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

Creating the characters in Flash

Spent most of today drawing out all the characters' heads and bodies.

For some of these characters, I'll need to draw these at different angles, such as the geek and the hobo. I think the hobo is going to be the hardest, since he's going to be rotating around 180 degrees. That'll be fun to animate.... oh man.... -__-

The gran is in a seating position because that's basically all she does in her cameo appearance. It would have been a waste of time and effort drawing her standing.

I've assigned us all to the scenes we will be working on. Here they are as follows:

Michelle:

• Opening Scene (Spotty Greasy Nerd)
• Dynamic Spinning Box
• Classroom "Spots and Blemishes" Scene
• Car Scene
• Funky Chicken Scene
  

Jon:

• Grandma Present Scene (both parts)
• "But That's Not All" Shot
• Spinning Pedestal Hobo Scene
  

Emma (me):

• Dancing Girls Scene
• "Completely Waterproof" Scene
• C-Box Scene

Michelle requested to do more animating, so I gave her a couple more scenes then me and Jon. The extra ones are fairly straight forward, so I'm sure she'll have no trouble getting them done as well.

I should also say before I forget that we have recorded our dialogue for our voice over. Tom Ritchie, a good friend of ours, agreed to take part in this. He did a fantastic job exaggerating the lines for us, and even taught us a bit about the program "Garage Band". We sped up the dialogue for the product purchase information, which made it even more funny. Also, we echoed the line "But that's not all!", which gave it a rather comical ominous feel to it. The effects you can do on Garage Band are really handy and can create a lot of different moods and depth to a single sound.

Speaking of sound, we have enlisted the help of Matthieu Baron, who will be dealing with the sound and music for our advert. Tara Dulake recommended him to us, so we e-mailed him and another guy to see if they could help us. Here's the e-mail I sent a while ago:

Hey Georgi and Matt!

Tara Dulake has recommended you both to me as awesome sound designers. Me
and my animation team (Jon Blake and Michelle Vinall) are looking for
someone who could do some nice music and sfx for our Rave Live 30sec clip.

At the moment, we are thinking of doing an advert parody in Flash. We have
a vague idea of what we are looking, but obviously we are still in the
early stages of development. But we wondered whether you were both up for
the challenge. If you do happen to be interested in assisting, we should
meet up at some point so we can talk about our ideas, and give you some
example clips as reference or something. If you are unable to participate,
maybe you know of some people who could help us instead.

Anyway yeh I hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers

Emma Wyton

So yeh, it's great that we have another part of our project in motion. I feel as if all the components are piecing themselves together nicely. Now we should be able to animate! Yay!

Final Colour Swatch

Here's the line up again, only with a splash of colour.

I intended to colour the Jock guy with a tan colour, but he unintentionally looks like an asian indian. I decided that he looked cool like this, and helped create a nice diversity of nationality.
I also changed the look of the Curvy girl to make her look a little more like Betty Boop.


Jon also sent me this video link that helped inspire me with designing her. The lady in the pink dress is extremely expressive and engaging.



I got some good responses from my team about the colour designs. They liked almost everything about the designs. They pointed out that the Hobo's hat shouldn't be a similar colour to his trousers. I altered this by changing it to a more greyish green colour. At first they weren't sure about Blondie's dress colour. They suggested that maybe a red colour would be more appropriate. I had a think about this, and then came to the decision that the Jock guy was already wearing red, so people may assume they are linked or something. I also explained that the green dress contrasted with the Curvy girl's purple dress. After I had talked about this, Michelle and Jon both felt that these were justified reasons for Blondie to have a green dress.

Final Designs

Voila! These are the final character sheets of the characters. We discussed a bit about the 2nd shorter dancing girl, and we think she might be tweaked a bit, because she doesn't look very appealing. So yeh I'll do an update later of how she's changed and stuff. Again, sorry about the photo quality, the scanner was playing up, so I had to use photobooth again.

All I need to do now is add some colour, and then starting bringing it all into Flash! Wahey!

Sketches of some beautiful main characters

Some doodles centering around main characters in our storyboard. Was fun coming up with the look for the cool guy and the dancing girls. It's allowed me to try and vary my way of drawing people. I've tried to make each character look unique and vary in shape and design. I think htis can be seen in my development.

Sorry about the quality of the pics. I had to use photobooth, which was annoying.