Experimental Project

Ok, so I've been on a bit of a creative rollercoaster in the past couple of weeks. My initial idea was altered, as I decided to team up with Orla to do a much bigger project, which would require two people. We intended to go to the beach, and do some pixelation down there with sculptures on the beach. However, the weather has been absolutely appauling, and its been too wet to be able to take a camera and tripod outside. So with only a week left and the sudden dawning realisation that we weren't going to make it to the beach we had to drastically rethink our approach. Therefore we decided to make origami dinosaurs. Relevent yes? So we spent a good few days making dinosaurs and the set, and we decided we wanted to make it look like an old style film, like the original King Kong. So we imported our footage into After Effects and used various layers and effects to create and old film look. Overall, I am quite pleased with the end result, considering we didn't have any stop motion equipment, so had to just take pictures and then go back and change things after we had imported it all onto the computer, which made it a very long process, as we had no onion skin option. But I think it works well with the sound clip we chose, and I think if we had had more time we would have been able to make it much better, but considering the limitations we had, I think we did pretty good!!

11 sec club Update!

When I first set out doing this project, I wanted to create a very smooth flowing animation that looked polished and perfect. But as I started to do it, and put in the keys, I realised that a really smooth animation wasn't picking up on the mood of the character. So I altered my angle slightly, and decided that I wanted to make it look a little more disjointed, as I felt that would reflect the mind of little Arnold. I went down a sort of "cut-out esque" sort of approach, using flash and photoshop to layer up the different parts of the animation, putting the eyes, arms and tears on separate layers, so it would look like I was layering paper on top of paper, while still being obvious that it was actually a Flash animation!

Sounds slightly complicated, but was actually a alot easier than animating each and every frame. And far less time consuming. Because I had opted to do a full colour detailed character, as opposed to just a sketch or mono chromatic character without too much detail, it was taking an eternity to draw and colour each frame individually, and I realised I was running out of time, so took a slightly easier shortcut. I think if I had possibly managed my time a little more efficiently, and spent less time doing tests and character design I could ahve probably done it frame by frame, in traditional animation stylee!

I have to admit that I am enjoying the character design parts of these projects more so than the actual animation, possibly because I prefer drawing than computers :P

But overall I have enjoyed this project. I think if I had had the entire year to work on it, I would have got the animation more refined, but overall I am pleased with the overall look of it.

Here is the (almost) final version!

Experimental Project update

Right, after working out HOW to go about doing it as I had first wanted, I realised it would cost a small fortune to get enough stuff, SO I have had to modify my idea a little bit. Instead of having characters animated onto pixelated objects, I have just had to find interesting objects to pixelate. And what did I find?? 5 year old funny shaped potpourri. Excitment! I thought at first it wouldn't work or be very experimental but I plan on combining it with some pixelation of some willing volunteers, in a sort of Harry Potter-esque moving photograph type jobbie!

Ive done the first few seconds of the pixelation as a test, just to see if I like the look of it. I am possibly thinking of altering it slightly but here is what I have so far. I think its important to be able to tweak thigs as you go along. If you find something you don't like early on, its better to change it then, than to carry on and end up hating the end product!

Ok here is a little test!

Experimental Project

I was definatley thinking I wanted to do pixelation for this project, and then (while re-watching episodes of Sesame Street like a cool person) I saw what used to be my favourite part of the whole show and it has really influenced the way I want to go about this project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjvt6xqKwV8

I really like this method of combining the different styles of animation, and Im thinking I really want to do something similar, combining my original pixelation idea with some hand drawn animation. How difficult it will be remains to be seen, but watch this space, we shall see what happens!!

11 Second Club - Week 1

I'm really excited about this project!!! I like the idea of being able to spend a nice long period of time on one animation to make it awsome! The idea behind my animation is there is a little caterpillar and he is upset because he is stuck inside his cocoon while its all nice outside :( and he is depressed and resorts to eating "9 cans of aerosol whipped cream" poor caterpillar. His name is Arnold. I did a character design for him, and I wanted him to be as caterpillarly as possible while keeping him silghtly cartoony, so i found this picture of a caterpillars face - http://www.butterflynature.com/images/cat_face_maple_eater.jpgater.jpg and cartoonised it do make Arnold!! Here he is!

Poor sad Arnold!! Well I also did a scene layout sort of jobby so I could work out shots etc. It's a bit difficult because the animation is only 11 seconds, but thats half the challenge!!! SO here it is!

I've also done a preliminary lip sync test. I wanted to do a quick flash pass at it, just to work out timings and mouth shapes because his mouth is not a traditional mouth and has 4 moving parts. So here is a first rough pass at lip sync of the first bit of dialogue!

Well, watch this space for updates!!!

Mood Change Animation

Ok here it comes!!! The triumph that is Alfred throwing his mate into a pile of poo!!! I spent longer on working on timings for this one, but I still think he needs more weight behind the throw. More anticipation a bigger lean back maybe. See what you think! :D

Heavy Lifting Man - The Result!

Ok so here is the final result! It needs a bit of tidying up, there are some volume issues and it needs a few more frames after he has lifted the ball, so it looks more realistic, but overall I'm pretty pleased with him. I'm going to give him another go though, to make him perfect!! Go Alfred!!!