eH ?

Been on the learning space the other day looking through it , seeing that we had to hand in stuff for the experimental animation project on there for some reason even though we sent it on disk and blogged stuff about it. Also what the hell is this other project about i think its the 11 second one but under another name for some reason which i had no idea about :S

Mood Change

The third assignment was to show a change in mood of a character/s , I completely missed the point of this which after andy and georg spoke to me about it , I had missed the anticipation and the reason to why the character reacts the way he does.

I had a few ideas for this which I think would of worked alot better than my final one , dont know why I didn't go with them to be fair.

Other Ideas

A bird crapping on a guys head
A man at the bus stop getting splashed by a puddle
A guy working at a computer when it crashes

All which were better than my final one which was a little guy listening to music then the big guy hits him in the face because he is getting annoyed with the loud music.

I showed the little character shaking as if to be scared and slying away from the big guy when he's not looking at him.

As I said before i'm not happy with the outcome of this project and I think I will do this again at some point.

Lifting a Weight

For the second assignment I had to show a character lifting weight and showing that this object was heavy when I first thought about this I thought hmm can't be that hard , but then when playing around with things I find out that it is hard to show that something is heavy , you have to think about the timing and posture alot. I again refrenced to looking at the Animators suvival kit book which I got the basic idea and principles from.

I started out by drawing my pose to pose pictures and adding inbetweens on paper then I put them into the computer and went over the lines in Adobe Illustrator and then went over them again in Adobe Photoshop for the effect I wanted.

To show that the bowling ball was heavy I put in alot of ''shakes'' so you could see that the character was struggling with it , and also made him raise it up very slowly , at the end he drops it slightly then has to really push it up above his head.

At the start of the animation I made the character scratch his head as to be thinking about what way to approach the ball , I made the begining part very fast when he is trying to lift it up as I really wanted to show the enitial lift.

Overall I am very happy with this because I think you really get the idea and sense that the bowling ball is really heavy and that the character is struggling alot.

Walk Animation

For our first assignment we had to make a simple walk cycle , for this I looked at Richard Williams Animators guide alot for how it should look and feel. I thought it turned out good I like how the character has a nice bounce to his step , the only thing I would change is so the character keeps in proportion as his hands change size etc.

Sketchbook Project

These are some sketches from stills of movies.

ExperimentalAnimation

''Experimental Animation Evaluation''

For the experimental project we had to listen to 4 pieces of sound : -

1. '' Black_Angels-2 '' - was a very high pitched freaky sound with some german vocals
2. '' Lorraine-A '' - This was a melow jazz piece
3. '' Mally-A '' - Violin very classical relaxing piece
4. '' Ruta Daita '' - This had a nice drum beat and sounded very tribal

After listening to all these I was temptin to go for the violin piece of music as I do like classical but I thought I could do more with the '' Ruta Daita '' piece as it had a nice beat to it.

For this experimental project we were shown some videos from the 50's by these two men of which names I cannot remember as I have lost my notes from the lectures and painting of cells and scatching them etc to create a differeent image. We were show '' Binky & Boo '' which is a cut out animation which I really liked the style of how it was done and I also found it pretty funny.

The main objective for this project was how sound works with image , we had to choose one method for our animation in which I choose to do cut out. Before I started to animate I had to break down the sound so I could match sound with image , for this I used '' Adobe Soundbooth '' the sound piece is 38 seconds long and I think it took me around 6 hours to break it all down in the end.

Rough Dope Sheets.

This project is really irritating me i've made two 20 second cut out projects so far , both of which I think are absoloute rubbish. One of them was in the test stage and the other is still test but not as rough. I cant seem to think of anything that I'm happy with at the moment.

The first one was foot prints going in time with the drum beats , then grass pulling back to reveal two antelope drinking water followed by a panther behind grass which eventually runs out to attack and kill one .. . sounds like a good idea but it didn't work to well I might re-start again and see what happens.

This is a rough layout from my very first idea.

The second one I kept the foot prints from the first but had flowers stems growing then buds then petals falling off is where I have got to so far. Another idea I had was tribes people mayan's , native's hunting down animal's then having a camp fire but after seeing another person had done this I opted agasint it.

Right I realised i've deleted one of them because it was that bad but here is the other one I started.

One of the first one's I started.

When I finally got my final idea in the works time was short and I had used alot of it managing other projects and personal issues , I liked the footprints at the start of the animation when I looked at it so as the music is very tribal I thought why not have a panther running through the jungle/desert etc , I cut out different bits of grass,hills and plants.

For the panther running I cut out four different shapes and put it into Adobe Flash and had the run cycle on a loop so I put it on a layer above the backgrounds I was cutting out. The backgrounds I cut out were different times of day , at the end of the animation the panther runs into shot and and sits up then the the letters '' RUTA DAITA '' appear in different colours aswell as my name.

When watching it back i'm still not entierly happy and watching it back there is so much more I could have done if i organised my time better and had a more clearer idea from the start instead of wasting time by doing others, for instance when the panther is running through the backgrounds there could be alot going on there within the sky and other animals aswell.

My final Animation

These are the three promotional images I wish to use: -

Cocoon Of Horror

The Project I am working on at the moment is a 11 second piece of animation consisting of a sound piece from the website http://www.11secondclub.com/ , which they have a 11 second sound byte every month for people to enter into.

the sound byte was a character saying:

'' I’m living in a cocoon of horror . . . Yesterday I ate nine cans or aerosol whipped cream ''

The character sounds very disturbed and upset , almost asif they were on a mental breakdown, so my first thought was a character at the doctors, mental hostpital or psychiatrist.

My first challenge was to break down the 11 second sound , so I could work out where the words start and end. To do this I used Adobe Soundbooth and had it on 25fps for the correct timimg , the sound took around 2 hours to break down.

This is what I ended up with after I broke down

After I had finished editing the sound , I then needed to start thinking about the character/s for the animation , I went with my initial idea of someone on a mental breakdown. I did actually first think of the cliche idea of a butterfly in a cocoon crying and sobbing but I decided against, so I went for a simple man on a breakdown your standard office work type 9-5 man. When sketching down some ideas the character resembles Ricky Gervais from the series '' The Office ''.

Some of the first roughs


After the roughs I put them into Photoshop and made some colour versions.


Another picture of the main character breaking down.

After designing this character I thought that at the start of the animation there could be a scene of a psychiatrist door and then show the psychiatrist twiddlin his fingers and nodding his head as they do. When I was thinking about this character I was thinking of people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud very suave looking gentlemen with some huge moustache's well Nietzsche especially.

Some rough first ideas.

Photoshop version of some roughs.

Animation Begins

When starting the project we were asked to film ourselves acting out the scene to get a idea of how it would play out in the animation. For mine as I thought of the main character at a psychiatrist's he would be either lying down or sitting in a chair, I thought of filming myself lying down acting it out but thought you wouldn't be able to see the expressions and actions as good as a front on view in a chair, so I filmed myself sitting in a chair acting out the clip.

Clip of me acting out the scene.

After doing this I got a general idea of how the animation would play out, as I had never tried rotoscoping before I thought this would be a nice opportunity to do it.

Layout for the animation.

As everything was in order to start the animation I went ahead and imported the video of myself into Photoshop into layers/frames, at first I made a position to position animatic by drawing over every 12th layer to get a general idea of how it would look and this is it:

Rough Animatic

After I started the long process of drawing over the layers which I did on two's for the most part I went for a very sketchy rough look to the animation because I think it gives it some edge. Each layer took about 10 minutes to draw and save and there was 169 in total which is around 28 hours.

I was thinking about colouring every frame but after starting it and realising how long it was taking I decieded not to as it would be very time consuming. By not realising how much time it would take me to rotoscope the 11 seconds of footage I didn't leave much time for adding in the psychiatrist at the begining fo the animation so I had to not include it.

For putting all the animation together I used '' Flash 8 '' and imported all the layers I had saved as GIF's into the Flash library. I had a sketch of a chair which was used as the background layer and then it was the case of putting in the frames to match the sound.

Screenshot of the project in Flash.

For the final part of the task it was to add the mouth in for the lip sync , for this I looked on google at phenomes which are the mouth positions that we use for animation to demonstrate words like ''ch'' ''b'' ''th'' , I went on google images and found one image which only had 10 phenomes which I thought was good.

A series of phenomes

After looking at these I went into each frame where I had wrote down before on my dope sheet and drew the mouth in flash where appropriate. And thank fully it all came together nicely as I said before if i knew how long the rotoscoping took I would of been able to fit in the intro with the psychiatrist but as a whole i really enjoyed doing this as after all the hours of going of the layers I was happy with the end product.

The Finished Animation

I Came 106th in the end .... wayyyhay ha

The End ^_^