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.