Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step4d)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Design for Media: Studio Project (Step4c)
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.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Design 4 MediaP Studio Project (Step4b)
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.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 4a)
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.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 4)
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 3)
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.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Design 4 Media: Studio Project (Step 2b)
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.