C-Box exert

The second scene from the C-Box animation. Unfortunately, I havent been able to upload this successfully, but I'll write about it all the same.

This one turned out very nicely. I tried to get a nice overlap in the wrist and hand at the beginning, and I added a little squash and stretch to the nerd's head as he moves into a comfortable sitting position. This gave it a little more exaggeration and energy.

Drawing expressions is definitely something I am strong at doing, and thoroughly enjoy too. I wanted to convey the emotions accurately in this shot. I found it hard to decide whether the geek should be embarrassed about his Box, or proud and excited about it. In the end, I decided that we should make him feel positive about it. After all, we are trying to promote this awful product, so his eagerness to share it with his friend should be evident.

The cool guy's attitude was unchanged from the storyboard idea I came up with. His displeasure at this totally ridiculous product was something I was aiming for from the beginning. So yeh, that stayed in the final production of this shot.

Problems I've experienced have been few and far between. However, my Flash program is older then Jon and Michelle's versions. When Michelle did the backgrounds, they didn't transfer well to my application. So I had to use simple jpg images to work with. That's why in this animation it appears that the nerd's body is overlapping the tv that's in the foreground. In the end, I sent my work to Michelle, and she dealt with arranging the background layers so this wouldn't happen.

Gnome project update and showreel

Recently, as you know, I have been trying to progress with the Gnome shot I was given by Sarah Verrel. However, I have been unable to develop it any further for many reasons. Time hasn't been on my side from the beginning, and because of this my motivation for the animation has expired.

Because of this, Sarah and Dan have decided to drop me from the project. I am kinda sad but relieved about it. It would have been nice to continue with it, but my pace and confidence to get it done at a good quality was lacking, and I felt that I was hindering the Gnome group's work.

Oh well, it means that I can work on my showreel and E+E project

At the moment, I have been gathering together all my animation work for my reel. At the moment, it consists of the following:

• "Drawn To A Close" exerts (Foundation Diploma Final Animation Short)
• Walk Cycles (Degree yr 1 Old lady and Degree yr 2 Dog)
• Button Bash Animation ( Degree yr 2 Brain Environment Project)
• "Waterproof" clip (Degree yr 2 Rave Live animation. See previous posts)
  
• "C-Box" clip (Degree yr 2 Rave Live animation. See previous posts)
• "Little Miss Sunshine" with 2D animation addition (Degree yr 2)
• Lip Synch in 3D (Degree yr 2 Willy Wonka dialogue)
  

Oh and by the way.....

Our group finished our animation for Rave Live!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

We completed all the bits of animation we needed to do, Jon put it all together using After Effects and Final Cut, and then I included the music and dialogue.

We also managed to get some pretty cool sound effects from Matthieu Baron. He worked really hard to get some cartoony sounds done for our Rave Live deadline on Monday, and I pasted it all into the animation for our hand-in.

So we have two versions of our animation. One with Tom Ritchie's Dialogue, Music, and Matt's sound effects. The other version only has Tom's dialogue and music.

I should mention that the music I got was bought from a site called Audio Network. It's a music and sound effects library where you can buy licensed tracks. Once you buy the track, you can use it without worrying about breaching copyright laws. I bought several tracks, and the one my group liked the most was one called "Miami Beach". That is the music you can hear in both versions if the animation

:D

Another Gnome Playblast

Just a rather crummy playblast of my work I've been doing for Gnome. Sarah Verrel gave me the rig for the Hero Gnome, which is great because I can work in proper detail on the poses and stuff. In this playblast, I have been working on the hips and body sways. I hope to get some nice arm movement done next, and then some nice expressions. It's just been a very busy few weeks and I haven't concentrated as much on this as I would have liked. It's been slow progress. :( However, I think the timing is getting there, and Sarah has very kindly given me some feedback for the previous playblast:

-maybe dont have the hands cross exactly in the centre of the characters
body, have them off to one side slightly (opposite side to the lean you
have going on) as this counters the weight of the lean.

-try not to sync the arms in movement, even if one starts moving before
the other by just a frame it makes all the difference to break up the
piece, have one arm move just faster than the other (obv not a gigantic
difference in pace) but we never move at the same rate/time.

-Like that you have the hands at different heights, again this breaks up
the shape/creates interest.

- perhaps exaggerate the lean a bit more from the transition of poses.
I've just been acting it out myself and the first pose has you sort of
upright but angled to a side (left or right) but as soon as we enter the
second pose of the arms on the hips you feel yourself leaning forwards,
creating that arch in your back.

So yeah, please continue animation on this, if you could show me an
updated playblast for Tuesday morning (tues 13th) then we'll go from
there. Hopefully i should have the other character for you then.

A final few pedantic points...

were running maya 25fps both rendering and timeline (i know such a silly
thing to mention but an obvious one to overlook)
Were rendering in widescreen so your camera should be set up as 1025 x 576
in Maya (dont worry too much about this for now but just so you know)

Keep up the good work!

Sarah

I think she raised some very good points, of which I will definitely take into consideration when animating my piece with the Hero rig.

Animatic! YAAAAAY

Here is the storyboard animatic that we all put together a while ago. Jon managed to defeat the evil Youtube problems and get it uploaded for all to see.

I think it is very smooth and portrays our advert very well. :D

My first scene finished??

Okay here we have the first flash scene I have completed. Sorry about the poor quality! It took a lot of hard work to get this done. I have a fairly good knowledge of Toon boom now, so I tried to implement what I know into my work with this. I used a lot of tweening for squashing and stretching and general movement. I have a feeling that I may have overdone it a bit. It was a bit annoying having to line everything up continuously whenever I adjusted things slightly. I think I had about 17 layers at the end as well. :O

I'm kinda happy with this, though it runs a lot quicker as a vid, compared to the test I looked at as I was animating. The playblasts didn't give a good interpretation of how fast my animation is. I'll see what the others say, but I have a feeling I might have to slow it down a bit. It's going to be hard doing that, considering the amount of components and layers I'm dealing with.

Some problems I faced:

The line quality wasn't consistent. When I did the templates, I drew them out very small, compared to the dimensions of the "stage". So naturally I had to enlarge the symbols so they could fit in with the scene. When I drew other components into the animation, the lines would be thinner and not fit in with the templates.

This was a problem I solved by changing the properties of the line at the bottom of the Flash interface screen. I could change the density fairly easily. It was tedious going back and changing everything, but ultimately it has resulted in a better quality scene.

Tweening was occassionally a hesadache, though it made my work a lot quicker to accomplish. Also colouring everything was a bit fiddly. I decided to fill the pencil drawn shapes using the fill tool. This caused problems if the lines didn't connect up properly. Sometimes it would take ages for me to find the gap between the lines that affected the way something is coloured. Very frustrating!

How to tween like a master

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/tween

I saw this flash vid a long long time ago. I felt that it deserved a feature on my blog. Wonderfully animated and extremely simple. I expect a lot of tweening went into this too! I intend to tween in my flash animating aswell, so this has helped inspire me a lot