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.

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octopus