Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step4d)

So I've finally put something together that actually shows the beginnings of an animation at work, and not just a practice run. Yes, it's small, but it is on its way! I've finally added the colored background, but I still haven't added the pattern overlay on the outfit. I did try to figure out a way how but didn't get very far. I'm assuming it would have to do something with setting the layers to multiply and applying a vector mask.... I didn't get as much done as I would have liked to for this final meeting; I was hoping to have finished her picking up the doll, smiling, and hugging it to her. I only got to her bending down to lift up the doll, grabbing a hold of it, and picking it up. Still, that took me hours. I did also figure out what I was doing wrong that was making my videos so fast, but sadly I didn't figure it out until about halfway through what I was working on. So, the first bit is still faster than I would like it to be but the second half is much better!

Design for Media: Studio Project (Step4c)

This time I attempted to animate the facial features of my character using After Effects. Once again I assumed it would be easier than it was, but it was still definitely fun and I was pleased with the result until I saw how quickly it played once rendered.

Obviously with my character there aren't many facial features to animate, but what I attempted was zooming in on her face, a breeze through her hair, and then her reaction which is slightly hunching her shoulders and a smile with squinting eyes. Once again, it turned out much faster of an animation than I would have liked it to be, but hopefully this is something I'll learn to catch earlier on in the creating process.

This is definitely getting to be quite enjoyable, actually. It was especially fun (and hardest) to create the seperate pieces of hair and animate them by themselves. This simple animation took me hours, however.

Design 4 MediaP Studio Project (Step4b)

When you suggested After Effects I thought that that may be a better idea, considering it was a program that I had some experience in (not a lot, but enough to at least know how to record an animation). So I attempted another 'test' walk in After Effects using Em. I didn't include the background or the pattern overlay on her for now, just to keep things simple. I read the tutorial on the puppet tool and gave it a shot.

Lo and behold, Em can walk. No, it is definitely not perfect, but it is definitely a huge improvement on the last sad animation that I did in flash. This one little step, however, still took me about two hours more than it should have. It was still an accomplishment to me.

I told myself I'd start out with something "easy" like a few "simple" steps. I should have realized from past experience that animating a character walking can actually be a rather difficult thing to attempt. In retrospect it would have been much easier to start with Em bending over to pick up the bunny doll or something like that.

*EDIT*

Okay, so I went to check on the new entry I posted and realized that the video plays very small and very quickly on Blogger. Sorry about this...it played much slower on my comp! My apologies for the crappy quality.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 4a)

Well, as long as I've been using animation programs I've been hating them. For some reason image editing programs (such as Photoshop) have always come easy, and then as soon as I find myself on a program that deals with animation of some sort I am simply struck dumb. It's like another language to me. Anyways, now I can add Flash to the list of programs that make me want to pass out/scream/vomit simultaneously. So now that I've gotten that out of the way, here's what I've been up to.

I got myself the 30 day trial of Flash so that I could play around with at home and have plenty of time to experiment with it (I live a decent distance from campus). I took some of the sketches that I did for my animation and inked them and scanned them into my comp to edit them on photoshop. For now, since I was simply trying things out, I didn't apply all the colors or the pattern. I did seperate the layers of my character from the background so that she could be movable (atleast I knew that had to be done...). I imported them into flash and proceeded to fool around blindly for awhile (with a little help from some basic tutorials) and finally did something. This sad, choppy, uninspired little animation took me WAY longer then it should have. Especially because nothing is really happening. Obviously this is not what I'm going for when it comes to my actual animation, I was just getting the feel of the basics of movement, layers, and frames in flash.

I, ofcourse, was not satisfied with this. I tried to find a way to make things smoother, and somehow ended up figuring out tweening and fade transitioning. Ofcourse this little test animation is not what I want my final product to be like either, but atleast its better then the first sad little animation.

This, I can tell, is going to be rather difficult. Still, Flash is now at least looking a little less intimidating to me. It would probably be easier to make the different parts of her body indivual layers and thus seperately editable, or something like that. I don't know if I'd know how to go about that or not, not until I give it a try that is.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 4)

For this final phase I've begun to draw out my story, so that I can work on it in photoshop and then ultimately animate it in flash. I know that it isn't much, but I have begun to sketch the part of the short when she finds the stuffed animal. I do apologize for the flimsiness of this update.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 3)

For the Judge Phase I showed my work to different people and asked them to tell me what they were thinking about it as they thought it.

These are some of the critiques I recieved:
~doll looks like Korn rabbit (I was not familiar with this so I looked it up and tried to find a rabbit that looked similar to mine, but was unsuccesful)
~depressing story (This was mentioned several times and I will discuss it further below)
~is she wearing a raincoat? (Three people were not completely sure what she was wearing; whether it was a raincoat or a dress or a hoodie. This is not completely important to me)
~straight edges drawn around character are more effective then rounded-rounded makes her look too lollipop-like
~girl or boy? (the question of Em's gender comes up a few times, but I had planned the character to be non gender-specific, it's up to the viewer's interpretation)
~the bunny is cute but some people might find it creepy (one person mentioned this, others didn't think so)

Common positive critiques and other miscellaneous critiques:
~cute
~like damask pattern on hoodie
~simple colors work well; no more color is needed
~scribbly style works well
~reminiscent of Edward Gorey
~bunny looks worn out "long day" (this is good because it's supposed to)
~Em looks innocent
~pink background works well, most favor it to yellow

After some discussion, someone offered an interesting change in the story so as not to make it so depressing. They suggested that the bratty girl that comes up and takes the doll away from her only does so because she doesn't want anyone else to have it, but then discards it when shes away from Em. Possibly throwing it away. Then, Em can walk over and pick the bunny doll up, being able to keep it instead of being left alone.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 2b)

Since last week I explored color and pattern on various versions of Em and picked one that I felt work the best, this week I expanded on that. I drew this version of Em that I chose as the final version, or atleast, the one I feel works best for what I'm trying to convey in my animation. I also came up with what type of story I'd like to do. The basic backbone of my short animation is that Em is walking alone, until she comes across a beat up old stuffed animal on the ground. She takes an immediate liking to it, seeming to identify with it. As she holds it close to her though and gives it a hug, another girl comes up and claims that it's her doll, taking it away from Em and leaving her once again by herself. I worked on various sketches along this storyline to give/get a basic feel of imagery. I did quick sketches of Em by herself to kind of set the mood of the story, and also with the stuffed animal. When she comes across it by herself, when she finds it, her reaction, and then when it is taken back away from her.




Then, I selected some of these sketches and brought them into Photoshop, using the same design elements as I had before. I did try a few different things to make sure that what I was doing was right for the story/mood. I attempted a yellow surrounding instead of pink, but found that I didn't think it worked as much as the pink did. I think that the more simple the color pallet for this project the more it works. So, I will most likely mainly stick to black, white, and pink. I'm not completely sure about this yet, however.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 2)

For this next step I began to take various sketches of Em into Photoshop and applied some color and patterns to figure out what design I will ultimately use. One thing that I found myself using as a constant was the colors black, white, and pink. I added the touches of pink to help soften the demeanor of Em, so the audience doesn't feel that she is supposed to be frightening (just misunderstood). Out of these I felt that the first one was most effective, and the second one was the worst (which was interesting because that was my original design of how Em looked. Not sure if it's the sketch or just the choices). I used texture/pattern overlays such as damask, lace, and plaid.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 1c)

For this next step I sat down and drew Em differently, trying new things with the character as they came to mind. I made sure to stay true to the usual aspects of the character, only varying things like facial structure, eye size, height, weight, etc. This is what I came up with. 

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 1b)

Here are two character sheets of my character Em for my project.

Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 1)

For this semester's project I decided that I would like to try my hand at something I've been meaning to learn for awhile now: Creating an animation using Adobe Flash. I often like to stick to my own characters when creating things, because I want to eventually do something with them and I think using them for several projects is a good way to get things started. I'm not sure yet whether I want to do something like a comic book or an actual animation with them in the future, perhaps both. For this project, I'm going to use my character Em. Here are some past drawings that I did of him/her (not really gender specific).

I've also put together a few images of characters/styles that inspire me. These include Emily the Strange, work by Jhonen Vasquez, Tim Burton's illustrated work, and Edward Gorey.

Lastly, I've included a short flash animation that I really like the style of, which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_dteOS40Y