wants to drop everything drive me to campus whenever I need to work on something and then pick me up whenever I get tired. That's totally understandable though. I just wish my computer was a bit stronger. I am really liking premiere though- before the only video editing tools I'd used were the default windows/mac ones and corel, none of which are utterly terrible (except windows'), premiere is just much better. It really helps the editing process go faster and lets you refine in ways you certainly can't in flash, so hopefully if nothing else I can make my animation have decent transitions.
I think that was everything I needed to write about (+ bonus art school crisis rant, 100% free with 'thank god I didn't go to RISD' subtext). Time to do work.

Storyboards, Model Sheets, Final Project Beginning

So for the final project, despite having a lot of other ideas (that are more coherent stories rather than disjointed little segments of a greater story), I've decided to make an animation that could be used as a teaser trailer for my senior thesis project. It just makes the most sense time-wise, and I think it will be good animation practice ( a lot of camera work and dealing with human and non-human forms) as well as tying my senior thesis together well.

The story board was a little hard to put together, since each scene is rather short and more about introducing the characters than telling your basic linear story. I tried to keep everything grounded by giving the animation a 'real time' part, but I don't know how successful that will be in the end. I may end up changing the style of the not real time parts a little to make it clearer, maybe bluer tones vs yellower tones? Not sure yet.

The model sheets were pretty easy since I've already drawn all the characters for Thesis. So that was probably the most convenient part of this animation.

I'm most worried about time for this animation because trying to do this, thesis, and multimedia authoring is getting to be a heavy workload. So instead of going in with a slow approach, I'm basically trying to animate the whole thing as roughly and quickly as possible. That way I can go back later and make everything look the way I want it to, and if I don't have time to finish that, at least I've already finished the whole story. 

Hopefully for this project I'm either going to use some other programs to create backgrounds and maybe some other stuff too. Drawing in flash is so different from every other drawing program it always throws me off, especially when it comes to backgrounds. 

Project 2 - continued

I'm about 90% done with this project which I'm pretty excited to be done with...I'm not sure how long it will end up being but I'm sure it won't be much more than 30 seconds even though it seems like it should be much longer than that.
I feel like I should have made this move in a few different files, now that I'm getting toward the end of the movie I'm getting scared Flash will just stop working and delete everything.  But so far it hasn't really given me a problem.
Nothing has really given me too much of a problem actually, except that at one point the pencil tool wouldn't stop drawing in symbols. Why is that even a thing you can do. And the button to toggle the option on and off is so subtle. Anyway.
Been using a lot of movie clips, so even though we are supposed to be using a lot of symbols, I've been creating a lot of new content so I ended up drawing a lot by hand. Oh well. At least I have it for later.
I'm actually not 100% certain what else I should write here. At the moment I don't have questions but that's probably because I'm just focused on finishing by Wednesday. So.

Project 2? 3?

I don't think I wrote about the end of project whatever number it was (2? 1? Did the original walk cycle count as a project? I can't remember) but there isn't much to say - both my walk cycles and a very fast little cat walk cycle. I'll have to adjust the size of the cat in the future so she doesn't have to move so fast, or slow down the humans, or something. I had time to do a little interaction but not enough time, unfortunately. I feel like I have a lot of ideas for little animations but no time to complete them, which is too bad.
    For example this next project, which is either project 2 or 3, I have an idea that would involve around 8 scenes (all of them very short, of course, it wouldn't go over 30 seconds or so) but I'm maybe 70% sure I wouldn't be able to finish it in time. I am thinking of creating at least some background elements in photoshop because I'm getting a bit sick of drawing everything in flash. Especially backgrounds. Especially backgrounds.
   I may just attempt my idea anyway. Just because. 

Walk Cycle Part 2

Was there a part one? Probably not. Oh well.
So it's the second week of our walk cycle assignment. In order to try and push myself further I'm attempting a second walk cycle instead of just tweaking my old one (which I plan to do as well) and use them both for the final assingment. I was thinking of trying to go a four-legged walk cycle as well, but after some research (and realizing both these cycles have taken me entire weekends to complete) I realized that idea was not just stupid but also complete insanity. I'm still thinking of including a third character but their walk will probably be more cartoony-bouncy with not so many joints and limbs that need to be moved around. Maybe something more along the lines of short little nubs instead of thighs and knees and calves and feet.
Anyway; the process. Somehow I feel like there is an easier way to animate a walk cycle than what I'm doing and just no one wants to share it. Drawing frame by frame seems a little messy to me, especially when you want to keep your character's clothes (and limbs) a consistent size. But then you try using the same shapes over and over and suddenly your character looks completely static and lifeless, so. That's something to riddle out I guess.
On the plus side I've been finding the 'turn your layer into neon colored outlines' button very useful for clothing, though, so that's good. I seem to remember using that back in the day. And it seems that when you have locked layers, onion skin won't show them, which is nice if I'm just trying to match up the clothing movement. I'm still not too great at it, but I think this walk cycle went a lot faster than my first, so I guess that's improvement.
On the negative side I'm still being really fussy about how I want my characters to look and it bothers me that they can't look exactly how I want them. But I'm going to take an educated guess and assume that's how most people feel about pretty much everything they make. Also I'm starting to look at professional animations and feel exhausted. Those poor people.
At the end of this project I want to feel like I've actually accomplished something instead of feeling like I've just 'gotten through' a project. As long as I stop getting sick every week I think I can pull it off maybe?

Excersizes something and whatever

I think probably one and two but it might be two and three I guess I don't know how to count.
Also I forgot to write in this last week, so that's my bad too.
This past week we were supposed to create three dynamic images with three different types of color, but knowing dynamic poses aren't my strong suite I chose to start animating instead, making a very short 4 frame jump. Sketching the poses didn't take long, drawing the figure took the most amount of time. Had I been choosing only one color method I don't think coloring would have taken too long - though I can see where after a good number of frames coloring with the brush (which is what I used for the flat and shaded figures) would get horribly annoying. Just to do something different I tried using the bitmap fill - I don't think I would use it again unless it did something really special for the image.
Now I'm working on making a walk cycle, which is where the frustration comes in. I want to make it look natural, not too cartoonish, while still keeping the character unique. I'm okay getting the keyframes, but the frames between seem to me like they aren't smooth enough.
And as I'm working on this at home complaining about how much better I was at animating years ago (I almost went to college for animation...maybe I should have instead of fashion design, would have saved me the headache of changing majors), my friend says 'shouldn't it just be like riding a bike?' And I thought, yeah, shouldn't it be? Shouldn't this all be coming back to me soon? Then I realize sure - it is like riding a bike - only now the bike has a pedal for each individual toe. And it shoots  lazes. Hopefully I can figure out how to use flash to it's fullest potential, and when I can figure all that out, I won't be so stressed about animating and things will come back easier.
Either way, I really want to improve my animation skills, so I'm going to try and create a full colored character for this assignment. May or may not get that far, we'll see.

post in this blog weekly

octopus